(gathered with the gracious assistance of BC Bookworld and Rutgers University)


When the first two volumes of his photos were published in 1907, the New York Herald hailed the work of Edward S. Curtis as “the most gigantic undertaking in the making of books since the King James edition of the Bible.” But later critics such as Ralph Maud have concluded, “One cannot help but think that his archival camera was somehow supposed to exonerate the genocide.” Both viewpoints are valid. Believing Aboriginals of western North America were doomed to vanish provided Curtis with his mandate to generate a massive archive of images that were frequently staged for effect.

In 1914, Curtis produced a melodramatic, silent film entitled In the Land of the Head Hunters. One of the first made-in-B.C. feature-length films, this was also the first film to exclusively star Native North Americans. An epic story of love and war set before European contact, it featured non-professional actors from Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly “misknown” as the Kwakiutl) communities in British Columbia—a people already famous then for their spectacular visual culture and performances.

Some aspects of the film do accurately depict the Kwakwaka’wakw, such as the artwork and many of the ceremonial dances. Others include forms of technology—the plank houses, cedar bark clothing, and massive dugout canoes—that were clearly recalled but in waning use in 1914 as people adapted to Euro-Canadian life. The most sensational elements of the film—the head hunting, sorcery, and handling of human remains—reflect much earlier practices that had been long abandoned, but which became central elements in Curtis’s spectacularized tale. And some activities were never part of Kwakwaka’wakw culture. For example, Curtis borrowed the whaling practices (and a rented whale) from neighboring groups in order to fit his dramatic narrative, and for purely cinematic reasons.

Since the 1970s, Curtis’s film has been treated as a documentary, adorning the halls of natural history and anthropology museums and being criticized for its staging of savage scenes from a “pre-contact” past as if they were part of the everyday life of contemporary tribal communities (as was also the case with his photography).



(In The Land of the Head Hunters: Ceremonial of Yaklus)


Interviewed at age 90 in 1988, Margaret Frank was known as Princess Ommagalees when she had a starring role in that Curtis’ movie at age 17. Born into the Kwawkgewith First Nation and raised near present-day Port Hardy, Margaret Frank, granddaughter of George Hunt, played the role of a princess named Naida in Curtis’ rendition of a story recorded by a man she knew as “the Professor,” Franz Boas. Margaret Frank recalled how her uncle stood in a war canoe, hidden behind a huge wooden thunderbird mask, flapping his arms up and down inside man-made wings, as if he was attempting to fly. Curtis stood in hip-waders at the tideline, cranking his camera on a tripod. “My mother stood up in the stern and began to dance and sing,” she said. “Then, suddenly, the canoe hit a rock and my mother toppled over onto several others, and everyone burst out laughing. Except Mr. Curtis. He scowled and took the film out of his camera and threw it away in disgust. ‘This is a serious film,’ he said. He didn’t want his Indians to laugh.”

The Edward Curtis Project: A Modern Picture Story, a play (and critique) by Métis playwright Marie Clements will be available in the fall of 2010, accompanied by photographs by Rita Leistner. In addition, Discovery Passages by Garry Thomas Morse, the first book of poetry about the Kwakwaka’wakw people, will be available in the spring of 2011.