Embassy Events

Exhibit of American Indian Photo's Debuts in Košice

The Great Plains

Edward Curtis’s brief expedition to the Great Plains in the summer of 1900 may have been the most profound experience of his life. That summer, Curtis witnessed one of the last great enactments of the Sun Dance. As Curtis viewed the Sun Dance ceremony his vision for the grand photo-ethnographic undertaking that would become his life’s work crystallized. The images he made on that summer trip clearly reveal that he had been touched by the magnificence of the Indian nations and the overwhelming depth of their culture. These photographs formed the beginning of the vast, elegant portrait of Native American cultures that Curtis would bring to the world over the next thirty years.

During Curtis’s time, the Indians of the Great Plains lived primarily in North and South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, a territory once traversed by great herds of migrating buffalo. Curtis was strongly attracted to the fiercely independent lifestyle of tribes such as the Lakota, Apsaroke, and Piegan and seemed particularly adept at transforming their dignity and pride into extraordinary photographic images.

Curtis’s photographs of Indian life of the Great Plains comprise perhaps his most popular body of work; for many people, his photographs of chiefs and warriors, the beadwork, the horses, and the Plains landscape have come to exemplify the American Indian. However, his photographs of the Plains Indians also documented many other aspects of tribal cultural life, including hunting, warfare, vision quests, and religious ceremonies. These images remain an unparalleled record of the strength and nobility of the Plains Indian peoples who had once held dominion over tens of thousands of square miles.

The tribes of the Great Plains were the most formidable and powerful in North America, and they inspired Curtis by the majesty of their lives. The great expanses of land and sky, the horses, the lodges, the sunning ceremonies—all are depicted in Curtis’s powerful Plains landscapes. His portraits of Plains Indians evoke the warriors’ emotional depth, fierce pride, and independence. Curtis would not find a more dramatic example of the notion of the “North American Indian” in his travels.