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Rare archive footage from 1914 film
Passed into our possession is this landmark piece of early cinema made by The Aboriginal Arts Program at the Banff Centre, Canada. Re-edited in the 1970s, it features excerpts from a long-lost film by American photographer Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) "In The Land of the War Canoes", the first ever feature film to exclusively star Native North Americans. It features the Kwakwaka'wakw tribe and explains the history of the people and their cultural background. Like his photographs, Curtis’s film was originally meant to capture a “vanishing race.” But instead Curtis used non-professional actors from Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) communities in British Columbia. By adapting their traditional ceremonies for Curtis’s film while refusing to play stereotypical “Indians,” the Kwakwaka’wakw played a vital role in the development of the most modern of commercial art forms — the motion picture. The film had gala openings in New York and Seattle in December 1914, where it was accompanied by a live orchestral score composed by John J. Braham (1848-1919), best known for his work with Gilbert and Sullivan. Critics wrote in rapturous terms about the power and beauty of the film, the Seattle Sun calling it a “great production—like a string of carved beads, too rare to be duplicated.” And yet, the film was a financial failure, quickly overlooked and barely preserved. Rather than documenting Pacific Northwest Native life in 1914, War Canoes documents a moment of cultural encounter between Curtis and the Kwakwaka’wakw actors and consultants who were performing Curtis’s scripted version of their own past for the camera. Some aspects of the film do accurately depict Kwakwaka’wakw culture, such as the artwork and many of the ceremonial dances. Others include forms of technology — the plank houses, cedar bark clothing, and massive dugout canoes — that were clearly recalled but in waning use in 1914 as people adapted to Euro-Canadian life. Even more noteworthy than Curtis’s embellishments, though, is the film’s portrayal of actual Kwakwaka’wakw rituals that were prohibited in Canada at the time of filming under the federal Potlatch Prohibition (1884-1951), intended to hasten the assimilation of First Nations. Despite this legislation, the dances and visual art forms — hereditary property of specific families — were maintained through this period and transmitted to subsequent generations.
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