Edward Curtis”Waswaslikya – Qagyuhl” Native American in Dog Costume – Photogravure Print1914

Photogravure of a Native American man from a photo by Edward Sheriff Curtis (American, 1868-1952). The man is wearing a full body dog costume as a part of an initiation ceremony. The costume is full-body, with a carved wood head. The rest of the costume is fur. The photographs of the ceremonial dress and masks of the Kwakwaka’wakw presented here are the creation of American photographer and ethnologist Edward Curtis (1868–1952), famous for his work with Native American people. Part of a project funded by banking magnate J.P. Morgan, these photographs are from the collection held at the Library of Congress, and contain many images not published in Curtis’ enormous twenty-volume The North American Indian.

“From Copyright Photograph 1914 by E. S. Curtis” in lower center.
Presented in a gold colored frame with a cream mat.
Frame size: 22″H x 18″W
Image size: 9.25″H x 7″W

Born in 1868 near Whitewater, Wisconsin, Edward Sheriff Curtis became one of America’s finest photographers and ethnologists. Beginning in 1896 and ending in 1930, Curtis photographed and documented every major Native American tribe west of the Mississippi, taking over 40,000 negatives of eighty tribes. For thirty years, he devoted his life to an odyssey of photographing and documenting the lives and traditions of the Native people of North America. His photographs had an immense impact on the national imagination and continue to shape the way we see Native life and culture.

His life’s work was to record the faces and lifestyles of the Indians before they vanished forever beneath the settling of the continent by the white man. He photographed his subjects from the deserts of the Southwest to the ice floes of the Arctic, recording with his camera and pen the look and the culture of more than eighty tribes. It was an achievement both poignant and monumental.
His life’s work was to record the faces and lifestyles of the Indians before they vanished forever beneath the settling of the continent by the white man. He photographed his subjects from the deserts of the Southwest to the ice floes of the Arctic, recording with his camera and pen the look and the culture of more than eighty tribes. It was an achievement both poignant and monumental.
The photographs of the ceremonial dress and masks of the Kwakwaka’wakw presented here are the creation of American photographer and ethnologist Edward Curtis (1868–1952), famous for his work with Native American people. Part of a project funded by banking magnate J.P. Morgan, these photographs are from the collection held at the Library of Congress, and contain many images not published in Curtis’ enormous twenty-volume The North American Indian.
The photographs of the ceremonial dress and masks of the Kwakwaka’wakw presented here are the creation of American photographer and ethnologist Edward Curtis (1868–1952), famous for his work with Native American people. Part of a project funded by banking magnate J.P. Morgan, these photographs are from the collection held at the Library of Congress, and contain many images not published in Curtis’ enormous twenty-volume The North American Indian.
The Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw (or Kwakiutl) are an indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast, covering the territory of British Columbia on northern Vancouver Island and the adjoining mainland, and on islands around Johnstone Strait and Queen Charlotte Strait. United by the common language of Kwak’wala, the broad group can be divided into 13 nations, each with its own clan structure and distinct histories. According to Kwakwaka’wakw folklore their ancestors (‘na’mima) came to a given spot — by way of land, sea, or underground — in the form of ancestral animals that upon arrival shed their animal appearance and became human.

The first documented contact with Westerners was in 1792 during the expedition led by English officer Captain George Vancouver, and was soon followed by colonies of Europeans settling on Canada’s West Coast. As was often the way, with settlers came disease and the Kwakwaka’wakw population dropped by up to 75% between 1830 and 1880. Their distinctive ideas about wealth — that status came not from how much you owned but how much you were able to give away — came to the particular attention of the US anthropologist Franz Boas, who wrote extensively on their elaborate gift-giving ceremonies known as “potlach”. The ceremonial practice was also a particular target of Christian missionaries who saw it as a major obstacle to their “civilizing” mission, and the Canadian government banned the practice in 1885 (although the act was soon amended, proving impossible to enforce).

The photographs of the ceremonial dress and masks of the Kwakwaka’wakw presented here are the creation of American photographer and ethnologist Edward Curtis (1868–1952), famous for his work with Native American people. Part of a project funded by banking magnate J.P. Morgan, these photographs are from the collection held at the Library of Congress, and contain many images not published in Curtis’ enormous twenty-volume The North American Indian.