When Shawnee Real Bird has her portrait taken this summer, she wants to wear her Crow regalia and sit atop a horse—but in front of an airplane. The framing will balance her work as a pilot with her Indigenous traditions, she said. Her Crow name is Aukeneegelah, meaning “Horse Across Way.” She grew up on the Crow Nation’s reservation, with her grandfather’s teachings about how to survive in a world where many people start their days with a run to a coffee shop. Instead, she said she would rather “sit in the hills, pray and smudge and start my day that way. That’s what my soul needs. That’s what my body needs. It doesn’t understand that $10 cup of coffee.”
Chief Red Cloud led his Oglala Lakota people from 1865 to 1909. He fought to preserve his tribe’s way of life, including his people's buffalo hunting grounds.
Photo by Edward S. Curtis
Chief Red Cloud's descendant Chief Henry Red Cloud strives to create energy independence for his Oglala Sioux Tribe. He runs Lakota Solar Enterprises, a renewable energy company that also builds stand-alone solar heating units for families on his tribe’s Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and the Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center, which trains Indigenous workers to install renewable energy sources such as solar panels.
Photo by John Graybill
In 1927, Edward S. Curtis photographed a 3-year-old Anna Nashoalook Ellis (Iñupiaq) with her parents in Noatak, Alaska.
Photo by Edward S. Curtis
Anna Nashoalook Ellis was photographed by Curtis’s great-grandson, John Graybill, at the age of 94 near her daughter’s home in Florida. She said she recalled why as a child she had been frowning in the Curtis photo (previous image): “I remember that I was upset to have to go inside for photographs; I wanted to keep playing outside instead. That’s why I look so sad.”
Photo by John Graybill
White Man Runs Him (Mountain Crow) traversed the site of the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn on Crow lands in Montana with Curtis, who decades later wished to examine the events of that day.
Photo by Edward S. Curtis
White Man Runs Him's descendant Vernon Whiteman Runs Him, whose Native name is “Rides Good Horses,” runs a cattle ranch and formerly managed environmental and buffalo programs for his Mountain Crow people. He said they shared bison with other Native nations to bring the animals back to their lands. He said, “some of our buffalo [went] to a tribe that hasn’t had any for 100 years.”
John Graybill
In 1895, Edward S. Curtis, then a studio photographer in Seattle, coaxed Qi’qay’seblu wi’weq, who was also known as “ki’ki’sòblu” and called Princess Angeline by local residents, to sit for a portrait. She was the daughter of the Duwamish Tribe’s Chief Sealth (also referred to as Si’ahl or Seattle), for whom the city was named. In addition to the studio portrait, he also photographed her clamming.
Photo by Edward S. Curtis
In 2018, Qi’qay’seblu wi’weq's great-great-great granddaughter, Mary Lou Slaughter (Duwamish) became the first subject for the Descendants Project. She is sewing a cedar bark vest. The portrait of her ancestor Qi’qay’seblu wi’weq hangs in the background.
Photo by John Graybill
A 1905 photograph of Mountain Chief (Blackfeet).
Photo by Edward S. Curtis
Peter VanDenBerg (Blackfeet) is a photographer, carver, sculptor and creator of block prints. He is working to complete his bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Montana in Missoula. He said he feels both pride and a sense of loss looking at the 1905 photograph of his great-grandfather Mountain Chief (previous image). Life on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, he said, remains unduly difficult. He told the Graybills, “There is enough land in this country for everyone to share. No one should be hungry.”
Photo by John Graybill
Dog Woman, a survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. During this conflict between the U.S. Army and Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people on their lands on November 29, 1864, many Native women and children were brutally killed.
Photo by Edward S. Curtis
Nelson Turtle (Southern Cheyenne) holds an eagle feather fan that belonged to his ancestor, Dog Woman (previous image). Today, Nelson is a religious leader whose ceremonies he learned from his parents and elders. In his community in Washington state, he said he tries to help people as much as he can, “especially if you’re new or just lost, trying to find your way.”
Photo by John Graybill
The well-known Hopi potter Nampeyo in 1906.
Photo by Edward S. Curtis
Darlene James (Hopi/Tewa), here in her home studio on the Hopi Reservation in Polacca, Arizona, is a fifth-generation pottery maker who descends from the well-known Hopi potter Nampeyo (previous image). She attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico, but she learned at home from observing. She said, “I really credit my grandmother Rachel [Nampeyo’s granddaughter] for my love of pottery.” As a ceramics major, she felt making pottery with an electric kiln and store-bought clay “didn’t have life.” So she returned to traditional pottery-making techniques, such as using sheep dung to fire it.
Photo by John Graybill
While training for her pilot’s license, she wore traditional Crow eye markings and thought about how the aircraft traveled into the place her grandfather told her great beings lived. “If I could have been wearing my elk-tooth dress in every single flight that I flew, I would have, because that’s how I would have wanted the sky beings to see me,” Real Bird said. “I wanted them to see me as a Crow. I wanted them to see me as a modern Native American.”
She will be photographed by John Graybill, the great-grandson of Edward Sherriff Curtis, a photographer who spent three decades during the early 1900s traveling among North American Indigenous communities to document their cultures and lifeways in an era when anthropologists—mistakenly—believed these people would soon disappear. “Edward Curtis focused on ‘the vanishing race’—that was one of his most famous photographs,” said Real Bird, referencing a 1904 image Curtis made of Diné people on horseback who were riding away into a dusky canyon, an image that served as visual metaphor of them supposedly fading away.
Since 2018, John and his wife, Coleen Graybill, have been sifting through thousands of Curtis’s previously unpublished photographs and compiling them into four books, two of which have been published so far. These include interviews with Indigenous community members now living where Curtis worked and excerpts from memoirs written by Curtis and two of his children. Upon learning that Real Bird was from the Crow Nation, they gave her a copy of one of their books, “Edward Curtis: Unpublished Plains.” Flipping through the pages, she recognized two names and realized she was looking for the first time at portraits of her great-grandfather and great-uncle. She showed the photos to her grandfather, Baucheewuchaytchish (Timber Leader), and as she later wrote to the Graybills, she saw the images “breathe life into him.”
Real Bird’s portrait will be part of the Descendants Project, an ongoing effort to find and photograph the relatives of those in Curtis’s original images. In addition to building a lineage of images, the Graybills are recording the participants’ stories and perspectives. Portrait subjects may often choose to still wear traditional clothing or carry cultural items that represent their Indigenous heritage, such as a ceramic pot or a feather fan, but they appear in a contemporary world. Whereas Curtis tried to capture American Indians as he imagined they appeared centuries before settlers arrived, Graybill asks his subjects to decide where and how to present themselves. Real Bird said of John Graybill’s portraits, “It’s like their photographs are saying, ‘No, this isn’t a vanishing race. This is a race of people who are still here.’”
Through Curtis’s Lens
Curtis’s work had been inspired by a visit to the Piegan people at an encampment in Montana to, as he wrote, document Indigenous peoples who “still retained some semblance of their traditional ways of life.” With a team of collaborators, he spent three decades visiting more than 80 tribes in western United States and Alaska. He did not include Eastern tribes, viewing them as already too assimilated. The work first appeared in a 20-volume series of books that contained more than 2,200 photographs and hundreds of pages of ethnographic writings on tribal practices and customs. The first volume, which was about Southwestern tribes, was released just a year after the project received its initial $75,000 in funding from J. Pierpont Morgan in 1907.The project consumed Curtis, who spent months of the year away from his family and perpetually hustled for further financial support, eventually dying penniless. The last volume of “The North American Indian” was published in 1930.
“The volumes were a truly monumental publication, the result of probably the largest privately funded anthropological project ever undertaken,” writes Mick Gidley, author of “Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated.” Yet, he writes, the project “tended to exaggerate the ‘primitive’ otherness of its subjects, and in general it typified rather than stood above the fraught and complex history of ‘white’ endeavors to represent Native life.”
Today, Curtis’s work is often received with what Gidley calls “an unenlightened division”—either debunked for perpetuating myths or taken “at face value, as both beautiful and true.” Neither captures the nuance due, he contends, or acknowledges that the many people working on the project steered it to represent cultural attitudes of the time, not a solo artist’s view. The powerful sense of Native presence in those volumes, Gidley said, comes with contradictions and challenges, including the influences of Curtis’s desires to appease his patron, revisions of prints that sacrificed accuracy for pictorialist composition, and questions of how much say subjects had in their portraits and how intentionally sensitive details were publicly shared.
“However much good he thought he was doing, there was also the fact that he was definitely photographing the Native Americans in the way that he was interested in photographing them, not in how specifically they may have presented themselves,” said Michelle Delaney, assistant director for history and culture with the National Museum of the American Indian. “Whatever Curtis was able to achieve in documenting ‘the vanishing race,’ that term has perpetuated to the negative for all of these communities who want to let people know that ‘We were never vanishing. We were always here.’”
Less than 300 sets of “The North American Indian” were ever printed, and fewer still exist, but one set resides in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History’s rare books collection. Additionally, in 2011, Gina Rappaport, photo archivist with the National Anthropological Archives, worked with Jim Graybill, John’s father, when Jim began contacting museums about donating the family’s collection of Curtis’s papers and original negatives, including delicate 6-by-8-inch cellulose nitrate negatives.
“When I got that email, I was like, ‘Oh my, this is serious business,’” Rappaport recalls. “It is an important collection. Not a lot of his original negatives survived.”
The Smithsonian likely holds the largest remnant of those original negatives, Rappaport said, and they offer some peeks into Curtis’s process. In comparing the negatives to existing prints, one can see in a handful of images that he did some post-production editing. For example, perhaps for sake of composition, he blotted out a small group of people in one image’s corner. In others, “ethnographic romanticism” may have prompted him to remove 20th-century items, such as an umbrella, though he didn’t always eradicate all the safety pins and other traces of modernity. He has also been accused of blurring over individuals to create stereotypes, but Rappaport spoke to one art dealer who had acquired stacks of Curtis’s photos clipped to original field notes about the individual portrayed. That art dealer separated the prints to sell them.
The NMAI also has dozens of his prints and records. “Today, at the National Museum of the American Indian, the collection is highly regarded for what it is—it is a brilliant set of images,” Delaney said. “But it resonates because it is such a deep documentation of that moment in time, and if you look at it with eyes wide open as to all the factors and the context of each photography shoot and every portrait, there is still something to be learned about the time, about the communities, about the interaction with the photographer.”
A Living Legacy
John Graybill, whose grandmother, Florence, was one of Edward Curtis’s four children, grew up with his great-grandfather’s images of Indigenous people on the walls but didn’t realize their significance until he attended art history classes at college. Still, he said, “You’d look at a photograph and think, ‘I wonder what happened to that person, what happened to that family?’”
The Descendants Project, part of the Curtis Legacy Foundation John founded, is building that connection by finding some of those answers. In addition to the images John has created, he has filmed his conversations with subjects, segments of which are available to watch through an app. “Our hope through this project is really to bring [out] their stories, their life, their struggles, their successes,” Coleen said.
To find subjects, they comb through social media and historic photo sites, looking for comments like, “That’s my grandma,” or Googling “descendant of” and inserting a name. That’s how they found Chief Henry Red Cloud (Oglala Lakota), great-great-grandson of Chief Red Cloud, and Jerry Geronimo Martin (Apache), great-great-grandson of Geronimo. John’s heartened that they’re beginning to get referrals. This past spring, they visited Arizona, photographing a Hopi woman whose grandmother appears as one of four women grinding corn in Curtis’s image he titled “Grinding Meal.” They took a dozen thick, orange notebooks of silver gelatin prints, many of them unpublished, made on Curtis’s seven trips to the Hopi, and shared those images with tribal members. For the Graybills, the conversations add clarity about which village is depicted and what an object’s placement means. They have also consulted with tribal members who specified images with content they would prefer be withheld from publication.
Like his great-grandfather, John Graybill works with a large-format camera and produces sepia-toned images. His and Coleen’s prior professional work relied on digital cameras, but they found that technology could not produce images that looked similar to Curtis’s. “The feel just wasn’t right,” Coleen said. So John found a whole plate view camera through an expert on historic photography equipment and processes, a lens manufactured in the mid-1800s, and, for a time, even dry glass-plate negatives, though now they are using film (a transition Curtis also made by the time he was working in Alaska). The negatives are then scanned and slightly retouched to remove dust spots or fill in where an image is over-exposed before they are sent to the printer.
So far, they have photographed 21 subjects and hope to gather about another 10. They plan to visit tribes in California, Idaho, Montana and Washington. Generally, they have been welcomed, John said, but he knows Curtis was not perfect. “There is a segment of the population that looks at Curtis’s work as creating a negative stereotype that scarred them,” he said. “Some of his methods were questionable.”
But he has also heard of people appreciating what those images documented. Andy Everson, a K’ómoks First Nation resident in British Columbia, wanted to decolonize his wedding and looked to Curtis’s archives to recover lost details for that ceremony. Real Bird grew up studying the beadwork, hair styles, half-familiar landscapes and clothing in Curtis’s images from a set of photos her adopted parents owned. After learning about how Curtis had reexamined the Battle of Little Big Horn and tried to share the Native version of events, she said she began to see Curtis as someone trying to tell the truth that no one wanted to hear about Native Americans and listening to people who American policies were trying to silence.
“Definitely, yeah, you could find some things to pick on for all of it,” Real Bird said. “But I would rather choose to look at the fact that because of those photographs, I know what my grandfather looks like in a war shirt, and I know what a Crow headpiece looks like, and I know what it looks like to do a Bear Dance for the Arikara.” The Descendants Project may provide a guide for future generations, who she hopes will look at portraits made of American Indians today and recognize people who survived efforts of assimilation and genocide.
Bridging Gaps
One of the Descendants Project’s goals is to spark discussions about that history and to help fill some gaps in the American education system about Indigenous peoples. Occasionally, John said, they run into people who ask, “Oh, there are still Indians around?” If nothing more, the project aims to resoundingly rebut the perception that American Indians no longer exist.
Gidley said that after some initial skepticism as a Curtis scholar, he sees in the Descendants Project “a more subtle Native viewpoint has come to the fore.” Delaney hopes the project cues a closer look not at one man but at the communities and what their lives were like beyond that quick moment in front of a camera. “I’ll be fascinated to learn more about the current research and how it might identify new opportunities for research in the collection, and I think that, hopefully, the Smithsonian can be part of that,” she said.
When she first met John Graybill, Tamara Stands and Looks Back-Spotted Tail (Sicangu Lakota Oyate) told him that if they were going to do anything together, it would have to start in ceremony. So he traveled from his home in Colorado to the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, and joined a sweat lodge with a group of medicine men for a purification ceremony. Afterward, the medicine men told John that they saw good in what he was doing and that they would help him. Stands and Looks Back-Spotted Tail said to him, “You’ve already conducted that ceremony and gotten that blessing. When we as human beings walk our prayers, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. Always, we’re going to be challenged.”
Stands and Looks Back-Spotted Tail has since joined the board for the Curtis Legacy Foundation. To help identify American Indian tribes in undocumented prints, she has examined photographs in the Library of Congress’s archives in Washington, D.C. As one of several Indigenous members of the board, she said she sees her role as bolstering understanding of Indigenous perspectives and helping to open doors for John to connect with Native people who might consider participating in the project.
“I think they have an opportunity to really shed some light on our history, our culture, through the photographs,” she said. “For a lot of people, it’s changing their lives. Maybe they needed something to help them, give them insight, encouragement, guidance. They’re connecting back to a time when their ancestors were strong and overcame adversity and connecting that to where we are today.”