Ocean State Libraries

For over thirty years, photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) traveled the length and breadth of North America, seeking to record in words and images the traditional life of its vanishing indigenous inhabitants. Like a man possessed, he strove to realise his life's work, which culminated in the publication of his encyclopedia The North American Indian. In the end, this monumental work comprised twenty textual volumes and twenty portfolios...

Text, drawings, and photographs describe the life of the SalishIndians and other North American tribes before the arrival of white settlers.

"At the turn of the century, Curtis started on his thirty-year project to produce a monumental study of North American Indians. Using an approach that was both artistically and scientifically ambitious he recorded, in words and pictures, the traces of the traditional Indian way of life that was already beginning to die out. This book includes a selection from The North American Indian, his photographic life's work, which was originally published in...