Our next Book Club meeting is Wednesday, October 15, 2025 at 6:30 pm Central.
Contact Liz to Register and she will send you a Zoom link the week of the meeting.
Hello everyone,
Just a note to welcome you to our second book in the 2025 explorations book club. As you know, we read Gary Moulton’s Lewis and Clark Day by Day as the preliminary book. You can watch our conversations about the book here on our site.
I’m happy to say the next book is much shorter and much easier to read. It’s Timothy Egan’s Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, about the life and work of the glass plate photographer Edward S. Curtis. Curtis took 40,000 dry glass plate photographs of Native Americans throughout the American West, and of landscapes in the West. He took some of the most important photographs ever taken of America’s indigenous people. He published 20 volumes of his research and images in a series called the North American Indian. Like so many others of his time, including Theodore Roosevelt, Curtis believed that Native Americans would disappear from American life. He was nearly correct. In 1900, the entire American Indian population of the United States was about 200,000. Fortunately, Native Americans have proved to be much much more resilient than the commentators of the time believed.
We will want to talk about the greatness of Edward S. Curtis. We will want to talk about the cultural criticism of his work.
I want to talk with you also about our proposed 2026 project to interview Native elders about specific court, images, and also the overall impact of Curtis’s work. We have already begun some of that work, and we are hoping that you will want to support it in a range of ways, because it is very important to let Curtis be seen through Indigenous eyes.
Please read the book. Take notes. Come with images you want to talk about, or themes you want to talk about. The more you generate the discourse, the happier I am.
See you soon, my friends!
