Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880

8. Indigenous Illustration

( 200 ) chapter Eight indigenous illustration pictorial illustration —a central feature of the printing revolution in nineteenth-century America—came more slowly to Indian Country than to the rest of North America. Its gradual and uneven dispersal in tribal communities was due in part to the complex technologies involved in producing steel plate engravings and chromolithographs, those techniques of illustration that turned American weeklies into a “a carnival on the page.”¹ But pictures had always been on the minds of missionary publishers, whose spellers and primers were amply illustrated with woodcuts, a less expensive and simpler form of illustration (figure 29). Indian literacy texts (like ones made for Anglo-American children) had traditionally been accompanied by some form of pictorial illustration. Many Indian spellers, however, appear to have sometimes included pictures because of the general assumption that if Native Americans had anything like writing at all, it was “picture writing”—to borrow a phrase from Garrick Mallery’s influential nineteenth-century study of pictographic systems in the Western Hemisphere. Even the spoken forms of Native semiotic production, early ethnographers theorized, were based on object, metaphor, and image.² The convergence of type and image in Indian Country also derived from the fact that during the period that Native communities were establishing printing presses Euro-American periodical and book illustration was reaching its high point. Lithographic firms like Currier and Ives were churning out hundreds of thousands of cheap reproductions of genre paintings and historical scenes. Brian Le Beau has argued that such images “were the leading source of popular culture in America.”³ Woodcuts also made a significant contribution to this popular culture of images. Sue Rainey points out that “prints made from woodblocks were a popular feature of the inexpensive, Indigenous Illustration ( 201 ) large-circulation newspapers and magazines . . . and their wide distribution made possible a common cultural experience that bridged class divisions.”⁴ Like movable type, pictorial illustration did eventually become a fairly common material practice in Native communities that had adopted some form of alphabetic literacy by the 1880s. We have already seen how Elias Boudinot quickly harnessed the power of printed illustration to the Cherokee press’s more general project of printing “laws and public documents of the Nation.”The illustrated editions of Poor Sarah (1846) and The Dairyman’s Daughter (1847) that he published were cheap steady sellers from the EuroAmerican popular religious canon translated into the Sequoyah syllabary. Boudinot was not alone in recognizing the power of this new technology available to printers in mid-nineteenth-century America. In chapter 6, we saw how Native authors like William Apess and George Copway deployed authorial frontispiece illustrations to influence how their readers approached Indian life stories. By 1891, on the Great Plains, pictorial illustration had begun to permeate even the everyday life of leaders on the reservations. A photograph from the period—captioned “The Bed Room of American Horse”—graphically illustrates how some Native people had begun to incorporate lithographs, Figure 29. “Prayer after Reading,” in Abraham Luckenbach, Fortysix Select Scripture Narratives from the Old Testament (1848). Courtesy of Edward E. Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. ( 202 ) Indigenous Illustration postcards, and photography into the decor of their dwelling places (figure 30).The pictured house belonged to the Oglala warrior Wasechum Tashunka (American Horse). He had come to prominence in 1866 during the Bozeman Trail War and had signed the 1887 treaty that ceded half the Dakota Territory to the United States, finalizing the settlement of the Pine Ridge Reservation . By 1891, when the photograph was taken, American Horse had moved from a traditional Plains tepee into a Euro-American–style cabin, complete with woodstove, trunk, and bed. This type of dwelling was becoming more common among the Lakota settled at Pine Ridge, and there is evidence that another prominent leader, Red Cloud, had a similar home adorned with pictorial illustrations, as well as a prominently displayed American flag.⁵ These photographs of image-decorated walls, cast-iron stoves, and European-style beds were often taken to show evidence of the rise of “civilization ”at Pine Ridge,but in some ways they reflect continuity with traditional Lakota practice.In the days before the reservation,although American Horse and Red Cloud would have lived in tepees, they would still have inhabited a world of vivid pictorial images. From the Kiowa in the south to the Blackfeet Figure 30. “The Bed Room of American Horse” (1891). Courtesy of...