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Authors: Timothy Egan
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put under microscopes as on the Harriman expedition. They
are just human beings, no more complicated or simplistic than others, no more heroic
for their survival or tragic for their loss. Laugh at yourself. Don’t be afraid to
appear stupid: imagine an Indian walking into an Elks Lodge in downtown Seattle, uninvited.
Curtis said he had established a rule, born in part by his revulsion at the Harriman
party’s looting: he would not take a picture without offering to pay, or without the
subject’s permission. A fine guiding principle to Grinnell, but he urged the young
man not to start in right away with cash and exchanges. Take time to get acquainted.
Here is White Calf, chief of the Blackfeet—a friend, nearly sixty years old. Over
there is Tearing Lodge, another revered elder, seventy years old. And that hard-eyed
man on horseback, scowling as he circles the edge of the encampment, that is Small
Leggins.
He doesn’t like you.
The whites had said many things about these plains dwellers, commenting on their
rituals of self-mutilation and fasting, their soaks in sweat lodges and their naked
dashes into the snow, the way they dispatched enemies, torturing and gutting them
and taking the women as slaves. Little of what had been written was accurate, Grinnell
said. George Catlin, the most famous American graphic documentarian of Indians in
the nineteenth century, had come home with many fanciful drawings and even more fanciful
conjectures. Catlin had called the Blackfeet “perhaps the most powerful tribe of Indians
on the continent.” They certainly had a reputation for toughness, for feuding fiercely
with other tribes, for violence that didn’t follow the norms of Anglo-European warfare.
But “most powerful”? No, not by any stretch. They were too small in number for that.
The Comanche, the hard-riding, merciless Lords of the Plains, who dominated much of
Texas and the Southwest, could rout the Blackfeet in an afternoon, had they come into
a fight.
If the stories are contradictory, Grinnell continued, put two or more sources together
and try to settle on the truth. Ask the same question repeatedly—but ask it of the
people themselves. Don’t bother with those who profess to know Indians because they
live nearby, the merchants who scorn them or the ranchers who run cattle over the
old buffalo grass. Nor should he waste his time with the anthropologists of eastern
colleges or European universities, who divided themselves between the Noble Savage
school and the racial determinists who saw Darwinian roadkill in the collapse of the
tribes. And he certainty should avoid the do-gooders in black robes who were oh so
sorry for the poor, pathetic Indians as they worked to tally converts. Finally, Grinnell
reserved special scorn for government agents, the frontline enforcers of assimilation,
the faces of a conqueror who made sure no sensible policy would ever be practiced.
Taking Grinnell’s advice, Curtis established another plank for the cathedral of a
plan he was building in his mind: “Information at all times must be drawn from the
Indians.” Over the days, Curtis listened. The Indians were skeptical, of course, of
this stranger that Bird had brought into their midst. Small Leggins followed Curtis
with his eyes, an orbit of staring. The man with the camera and wax recorder heard
stories of their origins, their hopes, the great losses they had suffered from disease
and a deathly hunger that followed the collapse of the buffalo herds. In one winter,
1883–84, the Piegan lost a fourth of their population to starvation—a “winter of misery
and death,” Curtis wrote. He wondered about a few of the more dark-skinned natives,
and was told they were descendants of a black slave called York, who had passed among
these people nearly a hundred years earlier with Lewis and Clark. Curtis smoked a
ceremonial pipe. He learned that a person
are just human beings, no more complicated or simplistic than others, no more heroic
for their survival or tragic for their loss. Laugh at yourself. Don’t be afraid to
appear stupid: imagine an Indian walking into an Elks Lodge in downtown Seattle, uninvited.
Curtis said he had established a rule, born in part by his revulsion at the Harriman
party’s looting: he would not take a picture without offering to pay, or without the
subject’s permission. A fine guiding principle to Grinnell, but he urged the young
man not to start in right away with cash and exchanges. Take time to get acquainted.
Here is White Calf, chief of the Blackfeet—a friend, nearly sixty years old. Over
there is Tearing Lodge, another revered elder, seventy years old. And that hard-eyed
man on horseback, scowling as he circles the edge of the encampment, that is Small
Leggins.
He doesn’t like you.
The whites had said many things about these plains dwellers, commenting on their
rituals of self-mutilation and fasting, their soaks in sweat lodges and their naked
dashes into the snow, the way they dispatched enemies, torturing and gutting them
and taking the women as slaves. Little of what had been written was accurate, Grinnell
said. George Catlin, the most famous American graphic documentarian of Indians in
the nineteenth century, had come home with many fanciful drawings and even more fanciful
conjectures. Catlin had called the Blackfeet “perhaps the most powerful tribe of Indians
on the continent.” They certainly had a reputation for toughness, for feuding fiercely
with other tribes, for violence that didn’t follow the norms of Anglo-European warfare.
But “most powerful”? No, not by any stretch. They were too small in number for that.
The Comanche, the hard-riding, merciless Lords of the Plains, who dominated much of
Texas and the Southwest, could rout the Blackfeet in an afternoon, had they come into
a fight.
If the stories are contradictory, Grinnell continued, put two or more sources together
and try to settle on the truth. Ask the same question repeatedly—but ask it of the
people themselves. Don’t bother with those who profess to know Indians because they
live nearby, the merchants who scorn them or the ranchers who run cattle over the
old buffalo grass. Nor should he waste his time with the anthropologists of eastern
colleges or European universities, who divided themselves between the Noble Savage
school and the racial determinists who saw Darwinian roadkill in the collapse of the
tribes. And he certainty should avoid the do-gooders in black robes who were oh so
sorry for the poor, pathetic Indians as they worked to tally converts. Finally, Grinnell
reserved special scorn for government agents, the frontline enforcers of assimilation,
the faces of a conqueror who made sure no sensible policy would ever be practiced.
Taking Grinnell’s advice, Curtis established another plank for the cathedral of a
plan he was building in his mind: “Information at all times must be drawn from the
Indians.” Over the days, Curtis listened. The Indians were skeptical, of course, of
this stranger that Bird had brought into their midst. Small Leggins followed Curtis
with his eyes, an orbit of staring. The man with the camera and wax recorder heard
stories of their origins, their hopes, the great losses they had suffered from disease
and a deathly hunger that followed the collapse of the buffalo herds. In one winter,
1883–84, the Piegan lost a fourth of their population to starvation—a “winter of misery
and death,” Curtis wrote. He wondered about a few of the more dark-skinned natives,
and was told they were descendants of a black slave called York, who had passed among
these people nearly a hundred years earlier with Lewis and Clark. Curtis smoked a
ceremonial pipe. He learned that a person
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