94 Years On, In the Land of the Head Hunters Returns to the Moore

Edward S. Curtis's In the Land of the Head Hunters @ the Moore Theatre // 1932 Second Avenue // $13-$18 // 7 p.m.

There's a fascinating event tonight at the Moore Theatre we'll be attending that hearkens back to Seattle's early days. In December 1914, Edward S. Curtis's In the Land of the Head Hunters opened at the Moore Theatre in Seattle (which celebrates in centenary this year), and tonight at 7 p.m., nearly 95 years later, it returns. An early silent film and the first to feature an exclusively Native American cast, In the Land of the Head Hunters is the union of two traditions: the one, early American cinema, and the other, the elaborate performances of the Kwakwaka'wakw Tribe.

Curtis, born in Wisconsin in 1868, was a photographer who made his way west in the late 19th Century; in 1895, he took his first Native American portrait of Princess Angeline/Kickisomlo, the daughter of Chief Sealth of Seattle. In 1898, he encountered Georgre B. Grinnell, the ethnographer and naturalist, near Mt. Rainier, and whose expedition to the Blackfeet tribe in Montana he joined in 1900. By 1906, Curtis's reputation was such that J.P. Morgan hired him $75,000 to produce a monumental photographic work on North American Indians. By the time he lost his catalogue and studio--based here in Seattle--as part of an acrimonious divorce in 1919, Curtis had taken over 40,000 photos, recorded 10,000 wax cylinders of language and music, and had painstakingly documented over 80 tribes; his work is frequently the only available resource on these vanished peoples.

Curtis's story is a page of the Pacific Northwest's history and bears witness to the process of genocidal brutality that more or less wiped North America clean of its native inhabitants, while at the same time reminding us how close and interconnected we are with the victims of American expansionism, churned into the blood splattered soil and forgotten in the wake of Manifest Destiny. Never having seen In the Land of the Head Hunters, we can only assume that it's as much an act of Victorian-era ethnography, racial profiling and noble-savage idealization as any other document from that time. But we're still excited to have the opportunity to reconsider this work which now more than ever can help audiences bridge the gap, not just between the white settlers and the natives, but between past and present, and in the process reveal how much we've learned since Curtis convinced a tribe to play-act their own mythology, and how far we still have to go.