Women and Ledger Art: Four Contemporary Native American Artists

Introduction: From Hides to Paper

introduCtion | 1 i n t r o d u C t i o n From Hides to Paper In the early nineteenth century, warriors painted pictographic narratives of their heroic deeds on their robes and tipis as a way of bringing honor to their families and tribes as well as themselves. These narratives could be readily understood not only by everyone in their tribes but also by other Plains Indians.1 Women’s art played a complementary and more pervasive role, and required a great amount of their time and energy. Rather than making narrative pictures, they quilled and beaded abstract designs on their families’ clothing. Their art was important in “confirming and maintaining kinship relations,” bringing prestige to their families, and preserving the basic values of their tribe. The source of this complementarity was “deeply embedded in [their] tribal memories.”2 Father Peter Powell, who was invited to be a privileged participant in the sacred ceremonies of the Northern Cheyenne, exemplifies this point in his account of their migration from Minnesota west to the Black Hills and then down to the high plains. Mahuts, the Sacred Arrows, and Is’siwun, the Sacred Buffalo Hat, now provided the supernatural power by which life could be lived in this beautiful but harsh new home, this prairie world where hunting and war would become dominant over the older agricultural ways. The Sacred Arrows not only bound the entire tribe to Maheo, the All Father. They were, and for conservative Cheyennes still are, the supreme symbols and sources of male power. Through Mahuts , the All Father gives the Cheyenne men power over other men as well as power over the animals. Is’siwun, the Sacred Buffalo Hat, is the great symbol and source of female renewing power. Therefore , throughout this book, I refer to the Sacred Hat as “She.” Is’siwun’s power renewed the buffalo herds 2 | womEn and lEdGEr art of the past, as well as the cattle herds of the present. It was through the Buffalo Hat that the Sun Dance first came to the Suhtai people, and when the Suhtaio merged with the Cheyenne proper, they brought the Sun Dance with them. It is in the Sun Dance that a Sacred Woman, as well as the male Pledger, offers the sacrifice of her body. Thus, in the Sun Dance, woman joins with man in bringing about the renewal of the Cheyennes and their world. Through the supernatural power of the Arrows and Buffalo Hat, the male and female relationships in Cheyenne life are blessed, ensuring continual strength, harmony, and new life for the People and their world.3 While men and women played complementary roles, Plains Indians were traditionally flexible in their attitude toward gender roles. They exercised different forms of power and achieved different kinds of success, and they were honored in different ways. But some women accompanied their husbands on the battlefield and often performed a variety of heroic feats, including those of a woman warrior. Their heroic deeds on the battlefield were passed down orally through the generations. But nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropologists were not interested in stories of heroic women. During the winter of 1833–1834, Swiss artist Karl Bodmer accompanied the German explorer Prince Maximilian on a tour of the West. When he visited the great Mandan chief Mato-Tope (Four Bears), he painted several portraits of the chief and provided him with pencils, paint, and paper. Like many warriors, Mato-Tope had already developed great skill in painting stylized pictographs of his heroic deeds on hide. As a result of Bodmer’s influence and by using his materials, Louise Lincoln points out, Mato-Tope’s pictographic style became more realistically detailed, and he employed more narrative action. The change can be seen in a pictographic drawing that Mato-Tope made for Prince Maximilian with Bodmer’s materials. In this detailed narrative, the chief “brandishes a tomahawk in one hand, while sustaining a wound in the other hand from the knife he ultimately wrested from his assailant before killing him with it.”4 Maximilian, in turn, paid tribute to Mato-Tope by publishing the drawing in the Atlas accompanying his Travels in the Interior of North America. This stylistic change became widespread among warriors throughout the Plains, particularly once pictures in newspapers and books became more available.5 By the 1840s, paper was more readily available in the form of autograph books, sketch pads, note paper, stationery, and balance sheets—which were...