Women and Ledger Art: Four Contemporary Native American Artists

Foreword

illustrations | xiii F o r E w o r d Until recently, Plains figurative art on paper, or ledger art, has been considered a male domain. With this book, Richard Pearce develops a history of Plains women artists who have chosen to express themselves through ledger art. These artists seek to provide a woman’s perspective on tribal history, sometimes slightly different than that portrayed by male artists, and thus they serve as revisionists of Plains cultural memory. These women tell us how and why they turned to ledger art to fill in omitted scenes, some not pertinent to a man’s world, which ultimately give women more significant roles in Plains history. Women had actually begun moving from abstract to figurative art in the late nineteenth century, depicting men, women, children, and animals with quill and bead embroidery on clothing and household objects. By the twentieth century, most of this material had been removed from the Plains through sale to collectors and placed in museums or private collections. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present, a proliferation of books on native art history and museum catalogues illustrating in vivid color nineteenth-century Plains art in bead, quill, and hide has appeared. As these materials became accessible to contemporary Plains artists, they were made wonderfully aware of their rich heritage. They lost no time in re-casting old designs and creating new ones. Among the four ledger artists discussed in this book, Sharon Ahtone Harjo and Colleen Cutschall have also painted figures on dresses, and Cutschall has created figurative metal sculpture. Linda Haukaas has created figurative beadwork on the clothing of male dolls. Many other talented women artists—such as Vanessa Paukeigope Jennings, Joyce Growing Thunder Fogarty, Tahnee Harjo Growing Thunder, and Teri Greeves—have created figurative beadwork on hide and cloth dresses, shirts, pipe bags, vests, cradles, dolls, and tennis shoes. This book also emphasizes the cross-cultural nature of ledger art. Pearce calls the art a form of storytelling, xiv | illustrations through which the artists explained themselves, their actions, and their ceremonies to a number of different outside groups. The flat, linear, autobiographical style of fourth-quarter nineteenth-century ledger art grew out of an earlier pictographic style. In the 1830s, Mandan chief Mato-Tope drew pictographs of his personal battles on his hide shirt, as a form of expressing his individual identity and achievements to fellow warriors within his own tribe. But because German prince Maximilian was visiting and asked for a copy of the drawings, which he subsequently published, Mato-Tope’s personal story became crosscultural property. Further, Swiss artist Karl Bodmer was accompanying Maximilian ’s expedition and provided some of the subjects of his paintings with art materials and an opportunity to observe his own detailed and ethnographically accurate portraits of them. American artist George Catlin and Swiss artist Rudolf Kurz continued the policy of sharing drawing styles and materials. The interplay of artistic ideas had begun. Warrior art such as Mato-Tope’s was also created by groups of warriors who had shared the same battle experience and might gather soon afterward to recordtheirheroicdeedstomemoryonacaptureddocument .Anexampleofsuch a war book carried into battle in the 1860s is The Autobiography of Half Moon. This collaborative effort was the work of Cheyenne and Oglala/Hunkpapa Lakota warriors. It was found in a funerary lodge at the Little Bighorn Battlefield.1 What is widely referred to as “ledger art” began between 1874 and 1876 when a group of warriors from five Southern Plains tribes were incarcerated at Fort Marion in Florida. Their supervisor, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, tried to improve morale by supplying paper and drawing materials and encouraging the prisoners to record memories of past deeds, as well as their current life. The intended audiences for these drawings were fellow prisoners of differing tribes, and residents and tourists from nearby St. Augustine who came to view dance performances. Many visitors purchased drawings, and Pratt approved of these sales, hoping that artistic entrepreneurship would encourage assimilation into the dominant culture. After the Fort Marion imprisonment, some of the men went on to study at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania or at Hampton Institute in Virginia and continued to produce drawings on paper and other kinds of art. Meanwhile, some US Army officers, government agents, and other nonnative residents across the western United States, wherever troops were stationed on or near Indian reservations, commissioned drawings from native artists, considering them souvenirs of a vanishing culture. Sometimes the drawings...