Eight years before Robert Flaherty's highly influential documentary Nanook of the North (1922), photographer Edward Curtis shot the first feature-length film whose cast was made up entirely of Native Americans. Technically, since the film's subject, the Kwakwaka'wakw or Kwaikutl, were located in British Columbia, they should be referred to by the Canadian term "First Nations." Either way, the combination of actual footage of native life with a narrative combining their legends with pure fiction offers a rare view of the world of indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest. In the Land of the Head Hunters is also the first feature film shot in British Columbia and the oldest surviving feature shot in Canada.

Curtis had begun photographing Native Americans in 1895 when Princess Angeline, daughter of Chief Sealth of Seattle, posed for him in his photographic studio in Seattle. A chance meeting with anthropologist George Bird Grinnell lead to a friendship and his being invited to join Grinnell's expedition to document the lives of the Blackfoot Confederacy in Montana in 1900. In 1906, J.P. Morgan gave Curtis a grant to create a 20-volume photographic record of the lives of Native Americans. Curtis would work on the series through the last volume, published in 1930. In addition to photographing Native Americans, he also made short films of their lives, including a 1906 recording of the Hopi Snake Dance. He also had experimented with media in his lectures, using two slide projectors at once so he could dissolve between images he had photographed.

Anthropologists had already documented the Kwaikutl extensively when Curtis first came in contact with them in Fort Rupert, British Columbia, in 1910. His main contact was George Hunt, a Kwaikutl who had served as contact point for visiting scholars for years. They came up with the idea of creating a feature-length film combining a fictional story with actually footage of Kwaikutl life. The story Curtis created was built on a dramatic staple, the romantic triangle. While on a vision quest, Motana (Stanley Hunt), sees a vision of the beautiful Naida (Sarah Constance Smith Hunt and Mrs. George Walkus), a woman from a nearby headhunter tribe betrothed to their Sorcerer (Kwagwanu). Motana's courtship and eventual winning of Naida leads to a violent war between the two tribes.

Hunt recruited the native cast and directed them while also serving as translator for Curtis and the other westerners on his production team. With his family, Hunt also supplied many of the artifacts used in the film, contributing to the props, sets and costumes. They also provided input throughout filming to guarantee that Curtis' work would present their people as favorably and accurately as possible given the melodramatic script.

The Kwaikutl's motivation for making the film was twofold. For one thing, the production promised to bring some much-needed income to the tribe. In addition, it allowed the Kwaikutl to preserve on film some of their most cherished ceremonial performances. This was particularly important at the time as a provision added to Canada's Indian Act in 1895 prohibited First Nations ceremonies and other religious practices in the interest of making native peoples assimilate to Western ways. Performing the rituals as part of a film, for what the Kwaikutl could claim were purely economic reasons, allowed them to preserve practices handed down from generation to generation underground. The law would remain in effect until 1951.

Curtis envisioned the film as a major event. At the time, feature films were still a rarity in the U.S., although foreign-made features like Italy's Quo Vadis? (1912) had screened successfully here. The film featured traveling shots, still rare, and the Hochstetter Process, a recently developed technique for tinting film that allowed for different colors within the frame. For the premiere engagement, he commissioned John Braham, a composer known for his arrangements for Gilbert and Sullivan and who had previously scored a 40-minute film version of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Hiawatha (1913), to compose and conduct an original score. Curtis' publicity indicated that the music was based on wax cylinder recordings he had made of Kwaikutl music, though there is little relationship between those recordings and the music Braham wrote. The film premiered simultaneously to glowing reviews in New York and Seattle. The World Film Corporation distributed it to other cities throughout 1915 and 1916, but attendance at theatres was low, leading Curtis to pretty much give up on the film. He sold the copyright and an edited print to the American Museum of Natural History in 1924.

In the Land of the Headhunters was believed lost for decades until film collector Hugo Zeitler donated a damaged print he had found in a dumpster to the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History in 1947. In 1974, art historians Bill Holm and George Quimby created a re-edited version of the film with an authentic Kwakiutl score under the title In the Land of the War Canoes. Even in this truncated form, the film was voted a place on the National Film Registry in 1999. A more thorough restoration was created in 2008, using the materials from the Field Museum, three nitrate reels from the UCLA Film and Television Archives (including original tinting and toning and one scene missing from the Field Museum's copy) and the original score, held by Getty Research Institute.

While revered for its pioneering use of film tinting and moving camera shots, In the Land of the Head Hunters is considered only partly successful as a record of native life before the colonization of North America. The most accurate material in the film is the record of Kwaikutl arts and crafts, clothing, architecture and some of the ceremonial dances. At least one dance was created spontaneously by Hunt and the cast to fit Curtis' need for a spectacular group performance. In addition, Curtis included a whale hunt, an activity he borrowed from a neighboring tribe. Although those changes and the fictional story render the film somewhat less than a documentary, it is still revered by film historians and ethnic scholars for what it does preserve of native lives and its early contributions to the medium (Flaherty attended a private screening of the film in 1915). Moreover, it has been studied as an intersection of First Nation customs and Western viewpoints, a record of the earliest attempts by American scholars to document and preserve indigenous civilizations.

By Frank Miller

Director: Edward S. Curtis
Screenplay: Curtis
Cinematography: Edmund August Schwinke
Score: John J. Braham
Cast: Stanley Hunt (Motana), Sarah Constance Smith Hunt (Naida/A Na'nalalal Dancer), Mrs. George Walkus (Naida/Sorceress), Paddy 'Malid (Kenada), Balutsa (Waket/Yaklus), Kwagwanu (Sorcerer)