Paper short abstract:

This paper provides a theoretical and historical background for understanding Edward Curtis’s 1914 silent film, In the Land of the Head Hunters, featuring the Kwakwaka'wakw of British Columbia, from the perspective of those who participated in both its making and subsequent reception.

Paper long abstract:

In the Land of the Head Hunters, a 1914 silent film made by Edward Curtis with the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) of British Columbia, was the first feature-length fiction film to star an entirely indigenous cast. Although a critical success, it made no money and was quickly lost to the archive (it was significantly re-edited and released in 1973 as In the Land of the War Canoes). Based on recent archival research, an interdisciplinary collaborative team has overseen a complete restoration of the film that returned the film's original title, inter-title cards, long-missing footage, color tinting, publicity graphics, and period musical score—now thought to be the earliest surviving original, feature-length film score. My paper will describe the film's significance and provide a theoretical framework with which to re-appraise it within the larger body of Curtis's work. Like his photographs, the film was originally meant to document a vanishing race. Instead, when resituated within the critical categories of motion picture genre, indigenous agency, and colonial modernity, this landmark of early cinema can be recast as visible evidence of ongoing Native cultural survival and transformation under shifting political conditions. For nearly a century and counting, Head Hunters has constituted a filmic lens through which to reframe and re-imagine the changing terms of colonial representation, cultural memory, and intercultural encounter.