Indians in the Mist

Many thoughts crossed our mind last night as we left the showing of Edward Curtis's In the Land of the Head Hunters at the Moore, not the least of which was our continued amazement that film ever took off. No more or less so than contemporaneous films like Birth of a Nation, Curtis's work bears witness to the fact that early film sucked. The narrative is disjointed, the story thin and hard to follow. It really just proves that people (or at least Americans) love technical gadgetry for its own sake, and are willing to embrace an impoverished experience for the novelty.

But beyond our theatre lover's snubbing of cinema, we were mostly left to consider Native Americans. Not so much within the context of Curtis's work, but in the contemporary. There was a de rigeur exhibit in the Moore's mezzanine that addressed Curtis's complicated legacy. On the one hand, his ethnographic studies--sound recordings and extensive notes and studies in addition to photography and some film--are frequently the only sources on vanished cultures. On the other, his willingness to make a film about head-hunting in the Pacific NW, something that never happened, makes clear that he wasn't beyond sensationalism or obscuring the truth. And his film's history (it was "lost" as a complete work until the 1970s, though segments were used as educational documentary footage) is a microcosm of Euro-Americans' long-standing treatment of Native Americans: a mixture of misrepresentation, idealization, and cultural (and physical) holocaust.

Yet Native Americans persist, on reservations and now with casinos, and a couple tribal leaders from the Puget Sound area gave introductory presentations, and a group related to the tribe that performed in Curtis's film presented a traditional performance after the show. All of which reminded us that, despite growing up in the Pacific NW, we have virtually no experience of the native coastal Indian tribes. Totem poles decorate downtown Portland and Seattle, and native art styles are presented virtually everywhere, but really, the only people we know are Native American are a trio of homeless alcoholics we see on the street moving back and forth between Capitol Hill and the International District daily. Otherwise, this is an invisible people, either fully assimilated or segregated geographically and culturally. They feel like a non-presence in contemporary urban life here.

And this in turn left us somewhat uncomfortable with the the presentation of traditional Native American culture at the show; is this all that's left to them, trotting out traditional costumes for Seattle's cultural elites who turn out to see a misrepresentative 1914 silent film? It's good there's a place for their cultural practices, we suppose, but it feels like an awfully small space.

Seattlest Flickr group contributor Grundlepuck provided this photo of the stolen Alaskan totem pole in Fireman's Park, Tacoma, with a nice editorial on the history.