Session Details

Tuesday, 29 December

549. Curtis Meets the Kwakwaka’wakw: In the Land of the Headhunters (1914)

5:15–6:30 p.m., Washington A, Loews

Presiding: Peter M. Logan, Temple Univ., Philadelphia

Speaker: Bradley W. Evans, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick

The event features a 45-minute showing of restored footage from a 1914 feature film on the Indians of British Columbia directed by the American photographer Edward Curtis, who dedicated much of his career to an idealized goal of recording traditional American Indian customs. Thus the film serves as a rare visual illustration of ethnographic concepts of the Indian as “primitive” in the early twentieth century. Further information on the restoration project is available at www.curtisfilm.rutgers.edu/.

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