The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

Chapter 2 opens with the same story about the earth being constructed on the backs of turtles. After reiterating that stories are “all we are,” King discusses a photography project he started in 1994, one in which he would travel across North America and take black-and-white photographs of Native artists (32). This project was influenced by the work of Edward Sheriff Curtis, who spent the first three decades of the 20th century taking thousands of photographs of Indians. King argues that Curtis’s photos reflect a desire to document the “last Indian” in the literary era known as American Romanticism (33). In this era, perceptions of Native Americans changed. Where once Indians were thought to be inferior, Romantics believed the Indian to be a symbol of their own ideals, as Indians embodied nature, exoticism, mysticism, and eroticism (33). Thus, writers and artists created the fictional noble Indian “who was the last of his race” (33). Curtis set out to document such an Indian but found that reality did not comport to this ideal. Instead of photographing the Native Americans as they were, Curtis dressed the Indians he photographed in the clothes of other tribes so that they “looked more ‘Indian’” and so his “photographs would look authentic” (36).