Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952)

Waiting in the Forest—Cheyenne, ca. 1910

Photogravure on tissue

15 ½ x 11 ¾ inches

From The North American Indian, Volume 6: The Piegan—The Cheyenne—The Arapaho (Seattle:  E. S. Curtis, 1911), plate 218

Anonymous Donor Purchase Fund, 86.08.14

Essay by Christian A. Peterson
Minneapolis Institute of Arts

           Edward Sheriff Curtis is well known for producing the most extensive documentation of Native American culture of the twentieth century.  The North American Indian (1907-1930), published in twenty bound books with accompanying oversize portfolios, included more than two thousand photographic images and detailed written accounts of over eighty tribes.  Curtis’s text covered every phase of Native American life:  births and deaths, song and dance, clothes and crafts, hunting and farming practices, food and language, spiritual beliefs, and a host of other cultural, racial, and social topics.  His photographs were equally wide ranging.

           Most of Curtis’s images picture individuals and/or their objects and activities that are relatively easy to decipher.  Waiting in the Forest, on the other hand, is one of his most mysterious and suggestive pictures.  In it, a figure stands among trees, tightly wrapped in white fabric and revealing only a pair of searching eyes.  The setting is noticeably dark and the figure is illuminated by a solitary shaft of light that casts a long, ominous shadow.  Directly overhead hang gnarled branches that seem to point toward and threaten the subject.

           Darkness and ghosts suggest a familiar October festivity for the White man, but this is no Halloween caper.  The true nature of what is going on is revealed only by reading the short text that Curtis provided for the image:

At dusk in the neighborhood of the large encampments young men, closely wrapped in non-committal blankets or white cotton sheets, may be seen gliding about the tipis or standing motionless in the shadow of the trees, each one alert for the opportunity to steal a meeting with his sweetheart.[1]

           In other words, this is a courting ritual.  And, contrary to one’s first impression, the Indian in the image is a man, not a woman.

           Practiced by more than the Cheyenne, this ritual involved a young Native American man first securing several accessories, the most important being a courting blanket, often made for him by his sister.  He would then approach the tipi of the woman of his desires and lure her out for a walk, during which the blanket was wrapped around the couple in order to provide a private place to talk.[2]

           This ritual was on its way out when Curtis made this picture in about 1910, as young Indians were beginning to go away to boarding schools.  Indicative of this change was the bare, white sheet that the subject uses.  In earlier times, when the courting activity was more important and regularly practiced, the blanket was a unique, hand-crafted textile with threading, beading, and significant color.  One could say that the item seen here is a mere “ghost” of the originals.  And Curtis’s term “non-committal” for the blanket is likely a fabricated one, as he was known for sometimes over romanticizing his subjects.

            Curtis, in fact, was interested in more than merely documenting the North American Indian.  He often attempted to make photographs of beauty and sentiment that stood as works of art in their own right.  To this end, he preferred clean, simple compositions and soft-focus effects.

           Edward S. Curtis spent most of his life as a photographer based in Seattle.  He first encountered Native American rituals on expeditions to Montana and Arizona in 1900 and shortly thereafter convinced himself that the American Indian deserved a mammoth documentary project that would require years of his time, and financing far beyond his own resources.  He was fortunate to obtain substantial funding from banker J. Pierpont Morgan and, in 1907, issued the first two volumes of The North American Indian, with a foreword by President Theodore Roosevelt.  The project was widely heralded in the early twentieth century for its detail, breadth, and compassion, but it took Curtis another twenty-three years to complete.

           It is fitting that the Minnesota Museum of American Art should have a sizeable collection of photographs by Curtis.  Born in rural Wisconsin, he first apprenticed as a photographer in Saint Paul, from about 1885 to 1887, before relocating to the Northwest.  The museum holds about two hundred prints by Curtis—including cyanotypes, silver prints, and photogravures—all acquired in the 1980s as part of The Cray Research, Inc./Christopher Cardozo Collection of Edward S. Curtis Photography.  Most of these are photogravures, an intaglio process that renders a photographic image in printer’s ink (think “photo-etching”).  This print of Waiting in the Forest is on tissue, the most delicate and desirable paper Curtis used, and it remains one of his most compelling images.

[1]Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian, Vol. 6:  The Piegan—The Cheyenne— The Arapaho (Cambridge, Mass.: The University Press, 1911).

[2]Kathryn M. Duda, “Courting on the Plains:  Nineteenth-Century Lakota Style,” Carnegie Magazine Online 59 (Jan./Feb. 1998), http://www.carnegiemuseums.org/cmag/bk_issue/1998/janfeb/dept5.htm.