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Showing posts from February 18, 2018

Jordan Shapot, Artist - Reinterpreting Iconic Edward Curtis Photographs

Every 8th grader in Montana studies how the Native Lemhi Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, guided the Lewis and Clark expedition team from present day North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean and back - carrying her infant son.  This expedition of Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase took place in the early 1800s.  Nearly seven decades after Sacagawea's tour of the new American west, Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer was defeated and killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and many Montanans feel that Custer got what he deserved.   On Custer's fateful day, his goal was to clear the area of the Lakota and Cheyenne and force them onto the Great Sioux Reservation.   Thirty years after the warriors won the battle, along comes Edward Sheriff Curtis to photograph and document the North American Indians.  He used his lens to create romanticized images of the American Indian.  The photographs were accomplished from 1907-1930.  By this time the American government had moved the American Indians