Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (7 page)

This trip to the Blackfeet Nation was also the test of an idea starting to take shape—that
those “Curtis Indian” fragments sold by his studio could form part of a much bigger
picture story. Grinnell encouraged Curtis, urged him to be expansive, but he also
stripped him of his more romantic notions. He was both mentor and tormentor.
What are you
really
looking for?
Grinnell asked Curtis.
Why are you shooting all these pictures of Indians in the first place?
Curtis explained that he was doing it “for his own amusement,” as Grinnell wrote
later. Also, Indian pictures were a lucrative part of his business. He could charge
a premium for a typical studio portrait, but those branded Curtis Indians—the pictures
he’d taken around Puget Sound and on the Columbia Plateau—were selling for much higher
prices. It was telling that Curtis put every surplus dollar back into the “amusement”
work; that was what made his heart race now, even more than climbing mountains.

Grinnell pressed him further. He wondered if Curtis had ever thought about putting
together a book, or an exhibition at the Smithsonian, where Americans could see what
was slipping away. Curtis could rouse the nation to action, as Grinnell had done on
behalf of keeping a small bison herd intact in Yellowstone. Grinnell’s crusade had
won over many influential people, including Teddy Roosevelt, who’d just made the step
from governor of New York to vice president of the United States. Indeed, Curtis replied,
he had thought about doing something grand and consequential. “The idea dawned on
him that here was a wide field as yet unworked,” Grinnell wrote. “Here was a great
country in which still live hundreds of tribes and remnants of tribes, some of which
still retain many of their primitive customs and their ancient beliefs. Would it not
be a worthy work, from the points of view of art and science and history, to represent
them all by photography?”

Curtis had tried to take pictures of these plains natives two years earlier, in 1898,
but came home with little to show for it. Now, with Grinnell, Curtis had a flesh-and-blood
passport to something an outsider could not see on his own. With Bird at his side,
he was a tourist no more—he was in training.

As for the late-afternoon thunderheads, twirls of dust devils and biting flies drawn
to horse flesh and the softer human kind—who could complain? Push on, Curtis urged,
push on. He’d been promised much more than a peek: a chance to witness the Sun Dance,
the oldest and most important religious ceremony to the Piegan, Bloods and related
tribes, resettled on the Blackfeet reservation because of common bonds. Any inconvenience
was a trifle compared to what lay ahead.

They crossed a plateau, the wind tossing thistle over the prairie, and galloped ever
higher, to the near exhaustion of their mounts. Grinnell signaled a slowing as they
seemed to run out of ground. Dismount, he ordered. The two men took the reins of their
horses and walked toward a cliff’s edge, Curtis curious and willful, Grinnell’s eyes
trained ahead. They stepped up to the rim of a high precipice. Below was an encampment,
a circle of large tipis, more than two hundred of them by Curtis’s count, forming
an enclosure a mile or so in diameter. The Indians had brought horses, wagons, carts,
food and the painted buffalo skins that stretched around pine poles to form their
lodges.

Ever since the daughter of Chief Seattle had caught his eye in the tidal flats, Curtis
had been looking for a community of Indians to cast in lasting light on his camera
glass. Mostly he’d found only snippets of life here and there, broken from the whole.
There was nothing of a people living in continuity with the past. Nothing intact.
But here—look at it!—just below the cliff were generations, as many children as grandchildren.
By historical standards, the Piegan encampment was small, but Curtis had never witnessed
so many Indian people together in one place. The only thing to compare to this group,
for sheer numbers, was the engraving he had seen as a child of Indians hanged in that
mass execution in Minnesota.

Take it all in,
Grinnell told him.
Take a long, long look.
To Bird Grinnell, the scene below the cliff already belonged to yesterday. For one
thing, the Holy Family Mission, aided by government Indian agents, was doing all it
could to put an end to this ceremony. The Sun Dance was considered savagery, matching
the law’s description of an “immoral dance.” Under the Indian Religious Crimes Code,
anything deemed unwholesomely pagan could be banned—dances, feasts, chants led by
medicine men. The regulations were specific: “Any Indian who shall engage in the sun
dance, scalp dance, or war dance, or any other similar feast, so called, shall be
deemed guilty of an offense.” As punishment, the agents could withhold food rations
and imprison participants of traditional religious ceremonies for up to ninety days.

The churches had been given broad discretion from the government to spread doctrine
and charity among the Indians, a clear violation of the First Amendment’s religious
establishment clause. Few politicians seemed to mind. “The Indians,” said Thomas J.
Morgan, the man appointed by President Benjamin Harrison in 1889 to oversee their
affairs, “must conform to the white man’s ways, peaceably if they will, forcibly if
they must.” The churches would give them spiritual sustenance; the government agents
would dole out food and goods. The system was fraught with corruption, and enforced
by patronage hacks and militant missionaries. “This civilization may not be the best
possible, but it is the best the Indians can get,” said Morgan. “They cannot escape
it, and must either conform to it or be crushed by it.” Forced assimilation never
had a more clearly stated goal.

After the mission was established on the Montana prairie in 1890, young Blackfeet
were taken from the tribe and sent to a three-story brick boarding school, fifteen
miles from Browning. The idea was to rinse the native out of them and cleanse them
with western Christianity. A big part of that effort was to get the boys to reject
the illegal Sun Dance. A year’s worth of missionary reeducation could be undone by
just a few days in summer at the traditional ceremony. If the Piegan were to avoid
the fate of Angeline’s people, they would have to start the new century by joining
the modern world, the clerics insisted. Give up the chanting and dancing, the prayers
to the sun and the earth, the mumbo jumbo. An ancient festival paying homage to a
blinding star was barbaric.

In 1900, census takers were in the field, making a concerted effort, at long last,
to count every Indian—this at a time when all violent hostilities between the original
inhabitants of the continent and the new residents had finally come to an end. The
frontier was closed, the U.S. Census Bureau had announced a few years earlier—there
was no longer a line to push west nor a big empty space on the map to be filled in
with immigrants. This caused a great fuss among the pulse takers of American life.
The early reports of the count were not good: the number of Indians was down, dramatically
so. And the population figures conformed with other indicators of decline: by 1900,
the tribes owned less than 2 percent of the land they once possessed. Entire languages
had already disappeared—more than a loss of words, a loss of a way to look at the
world. All of this had been predicted for some time, and was taken as accepted wisdom.
As far back as 1831, the prescient observer Alexis de Tocqueville had said this of
American Indians: “They were isolated in their own country, and their race constituted
only a little colony of troublesome strangers in the midst of numerous dominant people.”

Throughout the afternoon and into the early evening Curtis took pictures of these
“troublesome strangers” from above: the encampment; the practical lodges, big enough
to provide shelter for an extended family; the stretched animal skins outside, painted
with symbols that told a story in a compact wraparound. Curtis worked without pause,
moving across the cliff’s edge, reacting to the changing light, slipping the heavy
plates from his camera into a sealed container, then reloading.

Grinnell was impressed by his passion. Two years after meeting Curtis on the volcano,
he saw in him a rare combination. Here was “a professional photographer, equipped
with all the skill required in the technical part of that business,” Grinnell wrote,
“but he is also an artist, seeing and loving the beautiful and longing to reproduce
it.” And everything below, the sweep of tradition and majesty on one of the long­est
days of the year—it was fantastic, yes, Grinnell said. But the view was superficial
as well, offering only a glancing impression.

“Their humanity has been forgotten,” Grinnell said of the predominant way most outsiders
looked at Indians—as either savages or victims. The Piegan had gathered to pay homage
to the Great Mystery, Bird explained. And if Curtis expected to understand that mystery,
in order to take pictures that were true, he would need to go down below and get to
know the people. The glory was in the eyes, in the faces, in understanding how they
thought and what they did in the margins of a day.

Bird took him to the encampment. It was important, he cautioned, not to come on too
strong, too eager. Relax. Soak it all in. Smile. These people are not specimens, not
fauna to be categorized and put under microscopes as on the Harriman expedition. They
are just human beings, no more complicated or simplistic than others, no more heroic
for their survival or tragic for their loss. Laugh at yourself. Don’t be afraid to
appear stupid: imagine an Indian walking into an Elks Lodge in downtown Seattle, uninvited.
Curtis said he had established a rule, born in part by his revulsion at the Harriman
party’s looting: he would not take a picture without offering to pay, or without the
subject’s permission. A fine guiding principle to Grinnell, but he urged the young
man not to start in right away with cash and exchanges. Take time to get acquainted.
Here is White Calf, chief of the Blackfeet—a friend, nearly sixty years old. Over
there is Tearing Lodge, another revered elder, seventy years old. And that hard-eyed
man on horseback, scowling as he circles the edge of the encampment, that is Small
Leggins.
He doesn’t like you.

The whites had said many things about these plains dwellers, commenting on their
rituals of self-mutilation and fasting, their soaks in sweat lodges and their naked
dashes into the snow, the way they dispatched enemies, torturing and gutting them
and taking the women as slaves. Little of what had been written was accurate, Grinnell
said. George Catlin, the most famous American graphic documentarian of Indians in
the nineteenth century, had come home with many fanciful drawings and even more fanciful
conjectures. Catlin had called the Blackfeet “perhaps the most powerful tribe of Indians
on the continent.” They certainly had a reputation for toughness, for feuding fiercely
with other tribes, for violence that didn’t follow the norms of Anglo-European warfare.
But “most powerful”? No, not by any stretch. They were too small in number for that.
The Comanche, the hard-riding, merciless Lords of the Plains, who dominated much of
Texas and the Southwest, could rout the Blackfeet in an afternoon, had they come into
a fight.

If the stories are contradictory, Grinnell continued, put two or more sources together
and try to settle on the truth. Ask the same question repeatedly—but ask it of the
people themselves. Don’t bother with those who profess to know Indians because they
live nearby, the merchants who scorn them or the ranchers who run cattle over the
old buffalo grass. Nor should he waste his time with the anthropologists of eastern
colleges or European universities, who divided themselves between the Noble Savage
school and the racial determinists who saw Darwinian roadkill in the collapse of the
tribes. And he certainty should avoid the do-gooders in black robes who were oh so
sorry for the poor, pathetic Indians as they worked to tally converts. Finally, Grinnell
reserved special scorn for government agents, the frontline enforcers of assimilation,
the faces of a conqueror who made sure no sensible policy would ever be practiced.

Taking Grinnell’s advice, Curtis established another plank for the cathedral of a
plan he was building in his mind: “Information at all times must be drawn from the
Indians.” Over the days, Curtis listened. The Indians were skeptical, of course, of
this stranger that Bird had brought into their midst. Small Leggins followed Curtis
with his eyes, an orbit of staring. The man with the camera and wax recorder heard
stories of their origins, their hopes, the great losses they had suffered from disease
and a deathly hunger that followed the collapse of the buffalo herds. In one winter,
1883–84, the Piegan lost a fourth of their population to starvation—a “winter of misery
and death,” Curtis wrote. He wondered about a few of the more dark-skinned natives,
and was told they were descendants of a black slave called York, who had passed among
these people nearly a hundred years earlier with Lewis and Clark. Curtis smoked a
ceremonial pipe. He learned that a person should never look his mother-in-law in the
face or talk to her directly. He was invited into a sweat lodge. He stripped naked
and sat as the water poured out of him, until he nearly passed out, delirious and
hallucinating, “until I heard far-away music where there could be no music,” as he
wrote to a friend back home. But he remained Edward S. Curtis of Seattle, the portrait
photographer. He would not try to fake or play at being an Indian.

Curtis found these people very “likeable,” and among the most courteous he had met,
of any race. At the same time, Chief White Calf warmed to him. A trust was developing,
but it took a great deal of time, much of it spent in silence. His questions often
went unanswered. “To ask the Piegan . . . any direct question bearing on the subject
of religion yields scant light,” said Curtis. “It is necessary to learn rather from
the everyday life of the people.” When the stories came, even in dribs and drabs,
the breakthrough was thrilling to Curtis—like learning to swim after hours of flailing
in water. See how easy: just let yourself float.