The Truth About Stories Read Online Free PDF

started
     his project of photographing the Indians of North America around 1900, and for the next
     thirty years he roamed the continent, producing some forty thousand negatives, of which
     more than twenty-two hundred were published.
    Curtis was fascinated by the idea of the North American Indian, obsessed
     with it. And he was determined to capture that idea, that image, before it vanished.
     This was a common concern among many intellectuals and artists and social scientists at
     the turn of the nineteenth century, who believed that, while Europeans in the New Worldwere poised on the brink of a new adventure, the Indian was
     poised on the brink of extinction.
    In literature in the United States, this particular span of time is known
     as the American Romantic Period, and the Indian was tailor-made for it. With its
     emphasis on feeling, its interest in nature, its fascination with exoticism, mysticism,
     and eroticism, and its preoccupation with the glorification of the past, American
     Romanticism found in the Indian a symbol in which all these concerns could be united.
     Prior to the nineteenth century, the prevalent image of the Indian had been that of an
     inferior being. The Romantics imagined their Indian as dying. But in that dying, in that
     passing away, in that disappearing from the stage of human progress, there was also a
     sense of nobility.
    One of the favourite narrative strategies was to create a single, heroic
     Indian (male, of course) — James Fenimore Cooper’s Chingachgook, John
     Augustus Stone’s Metamora, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha — who
     was the last of his race. Indeed, during this period, death and nobility were
     sympathetic ideas that complemented one another, and writers during the first half of
     the nineteenth century used them in close association, creating a literary shroud in
     which to wrap the Indian. And bury him.
    Edgar Allan Poe believed that the most poetic topic in the world was the
     death of a beautiful woman. From the literature produced during the nineteenth century,
     second place would have to go to the death of the Indian.
    Not that Indians were dying. To be sure, while manyof
     the tribes who lived along the east coast of North America, in the interior of Lower
     Canada, and in the Connecticut, Ohio, and St. Lawrence river valleys had been injured
     and disoriented by the years of almost continuous warfare, by European diseases, and by
     the destructive push of settlers for cheap land, the vast majority of the tribes were a
     comfortable distance away from the grave.
    This was the Indian of fact.
    In 1830, when the American president, Andrew Jackson, fulfilling an
     election promise to his western and southern supporters, pushed the Removal Act through
     Congress, he did so in order to get rid of thousands of Indians — particularly the
     Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles — who were not dying and
     not particularly interested in going anywhere.
    These were not the Indians Curtis went west to find.
    Curtis was looking for the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the
     imaginative construct. And to make sure that he would find what he wanted to find, he
     took along boxes of “Indian” paraphernalia — wigs, blankets, painted
     backdrops, clothing — in case he ran into Indians who did not look as the Indian
     was supposed to look.
    I collect postcards. Old ones, new ones. Postcards that depict Indians
     or Indian subjects. I have one from the 1920s that shows an Indian lacrosse team in
     Oklahoma. Another is a hand-coloured rendering of the Sherman Indian School in
     California. A third is a cartoon of an Indian man fishing in the background while, in
     theforeground, a tourist takes a picture of the man’s wife
     and their seven kids with the rather puerile caption “And what does the chief do
     when he’s not fishing?”
    One of my favourites is a photograph of a group of Indians,