Legacy of the West by David C. Hunt (review)

Reviews 159 A translated poem may hang mobile in space like the leaves on a tree. It may serpentine through a Hopi rain dance in stately choral strophes, arrange itself in a Navajo origin myth as patiently as strata in a canyon wall, or burst freely around Plains drumming and chant­ ing. A translation may lap quietly as lake ripples beaching on a Chippewa shore, or stalk powerfully through darkness over a broken Iroquois terrain. It may soar with the Trickster Raven over the Pacific Northwest, or descend into itself, as kachina gods disappear­ ing into a kiva. Lincoln describes translation as the fundamental vehicle of spiritual transmission. Rather than the blurred “oneness” stressed by well-meaning observers whose vision has not come clear, Lincoln’s interpretive rite unwraps the complementarity between unity and relationship: “Controversies over breed and blood, urban and ‘res,’conservation and progress, ‘going back’ and coming forward, your tribe and mine, set up the dynamics of being who we are in the world. In Indian thought, we are native to ourselves, tribal to our given peoples, relative to all life forms, ritual to powers that spirit us. The original ‘What-Moves-moves’ in the world renews all of us continually, con­ stantly, at our best without fear of change, trusting in seasonal continuities. The renaissance or rebirth of all cultures, alive in spoken, sung, and signed literature, lies here in acts of translation” (p. 40). Native American Renaissance may well precipitate the emergence of more voices than the ones it translates. Lincoln manifests a literary event by engaging us in its spirit. The imparting of that spirit to the literature and criticism of his readers will fulfill Lincoln’s translative rite. JULIAN C. RICE, Florida Atlantic University Legacy of the West. By David C. Hunt. With a Contribution by Marsha V. Gallagher. (Omaha, Nebraska: Center for Western Studies, Joslyn Art Mu­ seum, 1982. 157 pages, $18.95.) The lavishly designed and well-illustrated catalogue presents the western American paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, and other pieces of art in the Joslyn Art Museum of Omaha, Nebraska. Appended are fifteen pages with descriptions and pictures of representative Indian art and artifacts that provide a glimpse at the Museum’s ethnographic collection. The publication is a companion volume to The West as Romantic Horizon, which a year earlier featured the holdings of The InterNorth Art Foundation on permanent loan with the Joslyn. Together both catalogues intend to give “a compre­ hensive overview of the magnitude of these collections,” the Museum’s direc­ tor, Henry Flood Robert, Jr., explained in his Foreword. They also constitute a splendidly displayed survey of the complexity of western American art. 160 Western American Literature The numbers and the range of the some 260 works attest to the stature of the Joslyn among a handful of important centers of western American art. At the same time they attest to the lack of an accepted definition for that category of American art as a consequence of the ever-changing limits of “the West” as a historical reality and cultural construct. For his essay on “The Artists’ Legacy of the West” and for his “Western Print Catalogue Entries,” David C. Hunt, the Museum’s Curator of Western American Art, considered germane all “works in the Joslyn’s permanent inventory that can be identified with the frontier West of the nineteenth century” (p. 38). To the artists of these materials he added more recent representatives from the roughly twenty painters of the some sixty regional pieces in the Joslyn closely linked to themes considered western by convention. And finally, some of the ongoing fascination of painters with western scenery and a segment of American art contributed by Indian artists also received his attention. With these admixtures, the principle of selection does not rely on the time when a work of art was produced but on its regional link, its topic so to say. As useful as this approach to a definition of western American art may have been for the compilation of the catalogue, one could ponder its implica­ tion for an understanding of the significance of that art in the large context of nineteenth-century art or...