#1578 Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2023

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on Listening to America, Clay Jenkinson interviews professional photographers John and Coleen Graybill of Buena Vista, Colorado, about the life and achievement of Edward S. Curtis. Curtis took 40,000 dry glass plate photographs of Native Americans between 1900 and 1935, and published 20 volumes of his portraits, landscape photographs, musical notations, and a gigantic amount of ethnographic prose. John is the great great grandson of Edward Curtis. The Graybills are traveling the West photographing descendants of individuals that Curtis photographed, and interviewing them on video about their lives and their heritage. They have released two books of previously unpublished Curtis photographs. It’s an amazing story of love, integrity, and perseverance.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, this is the podcast introduction to this week's Listening to America.
0:04.4	Talking about John and Colleen Graybill of Univista Colorado about their descendence project
0:09.4	with respect to Edward S. Curtis.
0:11.0	Edward S. Curtis, 1868 to 1952, was a photographer.
0:15.4	Dry glass plate and the negatives.
0:18.3	The glass whites were 5x7, 8x10, 11x18, giant glass plates.
0:23.2	And he took apparently as many as 40,000 of them over the course of his lifetime.
0:27.3	He was a prominent studio photographer in Seattle.
0:30.4	He had a kind of a conversion experience when he was on the Blackfoot reservation with
0:34.4	his friend, George Bird Grinnell.
0:36.2	He then photographed the Roosevelt children at Saigon More Hill and became a friend of theater,
0:41.1	Roosevelt theater, Roosevelt supported him not financially, although he bought a copy of the
0:45.9	complete North American Indian he subscribed. But he wrote letters of introduction and supported him
0:50.8	when there were controversies. And Curtis convinced JP Morgan, the famous art collector,
0:56.5	and financier JP Morgan to fund in part the project.
1:00.2	We now have the 20 volumes of the North American Indian. It's an amazing thing.
1:04.1	I spent all this time in the interview today asking questions of John and Colleen.
1:10.2	I did not talk about my own project, but I want to say a little bit about that.
1:13.2	So I'm doing something that's sort of similar parallel. We began, we both began without knowing
1:18.0	that the others were doing it, but they actually complement each other in an important way.
1:22.8	I'm interviewing Native Elders from the 70 tribal nations that he visited, not all of them.
1:28.5	Of course, my goal is 35 to 50 video interviews. These are video interviews, and I'm talking to
	...

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