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The Power of Images
"East of my grandmother's house the sun rises and falls out of the
plain. Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered
earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his
experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell
upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and
listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there
and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and
all the colors of the dawn and dusk".
N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969.
Within Native American and Euro-American cultures, art has served to order and interpret an individual's role within his or her environment and the universe as a whole. Among Native cultures, spiritual traditions, which are related to all other aspects of daily living, help to answer universal questions. The designs of many objects of traditional art, including images of the sun, moon, stars, bears, buffalo and other game animals, birds, and humans, represent a knowledge of the environment and spirituality that acknowledges the power and authority of the Creator and symbolizes the relationship of the people to the earth and sky. As the largest mammal and essential source of food and materials for clothing, lodge covers, and other necessities, the buffalo was often artistically depicted and was the center of ceremonial life for Plains hunters.
Place in the Universe: Contributions to Science
In the early nineteenth century, artists who recorded images of American Indians were motivated by an impulse to understand the world by describing and categorizing it. Europeans' views of the world were changed in the encounter with the North American continent. A belief in the rational ordering of the universe and the growth of the discipline of science required the gathering and dissemination of information and knowledge. The function of describing is especially important when the viewer has little knowledge of the subject, as was the case with American Indian subjects depicted by non-Indian artists. Working in an American society that was only beginning to develop a national art, Euro-American artists cited the primary value of their Indian paintings as documentary, yet they brought their cultural values to that process.
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Recording of History
The recording of historical moments has been another important motivation in the creation of Indian images. The history of the United States has been tied closely to the documenting of the expansion of the nation across the continent. Canadian history has offered an interesting parallel. Since the European Renaissance, the category of history painting, which portrays notable human activity, was considered one of the most noble forms of artmaking. American artists inherited a tradition that places their narratives in a context of human accomplishment. Those accomplishments have traditionally included the vanquishing of enemies. Thus, Indians became the foil, the enemy worthy of conquest.
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Recording History
Art may be used to record and retell cultural and personal histories. Both individual achievements and specific historical events are depicted in petroglyphs, hide paintings, tipi covers, ledger art, and other materials. Plains Indian people commemorated important events each year in winter counts on hides, that served as calendar histories.
Pictographic hide paintings, tipi covers, and ledger drawings were used to record warriors' accomplishments in capturing horses or in battle. Among many Indian people, such war deeds are accredited to assistance from more powerful beings. Retelling the stories and recording them in drawings or carvings reinforces and reminds the people of those blessings. Although such images of hunting, horse raiding, and warfare are sources of stereotypes in literature and film, for the warriors these drawings are real scenes from their own lives.
Ledger Drawings, Tsistsistas (Southern Cheyenne), Oklahoma, ca. 1894-95. Paper, pencil, watercolor, crayon. Buffalo Bill Historical Center. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Katz.
In the 1860s, Plains warriors began to illustrate their battle exploits in ledger and sketch books obtained through traders or government agents. Pencils, ink pens, watercolors, and crayons replaced the natural pigments and stick and bone brushes that had been used for drawings on hide. These drawings of a lone warrior and a running battle are part of a sketchbook of one hundred twenty-four illustrations by four Southern Cheyenne scouts at Fort Supply, Oklahoma identified as Kiowa, Sweetwater, Guilopin ( or Galloping), and Little Man.
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Cultural Identity
In Euro-American culture, the concept of the fine arts is a mark of cultural identity. Contrast between cultures is implicit in many Euro-American representations of American Indian subject matter. Paintings about Indians sometimes deal with the Indian as a "primitive" person, living in simplicity, in harmony with nature. This ideal can be a criticism of a culture that is seen as less progressive than Euro-American culture. It can also represent a yearning for a simpler way of life.
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Art as Cultural Identity and Survival
By the late 1870s, reservations had been established for tribes in Canada and the United States. For the Plains tribes, the massacre of Lakota adherents to the Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee in December 1890, signaled the end of the old way of life. Despite the desperate conditions of the reservation, the people made valiant efforts to preserve and protect their traditions, ceremonies, and communities.
During the reservation period, traditional materials, such as decorated clothing, became increasingly important to people as a means of establishing their identities as Indian people and as tribal members. Women also produced moccasins, clothing and other traditional objects and novelties for sale to individuals and through trading posts to augment family incomes. The rise in popularity of the intertribal powwow after World War II also provided the venue for the establishment of tribal clothing styles.
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Economic Motivations
An obvious motivation underlies the creation of most works of art: the creation of objects of economic value that can be traded or sold for necessities or enhanced status. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and Canadian society, the growing leisure classes with accumulated wealth provided a market for works of art. Euro-American artists found that Indian subjects sold.
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