The twenty volumes of ethnographic text and pictorial photography and the twenty portfolios of large, finely printed photogravures that together comprise "The North American Indian" were the product of an extraordinary labor by Edward S. Curtis, an extensive and shifting team of co-workers, and the participation of hundreds of Native Americans. By the time the last volume was published, Curtis' work has resulted in over 40,000 photographs that showcased American Indian primitive customs and traditions. Although recent accounts of the encounter between photography and Native American cultures have shifted attention away from the objectification of Native subjects within romantic and racialist iconographies and toward narratives that focus on Native understanding of the photographic process and on the active use of photography by Native individuals and groups for the purposes of self-representation, there has been no attempt to develop a sustained account of the extent and nature of Native involvement in the making of "The North American Indian." The use of Curtis's portfolio portrait of Alexander B. Upshaw, his gifted Crow (or "Apsaroke") interpreter and fieldworker, as an illustration of the triumph of romance over reality, of genre conventions and racial typology over individuated portraiture, is exemplary of the critical failure to take account of Native agency. Upshaw, who worked extensively with Curtis between 1905 and 1909, was the son of Crazy Pend d'Oreille, a prominent Crow warrior and leader. Several critics such as Mick Gidley and Christopher Lyman, have commented on Curtis' portrayal of Native cultures especially Upshaw's images. In this essay, the author argues that the critics' accounts of Curtis overgeneralize the meanings of particular images and their textual framings in "The North American Indian," thereby misshaping people's understanding of Curtis's achievements as a photographer and as a maker of photographic and textual combinations. If these ethical and ideological critiques of Curtis are undertaken in the name of Native cultures, it is a surprising paradox that these very critiques turn away from fully confronting the question of Native agency in the making of "The North American Indian." (Contains 4 figures and 50 notes.)