Contested Spaces of Early America

Chapter 11. Toward an Indigenous Art History of the West: The Segesser Hide Paintings

chapter 11  Toward an Indigenous Art History of the West: The Segesser Hide Paintings Ned Blackhawk Few have ever pronounced the history of the Americas to be, first and foremost, a history of the indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere. Certainly, the national histories of the nation-states of North and South America do not support such a contention, but the growing prominence of Native Americans within narratives of borderlands history invites such consideration. As a generation of scholarship has now demonstrated, across multiple imperial realms, throughout centuries of historical change, and amid massive economic and demographic transformations, the Native peoples of North America not only endured the brunt of European colonization but also directed the processes of the continent’s historical development . They did so moreover following millennia of autonomous social and cultural developments. Indeed, as Brian DeLay writes, ‘‘By the early 1820s, more than a dozen generations after Columbus, indigenous polities still controlled between half and three-quarters of the continental landmass claimed by the hemisphere’s remaining colonies and newly independent states.’’1 Surely, such indigenous histories compose an enduring and central feature of the hemisphere’s historical landscape. Unlike virtually all other fields of North American historical inquiry, borderlands histories have explored such developments, lodging new places, people, and paradigms within the vocabulary of particularly early American history.2 While the general contours of such historiographic transformations are increasingly coming into focus, the institutional structures that have guided such scholarly developments remain less apparent. Indigenous Art History 277 As in any field of historical inquiry, the countless archivists, bibliographers, translators, and related scholars fueling the production of work are often recognized solely within the acknowledgments of monographs, grants, and specialized journals. The field’s recent ascendency stands on the shoulders of so many. Few developments in borderlands historiography are as surprising as those associated with the discovery by the Swiss ethnographer Gottfried Hotz after World War II of a set of extraordinary paintings. Notified about the presence of two extensive wall hangings within the Lucerne castle of the venerable Segesser family, Hotz initiated a decades-long inquiry to discern the origins and ultimate meanings of these ‘‘Segesser hide paintings,’’ as they would eventually become known. Hotz’s research would identify the distant family member, Philip von Segesser, who sent these remarkable items from the northern reaches of New Spain back to Switzerland as well as the likely motivations fueling their production. Hotz would also publish the classic work about these ‘‘Indian skin paintings,’’ leading eventually to their return to New Mexico on March 11, 1986, over two and a half centuries after their creation.3 They currently reside in Santa Fe at the Palace of the Governors Museum, where, according to the former museum director Thomas E. Chávez, they ‘‘are viewed at home by some one hundred thousand annually.’’4 (See Plate 4.) Much like the emergence of borderlands history as a leading feature of twenty-first-century American historical inquiry, these paintings provide alternative conceptual and spatial perspectives on North America’s eighteenth-century past. As borderlands histories have questioned the teleological narrative of an American history that has equated early America with exclusively British North America, numerous studies have made the study of economic, social, and political relations within and between imperial and American Indian communities an increasingly recognizable feature of early American history. Military affairs and violent social relations have received particular attention, and historicizing the adaptations of indigenous peoples to varying cycles of colonial expansion has provided methods for assessing the extent and forms of colonialism’s multiple, disruptive influences across Indian homelands. Colonial violence, however, belies summation and comprehension, as the transmission and receipt of pain remains one of the least communicable sensory experiences. As Karl Jacoby has suggested, ‘‘Unlike almost any other object of historical study, violence simultaneously destroys and 278 Ned Blackhawk creates history. . . . One of the most immediate manifestations of violence is thus a terrifying silence that no testimony of the past can fathom in its entirety.’’5 Moreover, throughout the course of American history, internecine relations of indigenous violence have largely occurred outside of the immediate spheres of colonial observation and documentation. The Segesser hide paintings allow us simultaneously to assess such processes and to recognize such ‘‘terrifying silences.’’ Borderlands and U.S. western historians have, for generations, assessed the histories of indigenous and equestrian warfare in the American West, but, while...