This Is A New Release Of The Original 1844 Edition.

The Leading Pictorial Historian of the American Indian in the nineteenth century, Seth Eastman was a career army officer whose paintings are unparalleled on two fronts. Monumentally important as American art, they also comprise a unique visual record of Native life, which was then undergoing rapid change.

Over the course of 30 years Edward S. Curtis exhaustively documented America's first inhabitants. Follow along on his visits to 80 American Indian tribes from the Mexican border to the Bering Strait--working up to 16 hours a day to gain their trust and document their traditional way of life as it was already beginning to die out. This unabridged, ...

This Tiny Folio™ volume is based on the well-known frontier artwork by Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, and McKenney and Hall. Based on the renowned frontier artwork of George Catlin’s North American Indian Portfolio, McKenney and Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America, and Prince Maximilian’s Travels in the Interior of North America between 1832 and 1834, these historic collections of prints and paintings were the first to preserve images of Native Americans before their culture was affected by the white man. Fulfilling one of the Library of Congress’s central missions—to document the printed, visual, and written history of this country—the images in this volume constitute part of the archive of the American memory. Native Americans found the world’s eyes upon them in the nineteenth century. Artists like George Catlin, Charles Bird King, and Karl Bodmer trekked to the West to paint images for those unable to make the journey and created some of the most important sociological, historical, and ethnological studies of American Indians. George Catlin, for example, was allowed to observe many of the ceremonies and games in the Indian villages which enabled him to provide a remarkably detailed picture of the tribe’s religious and social life. He wrote, “The history and customs of such a people, preserved by pictorial illustration, are themes worthy of the lifetime of one man.” This extraordinary miniature folio will appeal to anyone with an interest in American art, art history, or Native American history.

The U.S. Library of Congress presents an online exhibit of the published photogravure images from the volumes of "The North American Indian" by American photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952). Curtis portrayed the traditional customs and lifestyles of eighty Indian tribes.

"Curtis spent the best part of his life-nearly thirty years-documenting what he considered to be the traditional way of life for Indians living in the trans-Mississippi West. He took more than 40,000 photographs, collected more than 350 traditional Indian tales, and made more than 10,000 sound recordings of Indian speeches and music His magnum opus was The North American Indian." (Pritzker, Edward S. Curtis, 6).

This lavishly illustrated art history situates the work of pioneering mid-twentieth-century Native American artists within the broader canon of American modernism.

Native Family presents some of the finest examples of Edward Sheriff Curtis's portraiture, especially of women and children, as well as images that portray the traditional costumes, rites, and character of the individuals who made up the native nations of North America. Photographs of a wide variety of tribal groups from the Pacific Northwest to the Desert Southwest to the Great Plains are included. The images, selected by Curtis expert Christopher Cardozo, are from Curtis's landmark publication, The North American Indian. This twenty-volume, twenty-portfolio magnum opus contains thousands of photogravures and accompanying historical and descriptive text, some of which has been excerpted here to bring the pictures to life and provide information on family structure, marriage customs, living conditions, child-rearing, relationships, and other components of these native peoples' often difficult existence. Compiled over thirty years beginning in 1898, Curtis's study of more than eighty tribal cultures on the brink of extinction captured the essence of the Native American way of life.