Bill Curtis Video Production

I thought I would also post this here. I'm getting to be an old guy and I've spent the last 2 years writing a book, that will be published some time this Summer and available on Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble. It is a biography which includes my 30 + years in Indian Education, with a number of years in both Utah and Kansas. It also includes my summers of video work with the U.S. Forest Service and some video work in the Philippines. More than that it is a testimony about God's faithfulness to me and his ability and desire to show Himself to me in so many visible ways. I have seen miracles in my own life and even more in the lives of others.

For Memorial Day 2024, I have received permission to post the entire original documentary “In the Tradition of the Warrior- A History of Modern-day Comanche Veterans”.
This was a production that I produced with Mike Tosee for the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma in 2009. It was probably the largest production that Mike and I did together and I like to think it was our best work. Our work was greatly enhanced by the expertise of Comanche Tribal Military Historian, Lanny Asapermy.
It is the 88-minute story that explains why American Indians were the largest minority group in the United States to enlist in WWI and WWII. It also tells of the Comanche Code talkers. What is the importance of the warrior tradition in all American Indian Tribes? Why are Veterans Day and Memorial Day a time of major celebrations in Indian Country today? Listen to fascinating veterans stories of battles in the South Pacific, Vietnam, Korea and the middle-east.

In the Tradition of the Warrior - A History of Modern-day Comanche Veterans Produced by Bill Curtis & Mike Tosee for the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma in 2009. Fascinating stories of courage and a discussion of the reasons why American...

This is a piece I produced for the U.S. Forest Service in 1999 on the Survey of Vegetation that is done every ten years in Alaska.

Inventorying Renewable Resources of Alaska Broadband High This is a video I produced for USDA Forests Service and The Pacific Northwest Research Station in Anchorage, Alaska in 1999.

This summer Haskell Indian Nations University paid my way to come up from Alabama to Lawrence, where I spent a week going through 100's of video tapes that we shot through the years from 1979- 2006. Original footage was on early betamax, 3/4in U-Matic, Professional BetaCam SP Videotapes. The footage has held up pretty well over so many years.
I found two old projects that I'd forgotten about over the years.
The first project was done while I was still an instructor at Intermountain Inter-Tribal School in Brigham City, Utah. I had been detailed to a brand new BIA Office that had moved onto our huge campus, which housed the 800-student boarding high school and the U.S. Indian Law Enforcement Training Center. The new office that was being created was going to have a video production unit formed to produce for the Tribes and the Bureau. No one had been hired for that function but I was brought over that summer to produce a video about the Indian Police Academy and since that summer they had several of the first women cadets, they became the focus. This was my very first video production. The equipment was primitive in comparison to what we would have in a couple of years. The camera was an early color video version that recorded on the original Beta-Max format tapes and we had a very early tape-to-tape editing system for a "cuts-only" edited version. The video ended up being used to promote the video services of our new office (OTAT) at a number of "dog & pony shows" held at Tribal leadership meetings. And I did get the job to run the unit in 1980.

Indian Police Academy 1979 In 1979 I was given my first video assignment for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Brigham City, Utah. I was given a single tube color video camera that recor...