I saw the brilliant film Revenant recently and while I was watching it I couldn’t help but think of a title we recently acquired here at The Patchogue-Medford Library.
It’s called “Edward S. Curtis: One Hundred Masterworks.”
“One Hundred Masterworks” is an extraordinary collection of vintage photographs that preserved for posterity the traditional life-ways of Native Americans in the early twentieth century. While this book documents a long gone era and way of life that has forever passed, I am stunned that these photographs were taken only 100 years ago. Starting in 1900 and going for another 30 years, Mr. Curtis painstakingly covered 80 distinct tribal groups, navigating such geography as the Southwestern U.S. to the Badlands all the way West to the tribes of the Northwestern United States. Once thought of as “savages”, Native Americans are America’s forgotten people, rarely ever being mentioned in the media or current events. Luckily for us, Mr. Curtis had the forethought to focus his lens on these amazing people.
Anyone interested in American history would enjoy this book. Highly recommended!
For further investigation I recommend these Web sites:
Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian
In addition, The Smithsonian has a museum in downtown Manhattan dedicated to the Native American called the National Museum of the American Indian–New York. Admission is free and the museum is located adjacent to Battery Park in Downtown Manhattan.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines revenant as “one that returns after death or a long absence.”