ABSTRACT
Curtis is one of the most popular sources of images of pre-contact Indigenous cultures both globally and locally. That a colonial archive like Curtis' the man, his products and the events spun from them is recuperated as Indigenous history by some communities does not alter other histories of contemporary neo-colonial and capitalist projects. Curtis made extensive notes on the ceremonies, dress and architecture of the Indigenous nations he photographed. The choice to salvage or continue an aspect of a culture is the Kwakwaka'wakw people's prerogative. This chapter uses the real to critique representation. Rather, different histories, including Curtis and the Kwakwaka'wakw performers, nineteenth-century ethnography and popular culture and twenty-first-century Kwakwaka'wakw communities, become part of a longer neo-colonial discursive formation. Cultures, even across the same language, are undergoing a process of translation and, therefore, a process of dispersion, deferral and dissemination.
