PARADISE LOST
COMING TO LIGHT: EDWARD S. CURTIS AND THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS
Documentary by Anne Makepeace
Voices of Sheila Tousey, Bill Pullman
Plan B NR 85 min.
The culture and history of the North American Indian were passed down orally from generation to generation. When the Europeans came and subjugated the indigenous peoples of this continent, they did their best to eradicate the native traditions. They did it by slaughter, and they did it by enforced reeducation, sending Indian children to regimented schools to learn the white man's religions and ways, and punishing them for speaking their own languages. Native Americans were herded onto reservations, and their wardens did their best to stamp out the traditional dances and ceremonies. By the turn of the century, it was clear to anybody who cared to look that the Indian ways were headed for extinction, and that they would largely vanish without a trace.
One who cared to look was Edward S. Curtis, a society studio photographer from Seattle who developed a passionate interest in this doomed culture. He spent thirty years documenting the Indians of North America, with photographs, motion pictures, and sound recordings. He produced a stunning series of 20 volumes of photographs and text covering the native tribes. He spent all his own money and some of J.P. Morgan's, impaired his health and destroyed his marriage. For his pains, his work was soon forgotten, his collection of prints and plates sold in bulk to a Boston second-hand bookseller, where they lay collecting dust in a basement for decades until they were discovered by a clerk in the early '70s, and the Curtis revival commenced.
Anne Makepeace's engrossing documentary traces Curtis's career and shows his work, and asks contemporary Native Americans to comment on the Curtis oeuvre. There are some who resent it, who feel that the old photographs serve to arrest spirits that otherwise would have moved on. More, though, appreciate the magnificent photographs, and treasure the historical record and the link it provides with an Indian past that would otherwise be lost. Some recognize relatives, or themselves, or have even used the Curtis photographs to reconstruct traditional dances that haven't been performed in half a century or more.
In the 1920s Curtis visited Alaska's Nunivak Island, an Indian community as yet undiscovered by Christian missionaries and white settlers. He was struck by the idyllic sense of well-being and joy among the inhabitants, and it shows in the pictures he took. Within a decade Swedish missionaries had arrived, and pulled the plug on this Eden.
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