Twenty-five years ago, the librarian in a museum where I worked, who had run out of shelf space, asked the staff if they would mind keeping the library's reference sets in their offices. After the senior anthropologists had carefully selected what they wanted, I was left with Edward Curtis' forty-volume set of photographs and notes on the American Indian. I was not pleased.

Time has been more generous. In the last few years, a wide audience has discovered Curtis. His major work has been reissued. His photographs illustrate several new books. Three galleries in New York showed his work this year. At least six new collections of his photographs are now in print or on press. A biography is announced.

Anthropologists, who once dismissed his work as mere romanticism, now find that his account of Kwakiutl ceremonies is actually quite accurate. Moreover, many of his photographs contain valuable details.

But the photographs themselves just don't ring true. Curtis built sets. He supplied wigs. Subjects weren't posed so much as staged, and though the costumes were accurate, the staging was false. A film he made on Kwakiutl life, as he imagined it was lived prior to European contact, though rich in detail, was embarrassingly theatrical, even for 1914.

Curtis was dedicated to an image of an Indian who existed only in romantic literature, and when he couldn't find the Indian in real life, he invented him.

It's an old story. When Queen Anne received four Iroquois sachems - the "The Four Kings of Canada" - the resulting publicity told more of London's fashions and fads than of Indians. Contemporary illustrations showed men whose countenance and posture resembled English gentry, even Roman senators, not woodland hunters. Only in minor details e.g., painted body designs, did accuracy prevail.

Voltaire's "Sincere Huron" was Huron only in name. That whole genre of letters, allegedly written by Huron, Chinese, and Persian expatriates in Paris, but actually written by French revolutionaries, was simply a disguised attack on the French establishment. Printers, to mislead censors, sometimes predated and misidentified books, e.g., "Amsterdam, 1771, "instead of the correct "Paris, 1779." Ethnologists find little in these books, though they must be a goldmine to political historians.

I cannot find Indians anywhere in the great mass of recent books on them. One book, subtitled "Self-told," consists exclusively of quotations from Indians complaining to white men of injustices. Indians are never quoted talking to Indians. The only identity they are permitted comes from their response to white men.

The popularity of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee didn't derive from any interest in Indians, but from concern over My Lai, over genocide, but genocide hidden in the safe past.

Behind the mask of "Noble Savage" or "Victim as Hero," Indians are simply exploited, their identities stolen from them like land and furs. Their new identities are neither believable nor admirable. Who takes seriously a Noble Savage? Who admires a victim?

Today's Indian exploiters say they write in opposition to genocide. But one cause of genocide is the absence of self-respect based on respect for the identity and integrity of others.

We honor Indian life for that life itself, not for its destruction. It needs no retouching.

Authentic records exist. Perhaps there's no such thing as a true native autobiography, self-told, since preliterates don't write. But there are certainly authentic accounts preserved by Rasmussen, Speck, Emmons, Harrington, Stevenson, Swanton, and others who dedicated themselves to placing on record the meaning of life to native Americans. This handful of strange, rare men, living between two cultures, at home in both but happiest in between, left records of extraordinary beauty and intensity.

The photographic record is also rich. Archives contain vast quantities of early pictures. One Canadian anthropologist recently assembled over 10,000 taken before 1900, on Haida villages alone. Postcard photographers, missionaries, and geologists rarely "staged" shots. They preferred to record real people being themselves.

Robert Flaherty's portraits of Eskimos and Indians were made before 1914, when he was a mining engineer: they are magnificent, but alas unknown. Flaherty was to Curtis what Cartier-Bresson is to a passport photographer.

Why, then, the interest in Curtis? For one thing, his pictures are easy to look at. They have about them a soft, slack romanticism which, like nostalgia, is now in fashion.

They are also readily available and require little research, which means they are ready-made for quick publishing rip-offs.