Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka'wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema

by Brad Evans, Aaron Glass, Bill Holm

Overview

Photographer Edward Curtis’s 1914 orchestrally scored melodrama In the Land of the Head Hunters was one of the first US films to feature an Indigenous cast. This landmark of early silent cinema was an intercultural product of Curtis’s collaboration with the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw of British Columbia—meant, like Curtis’s photographs, to document a supposedly vanishing race. But as this collection shows, the epic film is not simply an artifact of colonialist nostalgia.

In recognition of the film’s centennial, and the release of a restored version, Return to the Land of the Head Hunters brings together leading anthropologists, Native American authorities, artists, musicians, literary scholars, and film historians to reassess the film and its legacy. The volume offers unique Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw perspectives on the film, accounts of its production and subsequent circulation, and evaluations of its depictions of cultural practice. Resituated within film history and informed by a legacy of Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw participation and response, the movie offers dynamic evidence of ongoing cultural survival and transformation under shared conditions of modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295993447
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	12/10/2013
Series:	Native Art of the Pacific Northwest: A Bill Holm Center Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	7.20(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Brad Evans is associate professor of English at Rutgers University. Aaron Glass is associate professor of anthropology at the Bard Graduate Center.

Table of Contents

U'mista Cultural Society Statement of Participation / William T. Cranmer
Foreword / Bill Holm
Preface / Brad Evans and Aaron Glass
Acknowledgments
Introduction

PART ONE. Mediating Indians / Complicating Curtis
1. Edward Curtis and In the Land of the Head Hunters: Four Contexts / Micky Gidley
2. Images of Time: Portraiture in The North American Indian / Shamoon Zamir
3. Indian Landscapes: Pauline Johnson and Edward Curtis / Kate Flint
4. A Chamber of Echoing Songs: Edward Curtis as a Musical Ethnographer / Ira Jacknis
Photo Essay 1. "At the Kitchen Table with Edward Curtis"/ Jeff Thomas

PART TWO. Head Hunters Across Two Centuries
5. Consuming the Head Hunters: A Century of Film REception / Aaron Glass and Brad Evans
6. Unmasking the Documentary: Notes on the Anxiety of Edward Curtis / Colin Browne
7. Indian Movies and the Vernacular of Modernism / Brad Evans
8. Musical Intertextuality in Indigenous Film: Making and Remaking In the Land of the Head Hunters / Klisala Harrison
9. Reflections on Working with Edward Curtis / Barbara Cranmer (Tlakwagila'ogwa)
Photo Essay 2. "Old Images / New Views: Indigenous Perspectives on Edward Curtis" / Dr. E. Richard Atleo, Pam Brown, Marie Clements, Karrmen Crey, Mique'l Icesis Dangeli, Andy Everson, Linc Kesler, David Neel, Evelyn Vanderhoop, and William Wasden Jr.

PART THREE. Reimaging Curtis Today
10. In the Land of the Head Hunters: Reconstruction, not Restoration . Jere Guldin
11. In the Land of the Head Hunters and the History of Silent Film Music / David Gilbert
12. Performing Braham, Interpreting Curtis: A Conversation on Conducting / Neal Stulberg, Owen Underhill, Timothy Long, and Laura Ortman
13. "What the Creator Gave to Us": An Interview with William Wasden Jr. (Waxawidi)
14. Cultural Interpretation / Dave Hunsaker
15. The Kwakwakka'wakw Business of Showing: Tradition Meets Modernity on the Silver Screen and the World Stage / Aaron Glass

Afterword. Twentieth Century Fox / Paul Chaat Smith
Appendix 1. Promotional Images for In the Land of the Head Hunters
Appendix 2. The Kwakwaka'wakw Cast and Crew of In the Land of the Head Hunters
Appendix 3. Curtis Film Props in the Collection of the Burke Musem of Natural History and Culture
Appendix 4. Title Cards from the 2008 Reconstruction of In the Land of the Head Hunters
References
Contributors
Index

What People are Saying About This

Pauline Turner Strong

A highly original collection of essays that offers a theoretically sophisticated understanding. . . . Exemplifies collaboration between indigenous communities, scholars, and artists.

Bill Holm

Curtis's epic melodrama of the precontact Kwakwaka'wakw world has been given a new life, with the advantages of the discovery of a surviving bit of original film, the revival of the orchestral score originally composed for the motion picture, the expertise of film historians and musicians, the use of advanced film-reconstruction technology and modern concepts of restoration. It is a new chapter in the story of Edward S. Curtis in the land of the head hunters.

From the Publisher

"Lively and inspiring . . . a comprehensive and completely original cross-disciplinary collection that offers a model of how new work on older cultural materials can take place."—Faye Ginsburg, director of the Center for Media, Culture, and History, New York University

"A highly original collection of essays that offers a theoretically sophisticated understanding. . . . Exemplifies collaboration between indigenous communities, scholars, and artists."—Pauline Turner Strong, author of American Indians and the American Imaginary: Cultural Representation Across the Centuries

"Curtis's epic melodrama of the precontact Kwakwaka'wakw world has been given a new life, with the advantages of the discovery of a surviving bit of original film, the revival of the orchestral score originally composed for the motion picture, the expertise of film historians and musicians, the use of advanced film-reconstruction technology and modern concepts of restoration. It is a new chapter in the story of Edward S. Curtis in the land of the head hunters."—Bill Holm, From the foreword

Faye Ginsburg

Lively and inspiring . . . a comprehensive and completely original cross-disciplinary collection that offers a model of how new work on older cultural materials can take place.

Editorial Reviews

Offers a trove of cross-disciplinary approaches to the assessment of the 1914 film, whose afterlife—with new versions of the film and music reconstructed in 1973 and 2008—is as fascinating as its original creation. . . . Both retrospective and forward-looking, the collection offers a stunning range of perspectives and visual materials drawing from the original production to the present. . . . Insightful and moving . . . This collection is ambitious not only in its scope but in its commitment to understanding and presenting the film in its multiple indigenous contexts.

American Literary History - Beth Piatote

This richly illustrated, multivocal, and altogether remarkable volume is the result of many years’ work on the part of the editors; the U’mista Cultural Centre and the Gwa’wina Dancers of Alert Bay, British Columbia; and many scholars and cultural experts. . . . This book does us all a service by ushering Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters into the 21st century.

American Ethnologist - Richard Handler

An important work, dealing with the history of the Kwakwaka’wakw as well as the history of cinema . . . tells the story of one of Vancouver Island’s most important contributions to film-making, and finally gives proper credit to the role of the Kwakwaka’wakw in making it.

Times Colonist - Dave Obee

The benefit of hindsight tempts us to dismiss Curtis’s naiveté or his fetishization of authenticity. But the many voices brought together here—art historians both native and non-native, activists, anthropologists, even a renowned modern Kwakwaka’wakw documentary filmmaker—reach for a more nuanced critical appreciation of the film’s legacy. . . . Glass, Evans, and their contributors show Curtis and his native collaborators have left something that can be bent to new uses as a bulwark against cultural erasure.

Reed Magazine - Christopher F. Roth

The volume is interdisciplinary and multivocal in depth and in breadth. . . . The scholarly contribution of this book lies in its accomplished critical engagement with the complicated and tumultuous nature of the place of the film in academia and in First Nations communities. . . . A valuable resource . . . The volume is also testimony to the fact that 100 years after the original production, the film can still capture the imaginations and minds of scholars and the broad public.

BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly

"The benefit of hindsight tempts us to dismiss Curtis’s naïveté or his fetishization of authenticity. But the many voices brought together here - art historians both native and non-native, activists, anthropologists, even a renowned modern Kwakwaka’wakw documentary filmmaker - reach for a more nuanced critical appreciation of the film’s legacy. . . . Glass, Evans, and their contributors show Curtis and his native collaborators have left something that can be bent to new uses as a bulwark against cultural erasure."—Christopher F. Roth, Reed Magazine

"An important work, dealing with the history of the Kwakwaka’wakw as well as the history of cinema . . . [with] essays by anthropologists, Native American authorities, artists, musicians, literary scholars, and film historians. The book includes Kwakwaka’wakw perspectives on the film, as well as information about how it was made and distributed."—Dave Obee, Times Colonist

From the Publisher

"A detailed and thoughtful book that brings together scholars, artists, and Kwakwaka’wakw community members in a wide-ranging discourse on the film."

American Indian Culture and Research Journal

"[An] accomplished critical engagement with the complicated and tumultuous nature of the place of the film in academia and in First Nations communities. . . . The volume is also testimony to the fact that 100 years after the original production, the film can still capture the imaginations and minds of scholars and the broad public."

BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly

"Richly illustrated, multivocal, and altogether remarkable. . . . This book does us all a service by ushering Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters into the 21st century."

American Ethnologist

"Offers a stunning range of perspectives and visual materials drawing from the original production to the present. . . . Ambitious not only in its scope but in its commitment to understanding and presenting the film in its multiple indigenous contexts."

American Literary History

"The essays provide a rare look at both the tremendous amount of planning, negotiation, and artistic work that goes into this kind of production, but also the diversity of reactions it necessarily inspires—from sturdy appreciation to charges of romanticism and exploitation."

Pacific Historical Review

"[This] generously illustrated anthology of essays—some decidedly academic, others more personal and anecdotal—address the film from every angle while also placing Curtis (1868–1952) and his First Nations collaborators on the film in their historical context."

Seattle Times