Edward S. Curtis: the women.

Part photographic visionary, part huckster hawking his full-length documentary (the first one in history, in fact) of Kwakiutl ritual to the suits in Hollywood under the sensationalistic title In the Land of the Head-Hunters, Edward Curtis toiled on his monumental Native American project tirelessly. Crisscrossing turn-of-the-twentieth-century America from his base in Seattle in an effort to secure funding, he was the Don King of his day--selling out Carnegie Hall, in 1911, with his "musicale" based on native cultures; garnering meetings with his backer, J. Pierpont Morgan, and then-president Teddy Roosevelt; and setting off a craze for popular writing about the Indians of the West. A focused look at Curtis's images of women may seem merely a contemporary publisher's ploy to repackage yet another handful of the seemingly endless photographs the chronicler of native life took over the course of his lavish twenty-volume North American Indian. But, right from the start, Native American women occupied a key role in Curtis's undertaking. Running a society portrait studio in 1890s Washington State, Curtis found in Princess Angeline--the daughter of Chief Sealth, from whom Seattle got its name (and the title to its land)--the impetus to attempt to record on camera all extant American Indian cultures. A few early portraits of Angeline can be found in Edward S. Curtis: The Women, a handsome collection of native women, old and young, that will appeal to anyone interested in the intersection of Native American history, photography, and what might be best described as "the entrepreneurial spirit."--ED.

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BY CHRISTOPHER CARDOZO, FOREWORD BY LOUISE ERDRICH, INTRODUCTION BY ANNE MAKEPEACE