Stewardship
Some objects are owned. Others are looked after.
Stewardship is about preserving Curtis’s final vision, not about merely preserving a copper object.
The copper plates from Edward Curtis’s The North American Indian are the second kind. I’ve been the one looking after them for forty-four years — which is why I don’t call the people who acquire them customers. A customer completes a transaction and goes home. A steward takes over.
They Were Nearly Lost
It would be pleasant to tell you these plates came down to me through a long line of careful hands. That isn’t what happened.
They were used. Then they were forgotten. For something close to fifty years they sat in a warehouse — not preserved, just stored, their existence out of everyone’s mind. Nobody was looking after them. Nobody was thinking about them at all.
Copper has a scrap value. Somebody could have decided the space was worth more than what was in it, and there would be nothing left of Curtis’s final vision today but a story about what used to exist.
Their survival was far from inevitable. That’s the honest version, and it’s the reason I take this seriously. Stewardship here isn’t an old tradition I stepped into. It started late, and it nearly didn’t start at all.
My Turn
Forty-four years, and most of the work has been unglamorous.
Plates were returned from their steel-faced state, covered with asphalt, back to original copper. Provenance was traced and documented — back to Curtis himself, and to the certification of his daughter Florence. Thousands of plates were identified, recorded, sorted, and kept in conditions that wouldn’t harm them. None of it was exciting. All of it was necessary.
I didn’t do it to make them worth more. And I didn’t do it because they were historic — history alone would have justified a better warehouse, not forty-four years of my life.
I did it because of what I saw the first time I looked at one, before I had any words for it. These are extraordinary objects. That’s the part people leave out when they talk about preservation: somebody must decide the thing is worth the trouble.
What needed protecting was never the metal. It was Curtis’s final vision — the images as he meant them to be seen.
Twenty years of editing brought them to the form on these plates, and that form exists nowhere else. That’s the whole purpose. Keep the plates as close as possible to what Curtis last decided they should be, his final vision.
Your Turn
When a plate leaves here, the story doesn’t end. It changes hands. A steward inherits more than copper. You inherit the same responsibility I picked up in 1982 — that Curtis’s final vision stays intact, in your care, for as long as you have it.
You wouldn’t be the first. Plates from this collection are held today by museums, universities, and Native American tribes, including The Smithsonian and the Cahuilla Tribe of Palm Springs. The tradition of looking after these plates isn’t ancient. It’s forty-four years old, and there’s room in it.
What you do beyond that is yours. Some stewards hang them where everyone can see. Some keep them private. Some go in museum cases. Some are still deciding years later. I’ve never told anyone how to live with theirs, and I’m not going to start.
The only thing every steward understands is this: Keep it well. Hand it on in good condition.
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