Native Americans

• Native Americans

In the early 1900s, photographer Edward S. Curtis started to implement a large-scale project - documenting the lives of Native Americans, do not fall under the influence of Western society. The result of his trip to the United States was a series of books of 20 volumes of the "North American Indians" with almost 2000 photos.

Today, more than a hundred years later it was published the 1st volume, and we have an opportunity to look at the portraits of Native Americans in the early 1900's.

Hopi - Indian people living on an area of ​​12,635 square meters. km. in Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona. According to the All-American 2000 census the population of the Hopi Reservation was 6946 people. Photo 1905.

left- representative of the Mojave Indians living in the present time in the two reservations on the Colorado River. Dressed in clothes made of rabbit skin, 1907. Right - the representative of the Yakima tribe, 1910.

The Indians of the Navajo, 1904.

Apache - the collective name for several culturally related tribes of North American Indians. Apache was someone like a ninja in America. Photo 1906.

Native American tribe in the northwest Alaska in 1929.

Men Navajo.

Many popular Indian names. Like his imagery, beauty and meaning. Left - Black Hair, Right - Red Cloud, 1905.

Left - Owl sits on the right - a girl from the ancient settlement of Indians, located near the town of Taos in the US state of New Mexico, 1905.

The Indians - the common name of the indigenous population of America. As of the beginning of XXI century, their total number is more than 60 million people. Photo 1908.

According to genetic studies, University of Michigan, the ancestors of the American Indians and Eskimos moved to America from northeast Asia via the so-called "Bering Bridge" - an ancient wide isthmus between America and Asia, where now the Bering Strait, who had disappeared more than 12 thousand years. ago.

Indians extravagant ritual of fur garments, 1914.

An international team of researchers, which included the Institute of Cytology and Genetics, Russian Academy of Sciences, concluded that the genetic homeland of the first Americans to be considered Altai. About 20-25 thousand. Years ago there, apparently out Indian ancestors, seated in Siberia, and eventually got to America.

In North America, there were about 400 tribes of Indians. They all spoke different languages ​​and had no written language.

Indian Economy dictated by the climate conditions and terrain, where they lived, as well as their level of development. The Indians were hunters, gatherers and sedentary tribes also engaged in farming. In northern Indians hunted sea mammals.

With the advent of the Europeans on the continent, the Indians were the horse and firearms, which made hunting a buffalo more easy and fast.

Guests traveling on an Indian wedding, CA, 1914.

The Indians of Central America, the principal place in the mythology held myths about the origin of fire and the origin of humans and animals.

On the left - Long-eared Ben (1905), to the right - a doctor of the Navajo (1904).

North American Indians as a source of images, greatly influenced the Romantic movement in literature and cinema. Thanks to art books and films about them average European knows about the Indians much more than a similar tribes in Africa, Asia, Oceania.