#1578 Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian
2023-12-18 00:59:58
Listening to America aims to “light out for the territories,” traveling less visited byways and taking time to see this immense, extraordinary country with fresh eyes while listening to the many voices of America’s past, present, and future. Led by noted historian and humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson, Listening to America travels the country’s less visited byways, from national parks and forests to historic sites to countless under-recognized rural and urban places. Through this exploration, Clay and team find and tell the overlooked historical and contemporary stories that shape America’s people and places. Visit our website at ltamerica.org.
Hello everyone, this is the podcast introduction to this week's Listening to America. I'm talking with John and Colleen Graybill of Buena Vista, Colorado, about their descendants project with respect to Edward S. Curtis. Edward S. Curtis, 1868 to 1952, was a photographer.
Dry glass plate and the negatives The glass plates were 5x7, 8x10, 11x18 giant glass plates. And he took apparently as many as 40,000 of them. Over the course of his lifetime, he was a prominent studio photographer in Seattle. He had a kind of a conversion experience when he was on the Blackfoot reservation with his friend George Bird Grinnell. He then photographed the Roosevelt children at Sygamore Hill and became a friend of Theodore Roosevelt.
Theodore Roosevelt supported him, not financially, although he bought a copy of the complete North American Indian he subscribed, but he wrote letters of introduction and supported him when there were controversies. And Curtis convinced J..P. Morgan, the famous art collector and financier J...P. Morgan, to fund in part the project.
We now have the 20 volumes of the North American Indian. It's an amazing thing I spent all this time in the interview today asking questions of John and Colleen. I did not talk about my own project, but I want to say a little bit about that. So I'm doing something that's sort of similar parallel.
We both began without knowing that the others were doing it, but they actually complement each other in an important way. I'm interviewing native elders from the 70 tribal nations that he visited, not all of them, of course. My goal is 35 to 50 video interviews. These are video interviews, and I'm talking to these commentators, these elders, who then comment on specific photographs.
What's going on in such and such a portrait? What's that headdress? Why are there porcupine quills? is that trade cloth or is that bison? What sort of sacred objects are here?
Does that family still have descendants who are alive today?
What kind of attitude do you sense in the photograph? We do that, and these will become little vignettes on specific photographs that you will be able to look at with a QR code. Or on a kiosk or on a website. But there also are longer commentaries about what Curtis did. We didn't really talk about it today, but he's been accused of a number of things. A He was white, and that today matters more than it did then.
He sometimes manipulated his subjects a little bit. He paid and sometimes bribed people who were desperately poor to sit for portraits and to show him things that maybe they were not that willing to show. He intruded a little bit on the sacred from time to time. There are a couple of harrowing stories about that. He romanticized natives.
He carried along some costuming, let's call it, some robes and some shawls and some headdresses and so on. Normally, he did not use those, but when necessary, he was willing to say, Why don't you wear this? You know? There are a number of issues. I think that, on the whole, Curtis's achievement was of monumental importance. And that these things are issues. But they are not terminal issues, they're not cancel issues.
They're not discrediting in a fundamental way at any rate. I'm doing this, and I've so far done five of these interviews I'm going to do about, as I say, 50. In seven regions all across the American West, not east of the Mississippi, because that was not his focus, but through the American West, the Canadian West and Alaska.
I will certainly do that over the next few years if you want to support this project. It's one of the most important things that I've ever done because it's of importance way beyond my own little career. When you see these interviews and you see a native elder looking at a photograph and silent for 15 or 20 seconds or two minutes, for that matter. And then beginning to, I'm using air quotes to read it. One of the greatest interviews was done by my friend Gerard Baker, who's Hidatsa now living near Miles City, Montana. Unfortunately, that interview had to be done on Zoom, but it's still amazing.
We were looking at a photograph of a Mandan woman with a bull boat. A kind of a saucer-like boat made of buffalo, strung tightly over willow boughs, a kind of a basin. Lewis and Clark talk about this. These bull boats existed well into the 20th century. The Mandan people didn't go up and down rivers, they went across rivers, and so they needed this very simple craft.
It could be made in a few hours, if necessary. And so there's a woman who's partly bent over and there's a bull boat behind her, and there's a cliff. And this is near Washburn or Stanton, North Dakota. It used to be the heart of the Mandan world. And Gerard Baker, who's Hidatsa, who's from there and who has a very long and extremely distinguished career in the National Park service, among other things, was reading this photograph.
He said Well, that bull boat is not. That's not Buffalo hide, that's cow hide, so there must not have been Buffalo hide available. By the time Curtis got there, this would be around 1908, I think, and so they had to use cow hide.
And he said that, you know, this woman had to make x number of these before she could make one for herself. That there's an apprenticeship and a training program, and there's a sacred process, a set of sacred rituals that go into this. He read the cliff and said, I think I know where that is, or certainly I know about where that cliff is. He was able to see things in this photograph that I could never have seen, I don't think an anthropologist necessarily would have seen.
An art historian almost certainly wouldn't have seen, but he could see it because, of course, that's his own heritage, his own culture. And he was able to explain it to me and others. And he said, she's wearing trade cloth, you know? in other words, clothing woven on a loom back east somewhere, or, you know, in England or Canada.
And so he was able to see all these things and it's just so extraordinary to be part of this process. You know, my job is just to put up the photograph and get out of the way and ask follow-up questions. But to be as silent as possible, and you have to be willing to go through, you know, periods of silence.
Because most Native Americans that I know, and of course it's ridiculous to generalize, but most Native Americans don't just blurt stuff out. They think it through, and particularly when they're trying to decide, how do I say what I have to say? To non-natives, you know, to people who are looking from the outside in, rather than from the inside out? This is an amazing, amazing project.
And I sort of fell into it because I did an exhibit at the TR Center, the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, and the exhibit was Roosevelt. And Curtis, the rough rider and the shadow catcher and Curtis, name given to him by natives, was the shadow catcher. Because he was capturing light through his camera lens. I'm very proud of that exhibit. It's been dismantled now, but it's available to travel.
I hope it will travel to other Roosevelt-related sites around the country. And I wanted to have some commentary on the images. Because, you know, Curtis was a white man with a great, noble soul, but he was a white man. And I, too, am a non-native, and so I wanted to make sure that the discourse was generated by Native people.
That they were encouraged to tell their own story, and that, without them in the mix, without native commentary, that the exhibit would be less, indeed, much less. And so that's how this began, and so I've managed to get some very early funding for this.
I've got a plan to do about ten interviews in the year 2024.
It's going to take five or six years to do all of this, and, of course, the equipment gets better and easier to use every year. And there's a network, you know, once you've met one elder, my friend Jack Gladstone, who is a pegan.
He's blackfeet and he knows of people elsewhere, and they know of people elsewhere. And suddenly you begin to build kind of a network of people who know something that's important. But are also willing to talk with non-natives coming to their part of the world.
It's deeply satisfying. If you want to help us, we could use all the help we can get. You know, we really just need money and gas cards and so on to be able to do all this. Because it's not inexpensive to go to the Hopi world, or to the Paiute world, or to the Mojave world, or the Shoshone world.
Or the Nimiipuu world, or the Klatsa world, or the Apache, or Comanche world, or the Lakota world, or Cheyenne and Absaroka the Crow. So this is the plan.
And I'm so pleased to know John and Colleen Graybill. they have an amazing connection to the great man himself, of course. But Colleen was a photographer in her own right, and she and John are both photographers and are now partnering. This is not the story of Edward S.
Curtis and his long-suffering wife Clara. This is a partnership of John and Colleen, and I'm just so pleased to be able to share a little bit of what they're doing with you. And truly, this would be a great Christmas gift for you to give to people that you care about. Their latest book, Edward S.
Curtis unpublished Planes, or his previous book, Edward S. Curtis Unpublished Alaska. So anyway, that's this week's program. This is going to be a big part of my life over the next couple of years.
I should say before I send you to the show. A lot of what I know about thinking about Native Americans and working with Native Americans and learning from Native Americans. Comes from David Swenson, the now retired semi-permanent guest host of the Thomas Jefferson Hour.
He has achieved an extraordinary rapport with native peoples on the Northern Great Plains, and his humility is amazing to see. And because of that, the purity of David's heart and the humility of his manner, he has been invited into a world that most of us would never be allowed to see. So let's go to the program.
Happy holidays to you. All. This is Listening to America, Edward S. Curtis and the work of John and Colleen Graybill of Buena Vista, Colorado.
Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America. I'm Clay Jenkinson. I have the great pleasure today to be talking with two of my friends, John and Colleen Graybill of Buena Vista, Colorado, about Edward S.
Curtis, welcome.
Hi Clay. Hi Clay, thanks for having us.
Good to see you there in the mountains, in the interior mountains of Colorado. And for those who might be sending in snarky comments, it is buena, not buena vista, right?
That's right.
That is correct.
I was corrected the last time I was there when I tried to pronounce it in the full European way.
We know who's local and who's not.
Tell us who Edward S. Curtis is 1868 to 1952..
As it would happen to be, Edward Curtis is my great grandfather. He was a hardworking man, shall we say, and did a ton of odd jobs growing up. Around the house. To make ends meet with the family while they were staying in or near St. Paul, he did do an apprenticeship as a photographer in a local studio for a short period, and we believe that's where his interest started with photography.
As time goes on, you know, the family has this horrible winter and they're destitute. They're dirt poor, the true definition of dirt poor. Yes, and so he and his dad moved to Sydney, Washington, Washington territory, at the time.
That's near Puget Sound, that's in the Puget Sound area.
Yeah, yeah, Clay. And currently today, it goes by the name of Port Orchard, and I think most people would be familiar with that. It's a beautiful spot on the Olympic Peninsula, it's just gorgeous.
So he's sort of a handyman. Trying to keep the family finances together, he moves out there with his father. But he had had some interest in photography already in the Midwest.
Yes, and so he and his father. They hand-build this log cabin on the property that they're homesteading, and they get the cabin all ready over the winter. And they send for the rest of the family to come out, and they do, except for the older brother, Ralph, who stays back three days later.
After the family arrives, old man Curtis passes away, and Edward finds himself having to support the family yet again. Does all kinds of odd jobs, you know, he's cutting wood, he's fishing firewood, whatever he can do that you would do back in those days, but he hurts his back logging.
And that back injury lays him up in bed for nearly a year. During the course of that year. A young neighbor girl by the name of Clara Phillips starts coming by helping his mom to kind of nurse him back and look after him. And also during this period, we believe it was while he was laid up in bed at this cabin, watching the play of light that would go through. During the course of the day that he really becomes intrigued with this and how it plays on subjects. When he finally is healed enough to get out of bed, he realizes he can no longer do physical work. He's going to have to do something else.
And so decides to rely on those photography skills that he learned back in St. Paul. And so he mortgages the property, I think, much to his mom's chagrin, but he does and buys into a photography studio in downtown Seattle, across the pond, if you will. It was that start there. That really leads him on his journey. And he goes through a couple of studios before he has his own studio in his own name.
And he becomes like the place to go.
He's a sort of famous portrait photographer for the well-off, the rich, the celebrities, the people that really want to impress each other with their portraits. We all remember that era in American history with the great studio portrait photographers.
Exactly, clay. And it's like, if you're anybody and need a portrait, this is the studio, you go to, the Curtis Studio.
So this does not involve Native Americans so far.
No, no, not yet. I can only imagine the line out the door waiting to get their picture snapped by Curtis. So he's got people lined up. One of the really fun things that he did, Clay, is he took member photos of the Arctic Club, which was just around the block from the Reindeer Club in downtown Seattle. If you go into the Arctic Club today, you'll see almost like wallpaper 8x10s lining the lobby of the Arctic Club.
And they've all got the Curtis signature on these headshots, basically.
So he marries Clara, he marries this woman who got him through his long, difficult year, Clara.
He does.
They start to have children, John and Colleen. He is on his way to becoming a prominent, highly regarded social elite portrait photographer and wealthy. And instead of just riding out that career, which he could easily have done, he turns the direction entirely.
He does, and Clay, I think he got bored with the portrait work in the studio. If you can only imagine the line of people waiting to get their photo done by Curtis, I think he gets bored and he starts venturing out around the Seattle area. He does a lot of mountain climbing and exploring Reindeer, St. Helens, Baker and these mountains in the area with his camera and does some beautiful work. In addition to that, he ventures out down along the shoreline.
And there are still natives in this area because this is late 1800s, early 1900s. And he photographs people such as Princess Angeline on the shores, digging clams, picking mussels. And I think this starts something, he sees, something he's intrigued. Somewhere around that point, he invites Angeline up to the studio to do a portrait session.
And for those that don't know, Princess Angeline is like the last Native American that the Seattleites allow to live within city limits.
I mean, there are literally laws preventing natives from living within the city limits, and so it's a white-only city at this point.
White-only, except for Princess Angeline.
Who was the daughter of Chief Seattle?
Right sealth, or however you pronounce that. But she was the daughter.
Yeah, however, that's pronounced yes, from which Seattle was named.
So he took a famous photograph of her. Most people who wouldn't know who Edward S. Curtis is have probably seen that photograph. Or his canyon Dachet, which is justly famous, or his chief Joseph, which he took in a studio in Seattle.
Or maybe his portrait of Red Cloud? But almost everyone, whether they know his name or not, has seen a Curtis photograph. Yes.
Absolutely, yeah, and that's our experience. We run into people all the time, they ask us what we do, We say, Who's that?
Who's Curtis? But we show them the picture. Ah, yes.
So okay, so you think the seed of his great career is born by those photographs on the shore and bringing Angeline into the studio?
I do, I absolutely do. I think it sparks something inside of him. He realizes that these people are maybe not the way they've been portrayed by the dominant society in Seattle at this point. But there's something else there.
There's far more there than what people are giving credit for. And along the same time period. He's gone north of Seattle, up into Tulalip Reservation, and he's been taking pictures up there as well with Princess Angeline as early as 1895. He's doing photographic work with natives, and he's selling these out of his studio.
I mean, it's point of income for him.
People are fascinated with Indian portraits, with the Native American portraits, and so he's thinking of this as a commercial venture. I'll take some photographs of Native people, I'll sell them from my studio, it'll supplement my income.
Absolutely. He has what they call an Indian corner in the studio where he markets this stuff. And he's got it all decked out in baskets, pots, blankets. The photograph, scenes done.
So, Colleen, I want to ask you a question. So, you know? John said that he was sort of physically disabled and couldn't do physical work. Yes, that's true, he couldn't lift logs anymore, but this is a physical specimen.
He climbed Mount Rainier when that was a very difficult thing to do repeatedly, he saved people on Mount Rainier. He took these cameras, which weighed 50, 60 pounds, with all the glass plate negatives, up this mountain, without the kind of gear we routinely rely upon today. This is a really strong man.
Yes.
Yeah, he would climb Rainier with a small backpack and basically a piece of luggage. Or his camera with a handle on it, you know, just in his hand with the walking stick and go climbing up the glacier.
You know, I climbed Mount Whitney a couple of years ago. I wouldn't even take my cell phone because it was one ounce too many. He's carrying these very heavy cameras, so all right, let's flash forward, so he goes on.
The Herriman exhibition to Alaska takes something like 4,000 photographs, which is a kind of a rapid fire apprenticeship on how to do this in the field comes back. And George Byrd Grinnell, whom he met on Mount Rainier, we think, invites him to come out to Browning, Montana, to photograph what was thought maybe to be the last sundance of the blackfeet nation. So pick up the story there, John.
As the story goes, he and Byrd meet at the train station. They've got their horses, they pack the horses up with all their gear, so they've got their camping gear. Curtis has got the Dettuson wax cylinder machine that Herriman introduced to him.
Audio recording device also very heavy.
Very heavy, yes, he's got his camera gear, his photographic supplies. They pack these horses up and they head off north of Browning, up towards the reservation. And as the story goes, they meander on up the trail for a while and they come to this cliff or this overpass. And when they get to that, they look out into the field below them, and there's hundreds of teepees down there.
It gives me goosebumps.
There's a great Curtis photograph of that panorama, of those, it's not one of his greatest photographs from a purely photographic point of view. But for its impact and for how moving it is, it's one of the best.
Absolutely capturing the essence of that encampment, and I think he names it Sundance Encampment, that particular photo. He ends up spending time there, you know, and he talks to the chief, and the chief says. Well, you can photograph whatever you like, and of whom will ever give you permission to photograph them, but you can't photograph the Sundance.
Which may still be true in most of Native American country. You talk about the moment when Princess Angeline and On the Shore and Puget sound. Certainly, the seed is there. But I think the moment when he made the decision to give essentially the rest of his career to Native American photography was in. Browning was on the blackfeet reservation. And tell me if I'm wrong about this, Grinnell said to him. You know, you should exhibit these, or you should maybe put a book together, or you should do something, you know, something more with these.
And he said, Oh, I will. And it wound up being 20 volumes, one of the greatest achievements not only of ethnography in North American history, but of photography. One of the New York papers later said It's as big a project as the translation of the King James Bible. So we're talking about almost like an appalling conversion experience, where a very prominent studio photographer winds up giving his life to this really bold, difficult, maybe impossible, adventure. To capture Native American culture, dress visage, lodging landscape. Before, it was too late, because he believed that Native Americans were going to fade somehow from the scene.
It was not just Curtis's thought. These people would no longer be here. In just a few years, they wouldn't assimilate and they would pass on and everything would be gone and lost.
That's a great introduction to Curtis, getting him into the field. Now when we come back, I want you to describe what it was like. And Colleen, I think I would ask you to say a little bit about poor Clara. Because I'm guessing that she did not think, when all of this started, that he was essentially going to be gone for the next three decades. You're listening to a special edition of Listening to America. We'll be back in just a moment.
Welcome back to Listening to America, John and Colleen, it is so great to know you and to admire your work. I didn't know that you were the great grandson of the great Edward S. Curtis. I did a big project in Seattle.
I got a chance to talk to 15 or 20 different venues about the work of Curtis. You were at a couple of them and we met through mutual friends. And you not only told me of the fact that you have a very large archive of Curtis. Materials, including hundreds, maybe thousands of photographs that have never been published, he's said to have taken 40,000 photographs. That may be an exaggeration, but a lot, and only a couple of thousand, wound up in the North American Indian project. Most of them, as we like to say now, wound up at the cutting room floor.
But you have them, you're publishing books based on that, the first two of which have come out. You're also involved in something called the Descendants Project. I'll let you describe it. But as I understand it, you are going into Indian country. Finding people who are direct descendants of people. That are pictured, that are photographed by Curtis, and interviewing them and taking their portraits with a very high quality camera. Is that correct?
That's exactly right, Clay. The way I tell people is I'm using the same technology that Curtis used, which is an old-fashioned view camera. The lens I'm using is probably out of late 1800s, a Turner-wright, and then I'm using dry plate glass negatives.
How big are these glass plates?
It's a whole plate format, which is 6 1⁄2 x 8 1⁄2 inches.
It's a piece of glass with silver nitrate emulsion on it, and this is not like a giant SD card, is it?
Absolutely not. This is one of the things that really freaked Colleen out at first because we're both digital photographers.
You, too, Colleen, are a photographer, right?
Yes, she is an excellent photographer, so we're out there using this camera, taking a picture. We both are dependent upon that feedback. We want to check Instagram and make sure exposure and everything is set, make sure we didn't miss anything.
I got to take those glass plates back to the darkroom to process them and look at them.
You don't know when you take the photograph, if it's going to so-called turn out right? And so you don't know until you get to a darkroom, whether your portraits have succeeded. Yes.
That's the advantage that we both have is that we started out shooting film and we know that process well and know where our limitations are. So having that long history as professional photographers helps jumping into that large format. And the glass dry plates?
So Curtis had many cameras of different sizes 11 x 18, 8 x 10, 5 x 7 and others. Eventually, I think towards the end of his life, he actually used a little bit of film. But do you treat your own plates or do you buy them already ready?
No, I've been purchasing them from Jason Lane and he does an excellent job on it. He's taken a little bit of a sabbatical while he rebuilds in the darkroom, but yeah, predominantly, I've used his glass plate negatives.
So let's say you're in front, you have a descendant, you're working with the descendant, let's say on the Pine Ridge reservation. And that descendant has decided what to wear and is now posing for you. Here's what I understand about dry glass plate. You have to pull it out in a slide and then you have to put it in the back of the camera. Then you pull the thing that kept it from being exposed.
Now you're looking at it upside down in your viewfinder. You decide on that. You have to determine the number of seconds for the exposure. Now you say, don't move, and for x seconds, that person holds that look, that pose.
Then you put the slide back down into the frame, pull the frame out, put it in a bag, and then the next frame, right? So with my cell phone here, I could take 200 photographs in a minute. How long does it take a photograph for you?
Well, from start to finish, it's probably 15 minutes per exposure, I would say.
Colleen, what are you doing while he's sweating here? Taking these photographs, these five images.
I'm helping to set up the photograph, I'm watching to make sure how much movement the person has, whether they blink during the exposure. Because, you know, just breathing, we naturally move. Just slightly and a half an inch will make a difference between where he focused and then where he actually where that person is when he actually clicked the shutter. If they're a half an inch off, it's going to be out of focus.
How many individuals have you photographed so far in this great project?
So far, we've completed work with 18.
Amazing, and that's traveling all over the American West, I mean, that's not something that just happens in central Colorado.
I'm sure we've been places where Curtis had his wagon. You know, we talk about that with the natives, you know, your ancestor, my great-grandfather, they were probably right here doing the same thing we're doing. It's a wonderful experience, it truly is.
Yeah, difficult, complex, time-consuming, amazing and noble. So you've got X number that you've done so far, what's your goal?
Currently, the goal for at least this first phase is to work with 30 people.
So you're about halfway.
Yeah, a little bit more than halfway. And, as you know, as we know, and probably a lot of your audience, that. Curtis came under quite a bit of criticism, and one of those criticisms was for staging and posing his subjects. Because of that, every person that we work with, I ask them to come dress the way they want to be remembered, and they pick where the photograph's going to be.
And then I make it work, somehow.
So let's just say that the person you're going to take the portrait of comes in jeans and a baseball cap. You're okay with that.
Absolutely.
So you are making no attempt to manipulate this process. They get to choose exactly what they're going to wear and, within limits, how they're going to pose, because you can't do action photos. But this is granting them an enormous amount of personal integrity and agency, something that Curtis, I think, didn't always manage to do.
Yeah, I think he was predisposed to making sure they had their regalia in some setting that would portray them in their native homeland.
Well, he was trying to tell a story.
He was.
And with the image, just as we do once we talk to the descendant and know what they want to wear, how they want to be portrayed, and in what kind of location. Then we can dial that in to find the right light, because there's certain things you can't do with just natural lighting.
Well, yes, we use zero artificial lighting, it's all natural.
All right, so let me get this straight. You leave Buena Vista on a train and you go to Winslow. And you hire a wagon with four horses, and the wagon rumbles across these trails that have no roads. And you finally get to the end of that.
And then you get on mules and you go in, and finally, you're at this spot and you meet the elder or the descendant. And then you do this preliminary work about how they're going to, what they choose to wear and where they want to be photographed. Then you take these five or so images of them over half a day or so.
But, meanwhile, aren't you also interviewing them on video?
Absolutely, so, you know, it started out. We were interviewing them on video, so we didn't have to take handwritten notes during the interview. We wanted to be present and focused on that. And so then I take the audio out of the video, transcribe it.
And then we have all that information first hand. Since that initial start, we're incorporating the video or pieces of that video into the project and how we portray these people.
We want them to have their actual voice heard, of course, as much as we can possibly do, so these videos allow us to let them tell their own story.
And when you get back and develop the last plates, as I understand it, you then present to that family, that person, a beautiful print of the portrait that you took.
Yes, you know, so, like anything in the film, especially this really old technology, things don't always work out. And so they'll say, well, so we're going to get five images, and I say, well, if all five come out, absolutely, you can pick whichever ones or all of them that you want.
Because of the focus issue that Colleen was describing, there may only be one or two images that are really usable. They can have access to that stuff all they want.
So we send them a larger print and then we send them a bunch of smaller prints that they can share with family. We feel it's incredibly important for them to have a physical print to share and to keep in their family archives. Digital is going to become a problem real soon, with it not being passed down through the family.
The transmission of digital imagery and movies, and so on is going to be a gigantic crisis in the next 50 years. But I've known you for a few years now. This is time consuming, this is not inexpensive, and I don't think that you're in this for the money.
You're not going to get rich doing this. So I know you're the great grandson, but what's propelling you to do something? That's really a very huge amount of effort, why are you doing this?
Well, it started out as kind of, well, what if? And it's led to this, it's morphed into something far deeper in meaning for Colleen and I. And what we have found with every single native person that we've worked with. These people are by far some of the most incredibly warm, loving, heartfelt people I've ever met, and they have a story to tell.
And that connection from the past, and whether people know that history or not, we bring that past to the present for a further interpretation. And then our material will transcend into the future for many generations to come, we hope the story of resilience and healing that they share with us. The tribulations that they go through in modern-day life, surprisingly, is not too dissimilar to what their ancestors were going through 120-some years ago. When the Kurds worked with them, it's kind of amazing that there hasn't been that much progress in that realm. And so we hope in doing this with these people. That the viewers of our material can feel that same heartfelt appreciation that we have for these people. That they'll gain an appreciation for the culture that is incredibly spiritual and deep beyond imagination.
And that they can embrace these people, tear down the biases and prejudices that exist today, and see them as loving human beings.
When you started this, you knew of your great-grandfather's achievement, which is staggeringly beautiful and important. Did you know that the native people that you were going to meet were going to affect you? To move you, deepen your own souls in the way that they have?
No, not in my wildest imagination would I have dreamt that I'd be in the place that I am today. And I think it's the same for Colleen.
Some of these people have become some of our best friends, a tribute to. They realize that we care and that we're doing this from our heart. We're not being paid for this. It's just important for us to carry this legacy forward. And not only tell Curtis's story more, but his name and his work opens doors so easily. For us to bring in these native voices and give them that platform so you can tell their story.
Now you two are Anglos, you're white Americans. One of the issues today, as you know, is who gets to do this kind of work. You and I have interviewed a few of the same people and one of my favorites. A man named Aaron Breen of the Crow, rather the Absaroka world in Montana, said When I went, Okay, here comes another white guy who wants something from us. He was sort of teasing and he was sort of not, you know, it's an issue.
People are always coming into Indian country and wanting something or saying, here's what we're going to do for you. Or we have an idea. And natives have been around for a long time and this isn't their first rodeo. They're openly, at least initially, skeptical of non-natives who come rolling in with big ideas. So I know your hearts are good, but how do you overcome that resistance?
I would have to say we don't that if someone is resistant or doesn't want to tell their story, then we don't pressure them. And we just keep going until we find the people that want to share their story. That they're extremely appreciative of the history that Curtis captured for their family and their ancestry. And we've said all along that if we get to a roadblock, that we're not going to keep knocking on that door, that we will just keep going to where the doors open.
But I know, I mean, that's a really good answer, but I also think there's a little bit more to it, I think. And you're probably too modest to say, but I think you will agree, and I want to hear this to a very surprising amount. These native people have let you in, they have let you through the barriers that they hold, and they've let you into their lives. And to a certain degree, into their hearts. Which is an amazing thing, isn't it?
Yes, it is clay. And I would say, when we work with these natives, we're both extremely humbled. We're acutely aware of the history that they have gone through, that their ancestors have gone through with the U.S government in this country. And we're sensitive to that. And over and over, when we're done working with these people. They tell us that they can sense what's in our heart, and somehow we project that and they open up to us.
And even Aaron Bren, my goodness, you know, and he was one of our best interviews too. He was a hoot. He had a wonderful sense of humor, with sarcasm built in. He speaks the truth, you know, and I had talked to him about one of the questions in interviews and it was Aaron. What do you want to tell the white people in the world today? And in a nutshell, stay away, we don't need your help, was his answer, you know?
And he goes on to explain it a little bit more in depth that being the Cultural Preservation officer on Crow Agency, he's tasked with slowing down the erosion of their culture. And he portrays that this is a massive loss of culture that he's experiencing in his life, in today's world. And he doesn't have time for any other distractions, he doesn't have time for white tourists coming in wanting to do this or that it doesn't fit.
He has certain official responsibilities for the Ansaroka people. And I think you've told me that in some of these cases, you go down and spend a day or two. The individuals you meet are inviting you into their homes, you share meals with them, there's a sense of communion that is really cross-cultural and healing.
Absolutely, I believe it's healing for them, but I also believe it's healing for us. When I have come to terms with what the White Anglos, the settlers, had done in this country to the Indigenous population. There's an incredible amount of guilt in knowing that some ancestor of mine was a part of that. I have a hard time reconciling with what was done, so it's a healing process on both sides, I think, for us and for them.
I want to get back to Curtis for a second. So he took around 40,000 photographs, produced these 20 volumes. He did roadshows, kind of a picture opera, which had colored slides and music that was original for this, what he called an opera. Including a Carnegie Hall, he made a full-length documentary, a docudrama film. He was always starved for money.
He became friends with Theodore Roosevelt, and Roosevelt supported him, at least with letters of introduction. And the key moment was when Curtis went to see J..P. Morgan in New York and he showed him his portfolio, Morgan said. Go away. I get a lot of requests, I'm not interested, please, just....
And Curtis said, No, I'm not going away till. You look at the portfolio, which was a bold thing to do in the presence of the very, very formidable J.
P Morgan and Morgan paged through, and he saw this photograph of Mosa, a Mojave young woman, and he said, You can take pictures like that. All right. I'm going to support you for $15,000 a year for five years. See my staff and we'll make arrangements. Well, J..P.
Morgan wound up supporting him for four or five times that amount over the course of the project. But without that seed money and that imprimatur of support from the heart of the artistic establishment in New York, it's not clear that Curtis would have been able to achieve what he did. Is it?
Yeah, that's correct. At that point, Curtis had probably spent around $25,000 of his own money, had mortgaged the house collectors. Pounding on the door when he's out in the field, so Clara has to answer to that. And they were on the verge of bankruptcy. He was literally at the ends of his knees.
Say a word about Clara. There was a celebrated divorce. Clara does not come off very well in this conversation, but I feel deep sympathy for her. He left her for basically for 30 years, and she had to hold the home fires together. They had children.
She was trying to keep the portrait studio open when he would come home, he was exhausted or he was in the darkroom. We owe a lot to her.
Yeah, we tend to forget her part of the story. And yeah, if my husband was gone 10 or 11 months out of the year and left me hanging with the bag. And to talk to all the debtors, I wouldn't have been very happy either. But yeah, at that time it was very, very scandalous to ask for a divorce. But Clara liked her high society. I think her family was that way prior to Curtis, and that's the type of life she was expecting.
And at times, it was very questionable that that was happening.
We'll take a break here when we come back. I want to talk further about Edward S. Curtis. I'm talking with my friends John and Colleen Graybill of Buena Vista, Colorado. We'll be back in just a moment.
You're listening to an episode of Listening to America.
Welcome back to Listening to America. When we went to break, we were talking about poor, long-suffering Clara. They got this divorce. It was front-page banner headlines, it was bitter.
Glass plates were broken to avoid the sharing of intellectual property, according to family tradition. He came back from one of his journeys, and he was arrested for debt the minute he got off the boat in Seattle. This is a rough life, John.
Yeah, so, you know, the hard part for me, Clay, is this is my great-grandmother, you know? And I never got to meet the woman. I never got to meet Edward, but they're my great-grandparents. And it's hard to hear some of the things I've heard about her and what she went through and endured. I want to love her, just like Edward. Don't have enough information really to go on about her. But one of the things that was passed down from Uncle Hal, or Harold Curtis, the couple's firstborn, who traveled with Ed on a great deal of the summer trips. Whenever his dad was out in the field, Hal would say that his mom, actually. He called his mom a joiner, that she was out joining all the social clubs in Seattle. Leaving the kids at home with, you know, the two girls, and Hal and Hal ended up having to take care of the home and raise his sisters.
And because of this, there was no love affair between the children and their mom. They always chose Edward's side. That had to have been hard on her. I can't imagine, you know, your kids.
Choosing the parent that's never there.
Yeah, I just can't imagine what that would have been like, but nonetheless, that's how that went down.
You know, I think that from my own, you tell me, and I don't want to intrude on the sanctity of their own relationship. All relationships are complicated, but what you just said really struck me. I mean, it's not just that she's long-suffering, trying to hold the family together.
It sounds like, with her own social ambitions, she was a neglectful mother to those children and that was part of the issue.
That's how Hal portrays it, like Colleen touched on a divorce back in that day was extremely scandalous. My grandmother, Florence, their third-born child, had enrolled at the University of Washington. And when this hit the papers, she tells the family she was so embarrassed. She dropped out of school. And, you know, it never went back.
I can't imagine.
I have such sympathy for her, you know? It's easy to take his side because the achievement is one of the greatest you can possibly imagine. I mean, just to those who are listening, just think for a moment, if Edward S. Curtis had not done this and he had something that I don't have.
If you gave me $5 million and said, take the best possible camera equipment and anything you need and go take portraits of Native Americans. I could do that and they would be competent, but they wouldn't necessarily get through to the soul of those individuals. And somehow he had a rapport or a connection. Somehow there was some magic, I can only call it magic that occurred.
And when you look at the best of his photographs, not everyone, but most of them, you see that they gave their souls to this moment. And they wouldn't have had to do that, they could have just simply, you know, sat for the photograph and moved on. But there was some kind of, I want you to try to explain it, the two of you. There was some kind of a magic that was on here. And if I took the same photographs, I doubt that I would ever get that, because that's something that you can't learn.
It's something that just is.
There is certainly a skill to finding that moment and finding that, getting that expression that you're looking for, that tells their story. And that doesn't happen a lot, even with very skilled, technically correct photographers. Finding that and pulling out that emotion in an image that you're creating is a very different skill.
And that photograph is a one-off, so, in other words, I could have a camera today, I could take 200 pictures in a minute of somebody. And then you could go pick the one that gets closest to your idea of what it should be. He gets this one shot at it and that person has to hold that expression for four, five, six, maybe eight seconds, depending on the light. That makes it much more complicated and difficult than if you had the capacity to take all the frames you wanted.
I think there's a difference, too in when you have to just be for that long. And you can't fake it, you can't fake a smile that you're happy in. I think your true essence comes out when you have to just be still, and I think that's part of it too. He knew what he was doing.
CLAY Yes, Colleen's exactly right. And this process of photographing these people back in Curtis's time, and for that matter, the same way we do it. I've had exposures that were 30 seconds long inside window light at ASA2. That's all I got to work with. And so you make that work with a head brace. But it's this experience that Curtis had when he would go into a camp.
He would go into a camp and just exist in the camp. And he would start helping out as he saw, gathering wood or whatever it was for him. And eventually, they would come talk to him and find out more. And it's my understanding that the key that got him in was his appreciation of their spirituality. He saw a great depth in their spirituality. And he even gave speeches where he talked about the importance of absolute religious freedom. Because the Natives didn't have it then.
It was in the constitution for us white folk, but not for natives. And that was of utmost importance to him. And he saw this and this photograph that he would do. It's a collaborative experience, it's not like today.
That person had to actually work with you to make that photo happen. And through that connection and appreciation of their culture, that he projected. Or they sensed, they would open up. And you start to see that soul come out of the picture that was probably guarded for everybody else and never seen.
You know, what you say is so important, John. He didn't just show up in Hopi Land and say, All right. Tomorrow morning I'm going to take 20 pictures, line up, I'll get them and then I'm out of here. Because I've got to be Friday. I've got to be in the Navajo world. He would come, he'd spend weeks, sometimes months, no pressure.
He'd be hauling wood, he would be doing drudge work, getting water from the creek or the pond, handling horses, doing any tasks that were put in front of him. Very relaxed, and then eventually when people had come to see him as somebody who must mean it. Because why else would you spend this amount of time here? Then they were available, maybe to do the photographs.
Even then, it wasn't easy, but he knew that. And this is why so many people have gone wrong in Indian country. They show up and say, here's what I want to do, let's do it today, let's get this done, and then they're gone.
And so it feels exploitative, because, again, it's somebody taking rather than giving and taking.
And I believe it's exactly the same in today's world. absolutely, whether we recognize it or not, it's the same today, absolutely.
So important the patience that he showed. He went back to the HoPI world seven or eight times before he was finally allowed to be part of the snake ceremony. He never got to do it in full measure, but when I read about this, it just about kills me. He helped to go collect the rattlesnakes.
Try that sometime. And then he got to sleep in the Kiva with like 200 rattlesnakes slithering around. It's like an Indiana Jones story. And they had native elders, spiritual leaders, who would be fanning and singing to the snakes to keep them calm. I don't think Curtis was very calm in those Kivas, but he did it because he wanted to be part of it.
And they don't just give that to anybody, they only allowed that for someone that they had come to trust.
He wanted to experience those things himself. It's one thing to just write your impression of it, watching it, but when you're in that moment and experiencing it, it's much different. And I think he truly wanted to understand all these different ceremonies and different ways of life and different ways of thinking. And he wanted to experience those and produce this work from his heart.
Clay the Snake Dance, I think, is a perfect example. He had the mind, body and spirit in line and pure. Any alteration, any deviation, any doubt. The snakes would have been all over him. I believe the natives recognized this in them, they saw it, and the snakes saw it too.
You may be the great grandson and I do love and respect you, but I do not see you in a Kiva surrounded by 100 rattlesnakes. John, I can't imagine it.
Clay I don't see myself there either.
I've done other things, but not that.
That's a tough one. But his persistence and the clarity and the purity of his heart paid off again and again and again. So he's publishing this. He told J..P. Morgan that it would be maybe five, maybe ten years.
Well, this stretched out to more than 30 years, including through the heart of the Great Depression. He was always broke, he never had enough money, never took any money himself, just enough to keep going. In fact, when he was arrested in Seattle, the judge asked him, Well, surely some of that money that Morgan is providing goes to your own salary? He said, No, and the judge said, Are you crazy?
Are you nuts? You're doing this, you're donating all of your effort for the good of this project, and eventually, he produces these 20 volumes. He thought of quitting a number of times, but he just wouldn't.
Somehow, he persevered. The perseverance alone is one of the most remarkable things about him. Because in those 25 or 30 years, he went through a divorce. Several of his children were ill, at times he lost plates.
Some of his staff, though, he didn't do this alone. Some of his staff had to move on at a certain point. And he was left and felt a little betrayed by their departures. Roosevelt dies in 1919, so his sort of best friend in the establishment is gone. It's amazing that he did it, and what's so tragic about it is that when he finished, the country had kind of, in a way, lost interest. He then moves to Hollywood, lives with one of his children, winds up being a still photographer on movie sets. Has a bunch of schemes, including a gold mining scheme. Does a lot of writing, never really gets the credit that he deserves. And when he dies in 1952, he gets a 72-word obituary in the New York Times. It's not fair.
It's not fair to the achievement of this great man.
Probably not, but it's indicative with what we see, how our culture, the white culture, has treated the Indigenous population for the past 530-some years. We do not recognize them, we don't give them the time of day or the credit that they deserve. Just like Curtis's own experience with his project, people lose interest in it and move on, which is really sad. There's so much that we need to look back at and learn from these people.
Especially in today's world, we need this more than I think we realize. How to take care of Mother Earth, and how to recognize the spiritual world that we live in, and how to coexist in it.
Colleen, you're the writer in the family. And so far, all those images that wound up on the cutting room floor, many are lost. But we have lots, and you have them because of your relationship, yours and John's to the family, to Florence. You've published two books, tell us about them.
Well, it kind of started in two ways. One was we had found a descendant who was from Alaska, whose family was actually in Colorado Springs, which is only two hours from us. So in meeting with a couple different people in their family, they were looking for our notebooks of Alaska. Photographs that has been passed down through the family. And they're starting to go. I've never seen this picture of my grandmother, I've never seen this picture of my mother. And so it started to raise some questions in our minds of Are these not published?
How does the family not know these exist? Probably shortly before that, I don't remember the exact timeline was. We had come and listened to one of your presentations and when we were giving you some additional information that the family has, that's not really out there. You challenged us.
Oh boy.
This is partially your fault.
Oh, blame me, it's Clay's fault.
And yet I get no residuals. But go ahead. So we met, I challenged you.
You challenged us to get the other information out there that it's the family's responsibility to add to this great story. We really took that to heart.
I absolutely took that to heart Clay.
I apologize, I formally and publicly apologize. So then you decided you'd publish a book?
Well, yeah, then Covid hit and all our travel plans of seeing descendants went sideways. And so I had to find something to do, because I can't just do nothing. So I thought, Well, I'm going to compare these photos and I found right off 200 images just from Alaska that were not published as part of the North American Indian. We need to publish this, we need to share this with the descendants and the people of Alaska.
We need to share this with Curtis enthusiasts who have interest in this, we need to share this with historians because there's information in those photographs. And so that's kind of how it started with Alaska.
But you had a great advantage on Alaska because he went with his daughter, Beth. This was the last journey, right? She kept a journal, and that journal you were able to publish with the photographs of that great last expedition.
Pieces and parts of the Journal of Curtis's Journal had been published, but never the whole story. You know, as you're reading this, he should have died like 10 times. On this trip, fighting the Bering Sea, we just felt it was a fascinating story. To give people a little firsthand knowledge of this wasn't easy. Being able to publish these images for the Alaska natives was incredibly important to us.
What is that book, what's its title and how can people get it?
Edward S. Curtis, Unpublished Alaska, and it's available through our website and on Amazon.
The website is.
It's curtislegacyFoundation.
Org, and then you can just go to the gift shop.
Unpublished Alaska and now, most recently, just weeks ago, and I have a copy right here. it's spectacular unpublished Plains.
Then I picked the next region, it was the plains we went through, figured out what had been. What's already been published in the North American Indian, and then we also went through all kinds of other Curtis-related books because we wanted to put out things that were unpublished. So, even though it may not have been in the North American Indian. If it had been published in someone else's book, then we didn't want to add that to ours because we want to give that credit to them as publishing it.
Let me get this straight, you are only publishing, at least so far as you are aware of photographs that have never before been published.
Correct, correct.
So if one or two are in some other coffee table book, you do not republish them.
Right, right, if we found them, yeah. So we ended up with just under 200 images in the Plains Book. Along with those images, we have either essays or quotes from 10 different Native Americans from the Plains area. Because we felt it was important to give that voice to them and have them express how they felt about Curtis's work.
What's your next book?
Our next book is Southwest.
Unpublished Southwest.
Unpublished Southwest.
So there will be about 20 volumes before this is done right.
If my estimates are correct for Southwest, we may end up having to have two volumes of it.
How long does it take you to put together one of these books?
About a year and a half.
So you gather the photographs, of course, you scan them at the very, very highest resolution. Where Curtis has written about them, you tend to quote Curtis's description of the photograph. He doesn't always, unfortunately, do that. We wish that he had, but that's 40,000 paragraphs.
Other natives, contemporary natives, are commenting. Jean Eder, a very prominent Lakota woman, provides the preface to your second volume. You know, these are really extraordinary. I just want people to know that these are very, very handsome books to hold in your hand and to page through, great as gifts. But also this is of exceeding importance because we think, oh, all those Curtis photographs, but the public has only seen a fraction of all those Curtis photographs.
Again, it's important for us to share these images with the descendants. You know, we found families. White man runs him, his family multiple images that they've never seen of him before.
To your best estimate, how many more years is this going to take? This thing you're doing?
Well, we've got Southwest and Northwest, and then we have the Descendants Project book that we'll publish as well.
Oh, 10 years, anyway.
I'm hoping they're done before that.
Well, I'm trying to do the math here, you know, it looks like 10. But luckily you're both in your early 20s and so you've got all the time in the world, right?
Exactly.
It's been an enormous pleasure talking with you. I hope people will go to your website, I hope they will buy your books. But more importantly than that, I just want to congratulate you for doing work that is of the really the highest cultural importance. And you're doing it for the best of all possible reasons, because it needs to be done. I've been talking with John and Colleen, my friends. The Graybills from Buena Vista in Colorado.
Good luck to you, happy holidays and let's talk again about Edward S. Curtis.
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