Nineteenth-century Plains Indian drawings

The prisoners at Fort Marion were seen as proof that education and religious conversion would solve the "Indian problem" more nobly than annihilation. During the next few decades some of the former prisoners at Fort Marion were members of the first classes of Indian students in such schools as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania and the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Later generations of students wrote of their experiences at these schools, but the Fort Marion drawings remain the first native accounts of the white culture, rendered when the autobiographical tradition was still almost entirely oral and pictorial.

By the mid-nineteenth century white men had become a familiar sight to most Indians across the Great Plains. However, women and black men remained more exotic subjects for native artists. One ledger book of drawings, completed in 1884 at the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency in Indian Territory, offers a rare glimpse of black soldiers [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XIX OMITTED].

One Indian artist who endeavored to record traditional ceremonies, clothing, and culture was Black Hawk, a Lakota of the Sans Arc band, who worked during the bitter winter of 1880-1881 on drawings he sold for fifty cents apiece to the Indian trader at the Cheyenne River Agency in Dakota Territory [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XX OMITTED]. In so doing, he was not only providing food for his family but also reminding them of the richness of their culture even in times of extreme hardship. He opened a vivid window into Lakota ceremonialism as depicted by a Lakota, rather than by an anthropologist of another culture.

Many of the surviving Plains Indian drawings on paper were made to be circulated within a native culture. In addition, many artists made drawings to sell to outsiders. Yet even producing drawings for sale held profound meaning for the makers. It was an act of resistance; by chronicling the old ways they could keep them alive.

A traveling exhibition entitled Plains Indian Drawings, 1865-1935: Pages From a Visual History will be on view at the Drawing Center in New York City from November 5 until December 21. Future showings will be listed in Calendar. The exhibition was organized by the Drawing Center and the American Federation of Arts. Philip Morris Companies, Incorporated, is the sponsor of the national tour. The curators of the exhibition are Janet Catherine Berlo and Gerald McMaster, and the catalogue was edited by Janet Berlo.

1 letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841; New York, 1973), vol. 2, p. 42.

2 See ANTIQUES, October 1993, pp. 530-539.

3 "The Journal of Rudolph Friedrich Kurz," ed. J. N. B. Hewitt, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, vol. 115 (1937), p. 77.

4 Quoted in Jacqueline Peterson with Laura Peers, Sacred Encounters: Father DeSmet and the Indians of the Rocky Mountain West (Norman, Oklahoma, 1993), p. 108.

5 Quoted in Peter J. Powell, "They Drew from Power: An Introduction to Northern Cheyenne Ledger Book Art," in Montana Past and Present, Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, April 5, 1975, ed. P. J. Powell and M. Malone (Los Angeles, 1976), p. 38.