Sapir and Spier's work gives more definitive information on these “shirts” than the headdresses. They say that the women wore long dresses made out of buckskin and “A heavy beaded yoke . . . crossing the shoulders and extending down on breast and back. The dress was gathered with a beaded belt” (Sapir and Spier, 1930, pp. 206-207). Especially in Wishham Maid, 1909 (Image 11), the “shirt” does appear to be a yoke overlaying a dress.

Referring to the Encyclopedia of American Indian Costume again, this conclusion is verified. Under “Women's basic dress” it reads, “Later, reflecting Plains influence, the women wore an ankle-length dress of tanned leather in the two-skin style, with the deer tail retained in the yoke . . . The yoke was heavily beaded in a lazy-stitch technique” (Paterek, 1994, p. 233). This description is important because it identifies the beaded “shirts,” which we now know were part of a dress, as part of the Wishham culture. The Encyclopedia acknowledges the Plains as the source of this style of Wishham clothing. In the future, it would be interesting to look for similarities between the beaded outfits of the Wishham and any styles that may occur in Plains tribes.

Further examples of reconstruction are included in the complete thesis here.

Conclusion

Edward S. Curtis was primarily a photographer, but he hoped that through the combination of his photographs and text, those who read his twenty volumes of The North American Indian would obtain a broad understanding of the Native people he discussed (Lyman, 1982, p. 76). He used re-enactments, props, and posing in his photographs; but, during the early 1900s when Curtis worked, these methods were widely used and accepted, and Curtis readily acknowledged his methodology (Edwards, 2001, pp. 169-172; Lyman, 1982, pp. 65, 67).

Curtis's romantic appeal spawned interest among the public in the 1960s and 1970s, and this interest continues today, resulting in numerous publications geared toward the general public. These publications usually present the photographs alone, without the context provided by Curtis's text. Thus, my analyses have focused on what the photographs can provide to anthropological knowledge on their own, in the absence of their contextualizing text. I have examined issues of the “authentic,” “artistic,” and “reality” in photography, to

show that photographs are interpretations. Thus, I presented the analysis of the uses of photography, especially in re-enactment, in order to contextualize both Curtis's justification of his methods and the objections post-modernists have to these methods.

My analysis shows that one can use the post-modernist critique to determine the subjective views of ethnographers in the past, without taking the views of the fundamentalists who would disregard past works. Through the application of this knowledge and the filtering out of some degree of subjectivity, one can obtain culturally relevant information from the examination of past ethnographic works such as Curtis's. This analysis implies that people can evaluate other past ethnographies in a similar manner to derive cultural information that was not necessarily the intent of the ethnographer. I used Curtis's work precisely because other complementary, written ethnographies about the groups he photographed are available for comparison and evaluation of his photos.

My purpose in performing this analysis is to demonstrate a fallacy of the fundamentalist post-modernists, because I am opposed to ignoring past ethnographies. While I realize that the methods earlier ethnographers used are not equivalent to those we promote today, it does not mean that their work is irrelevant. Past ethnographies are our primary resources about the histories of a people. I believe that by ignoring these, we, in turn, treat the cultures they studied as ahistorical, as though we can go back to that culture today and record exactly the same things that the ethnographers of the past witnessed. We know in anthropology that this is not the case: cultures are dynamic and change through time. If we disagree with the methods, analyses such as mine should be conducted to determine the ethnographers' methods, and to derive the information that we desire.

For the list of references cited click here and the full-size images click here

Images 5b and 6a are copied with permission from Christopher M. Lyman's ‘The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions:' Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis , 1982. All of the other Curtis images are reprinted courtesy of Northwestern University Library, Edward S. Curtis's ‘The North American Indian': the Photographic Images , 2001. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/
award98/ienhtml/curthome.html .