George Flett: Ledger Art (review)

George Flett lives on the Spokane Reservation, where his family has played a prominent role in tribal affairs for many generations. His mother, a well-known storyteller, has passed the storytelling tradition down to him. In George Flett: Ledger Art he now passes these stories down to the next Spokane generation—and also to us—in accurate pictographic detail and compelling visual arrangements. He draws his images on not only ledger pages, but also maps, Western Union telegrams, a tribal census, Congressional Records, stock certificates, and World War II ration books.

George Flett: Ledger Art is a beautifully produced book housed in a cloth-covered, inlaid slipcover. It contains thirty-seven plates and five illustrative photographs, along with a rich and valuable introduction by Scott M. Thompson. Thompson is a teacher, artist, scholar/craftsman of Plains and Plateau Indian culture, and author of I Will Tell of My War Story: A Pictorial Account of the Nez Perce War. Steeped in Spokane culture and a longtime friend of the artist, he explicates Flett’s use of color and clothing design. He also elaborates on the oral tradition—where storytellers employed a variety of voices, gestures, pauses, and facial expressions. And he points out the specific ways Flett translates these dramatic conventions into his storytelling images. Indeed, part of what distinguishes this collection are the storytelling figures and subtitles that are implicitly in the past tense, or a written story serving as present retelling. For example, in “Warrior’s Dream” there is the subtitle “In my dreams I met with the Upper, Middle, and Lower Spokane Chiefs Near Oyaken Creek.” On the left-hand side of this drawing is a penciled figure of Strong Eagle, along with his name glyph, while to his right (in the important pictographic position) are the three chiefs, whose colorful attire is explicated by Thompson. And in “Story of a Prairie Chicken Dance,” as Thompson explains, a storyteller uses words and actions (in a series of images) to relate his tale to an attentive audience. Flett, I should add, has popularized the Prairie Chicken Dance in the Northwest through drawings that vividly capture the vitality of the dress and movement. He has sponsored Prairie Chicken Dance contests on the Spokane Reservation, and last year he brought a group of drummers with him for an exhibition of his work in California.¹

What also distinguishes the drawings in this collection are, first, Flett’s complex use of adjoining and overlapping mixed media (which add material and historical dimensions to his stories) and, second, his use of photo transfers, thought images, and embossed images of memories and spirit helpers. As a result we can come close to seeing the way Native people saw their world. Flett talks about “layering”: “Layers not only of time—from ancestral to the current day to future generations—but he also sees spiritual layers.”² Hence we see not only the action of a historical character but his thoughts, dreams, memories, and spirit helper. And the embossed images make their presence felt as well as seen as the light changes, literally adding a spiritual dimension to the work.

One of the most interesting of these mixed-media pieces, “Spear in the Ground,” contains a pictographic story of Flett’s maternal grandfather, who was left in a cradleboard leaning against a spear in the root-digging plains. Knowing that she could not take care of him, his mother had placed him on a regularly traveled route. She left when she heard someone coming, and the couple riding along the trail knew they were meant to take him. The story is drawn in colored pencils on a cash book page, which has been burned into the shape of a buffalo robe. Flett both appropriates this material record of Western expansion, using it to record his own individual/tribal history, and shapes the Western accounting page into a form of traditional Native clothing. Moreover, he places the transformed cash book page upon a faded Department of the Interior...