International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Review

During the turn of the nineteenth century, Edward S. Curtis embarked upon an epic mission to photographically document the Indigenous peoples of North American. His pseudo-ethnological, pictorialist approach often portrayed romanticized images of ‗the vanishing race‘ through representations of a simulated and constructed Indigenous subject. Curtis‘ photography reinforced the reduction of unique Indigenous identities by absorbing, assimilating, and re- translating his subjects into a monoethnic identity. His published body of work The North American Indian became the source document by which all future North American Indigenous cultures‘ ethnographic information would be archived, romanticized, and caricaturized by the dominant Western world. Curtis‘ photographs of Indigenous peoples are compelling, in part because of the impetus they provide for critical reflection, but more importantly, for the visual analysis of the past, present, and future of contemporary Indigenous people. Through postIndian theorist, Gerald Vizenor‘s concepts of survivance, and a postcolonial mode of critical visual analysis, this essay deconstructs and reinterprets selected works of Edward S. Curtis‘ paradoxical representations of Indigenous people, and in contrast, highlight the acts of contemporary Indigenous survivance by examining contemporary Diné photographer, Will Wilson.