Art102: Art History 2

New Ways of Exploring the Old West

By: Deborah Weisgall

The New York Times, March 1, 1998

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VER THE last 30 years, the telling of American history, especially the history of the American West, has undergone fundamental changes. In counterpoint to the traditional European-American tale of triumphant exploration and conquest, a complicated narrative has emerged: stories, told in many different voices, of threatened native cultures and displaced populations. And as ideas of history have changed, museums devoted to the West have had to reinvent themselves. The exhibition "Powerful Images: Persistent Voices," at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, is, in effect, a show about this process of reassessment.

"Powerful Images" juxtaposes 125 European-American and Indian objects to explore the myths and realities of American Indian culture. A war bonnet, for instance, is an image almost synonymous with American Indians. Three objects from the show display that motif, and each carries a very different meaning. One is an actual Lakota war bonnet, almost eight feet tall, made from eagle feathers, otter and ermine, buckskin, porcupine quills and beads. Another is John M. Stanley's 1857 painting "The Last of Their Race," in which an American Indian stands on the shore of the Pacific Ocean in the setting sun, his head bowed in defeat. He is wearing a bedraggled war bonnet, its plumage askew. In a third, the profile of an Indian in a war bonnet decorates a can of Calumet baking soda.

John Mix Stanley, Last of the race

In each case, the object's cultural context is as important as the object itself. The show wants the viewer to ask: "Is the war bonnet a work of art, an artifact or a symbol of a people? What are the assumptions informing 'The Last of Their Race'? And what does the baking-soda trademark say about attitudes toward the Indian?" The curators also want to highlight a larger issue: the tension between the story inherent in an object and the story that emerges from it in a museum context.

Organized by Museums West, a consortium of 10 museums whose collections focus on the American and Canadian West and American Indian peoples, the show has been seven years in the making and will travel to the member museums in the group until the year 2000. "It was an introspective vision," said Peter Hassrick, the former director of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo., who instigated both the consortium and the exhibition. "We asked ourselves: 'What is it that museums do to construct an image of the people they're interested in? What do they do to affect public perception?' And then we went farther, to ask: 'What does the public perceive? What do Indians perceive about themselves?' "

"Powerful Images" marks how far many of the participating museums have come from their original missions. The Buffalo Bill Historical Institute, for instance, was initially established to memorialize the soldier, scout and impresario whose Wild West shows, touring the United States and Europe, established the enduring stereotype of the Indian: a hunter who rode horses and killed buffalo. Now it contains definitive collections of Western and Plains Indian art. The Cowboy Hall of Fame began as an effort to preserve the legend of the cowboy and the free, unfenced West; it now houses serious collections of Indian art.

Although these museums have changed, ingrained attitudes, represented by the powerful images of the exhibition's title, shift very slowly. "People are still disappointed because they want Indians to stay the same, and stay in the 19th century," said Emma I. Hansen, a Pawnee and the curator of the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center who put together the exhibition's section of American Indian objects.

One of the most persistent misconceptions is the idea of the disappearance of Indian nations. From the early 19th century, European-Americans assumed that natives were doomed; their extinction was part of the cost of possessing paradise, the marvelous American wilderness. Nineteenth-century artists like George Catlin and Karl Bodmer, who painted portraits of Indians and scenes from their lives, were of the same generation as John James Audubon; they were naturalists and adventurers, heroes of their own romances. Catlin spent the years from 1832 to 1836 among the Indians of the Great Plains. He published his observations as "Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians."

Discounting the Indians' ways of remembering—their stories and the decorations on their objects—Catlin believed that Indians had "no historians or biographers of their own to portray with fidelity their native looks and history." His intended audience was, of course, European-American, not Indian.

"We have to make sure that this is not the only source of historical information about Indian peoples," said Sarah Boehme, curator of the Whitney Gallery of Western Art at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center and the organizer of the European-American portion of the show. "We have to look at this material within its context."

Artists like Catlin and Bodmer influenced more than a century of followers, transmuting what had begun as scientific inquiry into the perpetuation of a myth about the fate and characteristics of Indian peoples. Frederic Remington, for example, cast Indians as savage enemies; his bronze "The Cheyenne," which is in the show, dates from 1902, more than 20 years after the end of the Indian Wars. In 1973, relying on a 19th-century vocabulary as if the modernist movement in art had not happened, John Clymer painted "Tribal Hunt" as if buffalo had not become almost extinct and Indians had not long since been confined to reservations.

The Cheyenne, 1901; this cast, by March 1907, Frederic Remington (American, 1861–1909), Bronze; 20 1/4 x 25 x 8 in. (51.4 x 63.5 x 20.3 cm)

John Clymer (1907 - 1989), Tribal Hunt, 1972, oil on canvas

Not all of these myths about Indians were negative. William M. Stanley painted "The Last of Their Race" after participating in an expedition to lay out a possible route for the transcontinental railroad; Isaac I. Stevens, the leader of that expedition, owned the painting. It is far more sophisticated than Catlin's rough-and-ready work; Stanley deploys a full array of academic techniques to dramatize the tragedy of noble tribes. It depicts the outcome of an implied battle; the victors, of course, were the people looking at the painting.

Although European-American paintings and bronzes in the show date from the 1820's, the earliest Indian object, an Osage quirt, or riding whip, dates from 1850. Ms. Hansen explained that "most ethnographic material before that date is very rare."

"Objects were used up; materials were recycled," she said. "These objects were not created as art. There is no equivalent word in any Indian language for 'art.' They were not artifacts either or remnants of an extinct culture. They were a vital part of life."

The significance of such objects was often misinterpreted by European-Americans. That Lakota war bonnet, for instance, was never worn into battle. "Eagle feathers signified bravery," Ms. Hansen said. "The bonnet was made for an elder who had earned it, who had once been a warrior. But at this point in his life, he would have been a man of peace."

Perhaps, then, the image on the Calumet baking-soda can is not so farfetched; a calumet, is, after all, a peace pipe. But it is the appropriation of this image that the show questions, the transformation of Indian into trademark and the effects of such stereotypes on American Indians themselves.

In the last 30 years, these stereotypes have broken down somewhat, but they remain strong. As late as 1980, Cecilia Yazzie, a Navajo weaver made a hanging featuring astronauts. Her friends objected to the subject matter and told her that astronauts were not appropriate for a weaving. She replied that she had visited the Kennedy Space Center, and it was a part of her life.

Perhaps the most crucial question that "Powerful Images" raises is being asked about all kinds of art: what does it tell of its particular time and set of circumstances? "The Last of Their Race" reveals more about John M. Stanley and his mid-19th-century belief in Manifest Destiny than it does about Indians on the canvas. The Lakota war bonnet, a key to understanding the Lakota conception of the stages of life, also points to a tragic episode in Lakota history.

In 1889, some Plains Indians, dying from disease and starvation on reservations, believed that if they lived peacefully, worked hard and performed the ghost dance, the dead would come back, game would be plentiful, the white man would disappear, and the old way of life would return. This was a moment when, for profoundly different reasons, both European-Americans and Indians shared a longing for the old way of life—the former because they had no more territory for expansion, the latter because they saw no future. The exhibition includes a rare Southern Arapaho ghost-dance dress decorated with moons and stars and animals, symbols of the spirit world. In 1890, the year the war bonnet was made, Lakota believers in the ghost dance were massacred at Wounded Knee.

But despite efforts to eradicate it, Indian culture flowered on reservations, where it often incorporated new materials and new inspirations. A Crow cradle board, for instance, dating from 1900, is elaborately decorated with white and turquoise beadwork. The motif of stylized flowers came from a European-American pattern printed on cloth, one example of the ways Indian culture survived and changed.

"Objects mean different things," Ms. Hansen said. "They have different voices." "Powerful Images" illustrates how museums have learned to ask questions; now it asks viewers to look past familiarity and listen to what else these images have to say.