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     headdresses, golfing at the Banff Springs Hotel golf course in 1903. The photograph was
     taken by Byron Harmon and shows Jim Brewster and Norman Luxton, two Banff locals,
     caddying for what looks to be five Indians who are identified only as “two Stoney
     Indian Chiefs.” I like this particular postcard because there is an element of
     play in the image of Indians in beaded outfits and full headdresses leaning on their
     golf clubs while their horses graze in the background, and because I can’t tell if
     the person on the tee with bobbed hair, wearing what looks to be a dress and swinging
     the club, is an Indian or a White, a man or a woman.
    But the vast majority of my postcards offer no such mysteries. They are
     simply pictures and paintings of Indians in feathers and leathers, sitting in or around
     tipis or chasing buffalo on pinto ponies.
    Some of these postcards are old, but many of them are brand new, right off
     the rack. Two are contemporary pieces from the Postcard Factory in Markham, Ontario. The
     first shows an older Indian man in a full beaded and fringed leather outfit with an
     eagle feather war bonnet and a lance, sitting on a horse, set against a backdrop of
     trees and mountains. The second is a group of five Indians, one older man in a full
     headdress sitting on a horse and four younger men on foot: two with bone breastplates,
     one with a leather vest, and one bare chested.
    The interesting thing about these two postcards is
     that the solitary man on his horse is identified only as a “Cree Indian,”
     while the group of five is designated as “Native Indians,” much like the
     golfers, as if none of them had names or identities other than the cliché. Though
     to give them identities, to reveal them to be actual people, would be, I suppose, a
     violation of the physical laws governing matter and antimatter, that the Indian and
     Indians cannot exist in the same imagination.
    Which must be why the White caddies on the Banff postcard have names.
    And the Indians do not.
    It is my postcard Indian that Curtis was after. And in spite of the fact
     that Curtis met a great variety of Native people who would have given the lie to the
     construction, in spite of the fact that he fought vigorously for Native rights and
     published articles and books that railed against the government’s treatment of
     Indians, this was the Indian that Curtis believed in.
    I probably sound a little cranky. I don’t mean to. I know Curtis
     paid Indians to shave away any facial hair. I know he talked them into wearing wigs. I
     know that he would provide one tribe of Indians with clothing from another tribe because
     the clothing looked more “Indian.”
    So his photographs would look authentic.
    And while there is a part of me that would have preferred that Curtis had
     photographed his Indians as he found them, the men with crewcuts and moustaches, the
     women in cotton print dresses, I am grateful that we have his images at all, for the
     faces of the mothers and fathers,aunts and uncles, sisters and
     brothers who look at you from the depths of these photographs are not romantic
     illusions, they are real people.
    Native culture, as with any culture, is a vibrant, changing thing, and
     when Curtis happened upon it, it was changing from what it had been to what it would
     become next. But the idea of “the Indian” was already fixed in time and
     space. Even before Curtis built his first camera, that image had been set. His task as
     he visited tribe after tribe was to sort through what he saw in order to find what he
     needed.
    But to accuse Curtis of romantic myopia is to be petty and to ignore the
     immensity of the project and the personal and economic ordeal that he undertook. He
     spent his life photographing and writing about Indians. He died harnessed to that
     endeavour, and, when I look at his photographs, I can imagine this solitary man moving