• Age: 9
• Grade: 4

This poignant and beautiful record of Canada's First Nations people and their culture, as seen through the eyes of talented photographers, is a fascinating glimpse into Canada's past. Of great historical and aesthetic interest, this collection of photographs captures the diversity and dignity of First Nations during a time of tumultuous change. Assembled by Edward Cavell, a former curator at Banff's Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, the photographs span the period from the infancy of photography to the more sophisticated technology of 1920.

Edward Cavell has worked with historical photography in Canada for more than 30 years. Once the curator at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, Alberta, and author of seven illustrated histories, Edward has pored through many hundreds of thousands of photographs in archives, museums and private collections across Canada and abroad. Since 1992, he and his wife, Donna Livingstone, have operated Livingstone & Cavell Extraordinary Toys, a shop dedicated to nostalgic collector toys and quirky novelty items, in Calgary, Alberta.

Edward Cavell's profile page

Classic Images of Canada’s First Nations: 1850-1920

This collection of photographs compiled by former museum curator Edward Cavell is a pictorial record of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples from the 1850s through the 1920s. It presents Haida shamans of the West Coast, the interior of an igloo in a village on Hudson Bay, a prairie horse race and a Cree camp. Crowfoot, Cree, and Mi’kmaq men and women posed and in repose are captured by early photographers. We view the construction of a birch bark canoe by the Montagnais in Quebec and see the pride on the faces of a lacrosse team in 1876 Kahnawake. Each image is accompanied by a brief description of time and place, and often includes names and information that make the photographs more personal. The powerful collection of images in this slim volume is of both aesthetic and historical interest.