May 31, 2001

Plains Folk: Pictures of the Plains

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Today's sermon has two texts. First, from the New York Times of 27 May 2001, the article by Timothy Egan, "As Others Abandon Plains, Indians and Bison Come Back." Second, a new book from the University of Nebraska Press, "The Plains Indian Photographs of Edward S. Curtis."

The Egan piece comes from a threadbare genre, the slow-death-on-the-prairies school of writing that appeals to the same sort of people who like to watch cop car crashes replayed in slow motion. Since release of the 2001 census figures I've been getting phone messages from lots of eastern reporters looking for the pithy quotes and for directions to a good ghost town. I do not return the calls.

Egan has a much better insight into the Great Plains in transition than do the other such writers, however. He points out that while northern Europeans continue to abandon the region, other people, particularly American Indians, are arriving or returning. Egan also notices that buffalo are coming back on the plains not, as some wags predicted, by government mandate, but rather by individual initiative.

Where does this leave those of us who are of European settler stock? I find answers in the photographs of Edward Curtis, who a century ago emerged as America's foremost photographer of Native Americans.

Curtis was an artsy photographer, much influenced by the pictorial movement in visual arts. Composition, beauty, and emotional effect were constantly on his mind as he shot. On the other hand, he always said his work was historical and documentary, intended to lay down a lasting record of a vanishing race. "The Indian," he explained, "one of the four Races of Man, is fast disappearing from the earth. In a few brief years he will be but a tradition."

The Plains Indian Photographs of Edward S. Curtis is a book I'm happy to recommend simply for its artistic and ethnographic merits. It raises all sorts of questions about the ethics of a white photographer moving among reservation Indians, but still, here are the photos, many of them compelling. My favorite is "In a Piegan Lodge." Another from the Piegan series is "The Three Chiefs," captioned thus by Curtis: "A picture of the primal upland prairies with their waving grasses and limpid streams. A glimpse of the life and conditions which are on the edge of extinction."

That caption brings me back to my theme: the depiction of vanishing peoples. The basis for Curtis's photography, and for the journalism of eastern reporters today roving the plains, is a remarkable 19th century concept known as "the fatal contact." This doctrine, a fundamental precept of the British Empire, stated that wherever modern European civilization encountered primitive native cultures, the natives were doomed. They would die out, naturally, conveniently, and inevitably. Their images, stories, and native knowledge, therefore, should be set down, and also exhibited to the enlightened conquerors.

So, my fellow settler descendants of the plains, how does it feel?

Rather than wallow in perceived slights, perhaps we should fast-forward on the timeline, using experience as a guide. As Egan tells us, the vanishing savages of Curtis's photographs are today the fastest-growing cultures on the plains.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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