Facing new flows: subjectivity and the colonial encounter in Plains Indian art

Abstract

This preliminary evaluation of depictions of the human face among North American Plains Indians elicits questions regarding non-Western approaches to portraiture at the interface between visual regimes and experiential approaches to reality. It shows how the appearance of mimetic naturalism in this regional art reflects more profound changes in perceptions of reality and personhood engendered by the colonial encounter. In so doing, the essay aims at reframing the questions we ask about Native American arts by incorporating indigenous approaches to experience and vision that may help us reformulate how we talk about arts outside the Western canon.

Keywords:

• Native American Art
• Plains Indian Art
• picture writing
• face
• portraiture
• subjectivity
• culture contact

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was carried out during a three-month fellowship (from January to April 2016) at the Sainsbury Research Unit (Norwich, UK). Most grateful thanks go to its staff and students, who helped me to think through many of the issues developed here. Particular thanks go to John Mack, Steve Hooper, George Lau, Fiona Savage, and Aristóteles Barcelos Neto for their insightful remarks. Pat Hewitt, Laura Armstrong, and Jeremy Bartholomew at the Sainsbury Research Unit Library have been indefatigably helpful in retrieving obscure material; a big thanks for their unwavering dedication and support. In the School of Art History and World Art Studies I greatly benefited from numerous conversations with Simon Dell, whose suggestions expanded the theoretical and cross-cultural scope of the research. Further thanks go to the administrative staff at the SRU for their professionalism and help, especially Lynne Crossland and Lisa Farrington whose sympathy and generosity rendered my stay there a true pleasure. Additional thanks go to Stephanie Pratt whose comments on a previous versions have been instrumental in unpacking art-historical idioms. Additional thanks go to Martin Schultz for allowing me to use his photograph of Mato Tope’s self-portrait included here.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Max Carocci (Adjunct Lecturer Museum and Curating MA) Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts, London.

Max Carocci is an anthropologist specialised in the art and cultures of Native North American peoples, which he has taught and researched since 1990. His direct engagement with Native artists and practitioners led him to challenge formalist readings of North American indigenous expressive cultures. This is an approach that he continues to develop in his on-going research started with his first book Warriors of the Plains (McGill University Press/British Museum Press, 2012).

Notes

1. In this article, ‘Plains Indian’ and its synonym ‘Plains peoples’ are used as collective terms for indigenous social groups living in the Great Plains since prehistory.

2. Christopher Miller and George Hamell discuss the process of ‘disenchantment’ in the context of trade transactions between Woodland Indians and Europeans in the eighteenth century. With this term they describe how native perceptions of imported goods changed from mysterious to ordinary, leading to a devaluation of the symbolic function and meanings associated with ritual and sacred objects. This, they maintain, ‘increasingly pushed intercultural exchange out of the symbolic ceremonial realm and into the realm of the white marketplace’ (Miller and Hamell 1986, 326).

3. Scholars unanimously agree on the high level of epistemological homogeneity shared by all tribes living in this area irrespective of linguistic diversity. This uniformity is largely based on knowledge practices and conceptual frames articulated around the vision quest complex and the belief in the possibility of communicating between and across different registers of reality. This paradigm characterises what Lee Irwin calls the Plains ‘visionary episteme’ (Irwin 1994, 18–22; but see also Albers and Parker 1971; DeMallie 2001).

4. A variation of this idea has been more recently developed by David Summers, whose new framework for the study of world arts takes a phenomenological perspective in which he separates art from sight. In so doing he turns his attention to the ‘corporeality and human existence’ that results in the contingent study of humans’ relations to space and time (Summers 2003, 41–42).

5. Marks descending from the eyes are both ancient and common in the iconography of the Great Plains. Archaeological specimens dated to the Upper Republican phase of the Central Plains Tradition show a straight variant of this motif radiating from the eyes (Steinacher and Carlson 1998: 25, Fig. 8.8, second from the left). Such marks can appear in the form of stripes, dots, or waves and they have been variously interpreted as tears, power waves, or tattoos and face paint associated with war cults or activities (Keyser and Sundstrom 2015, 129, 132; Smith and Smith 1989; Sundstrom 2004, 2015).

6. The historical use of masks in the Plains is almost entirely concentrated in the northern and eastern parts of the region, where they were used in animal dances associated with cults and dream societies. These objects could be assembled on frames of wood and canvas, as among the Assiniboines Fool Dancers, Plains Ojibwa Cannibal Dancers, the Lakota Elk Dreamers, the Dakota Tree Dwellers Dreamers, and the Heyoka buffoons (Berlo 2000, 46–55, Figs. 10–17; Howard 1955: Fig 2; Lowie 1909, 65–66, Figs. 15–17; Ray 1945; Skinner 1914, 503, Fig. 6; Sundstrom 2015). Alternatively, they were obtained from animal parts such as heads, fur, horns, or antlers, as in the case of Buffalo dance accoutrements of the Mandan and Northern Arapaho (Baker 2007, 134–135; Hansen 2007, 182), Quapaw (Horse Capture et al. 1993, 134–135), and Blackfoot (Taylor 2013, 46, Fig. 4). Whether partially or fully covering the face and head, the use of masks during dances ensured that the wearers transformed themselves into the animal they were impersonating.

7. Whereas Numakmax Ena appears as an entirely uncarved and undecorated cedar post, Umoⁿ’hoⁿ’ti, although it has no face, bears distinctive features of anthropomorphism; for example it has scalps as hair, and a bowguard revealing its role as protector and provider.

8. Occasional anthropo- and zoomorphic clay figurines from the proto-historical period associated with the Oto-Missouri appeared in the archaeological record after the Coalescent period. James Howard reports that these effigies were regarded in the 1960s by elderly Ponca informants in the 1960s as xúbe – that is, supernatural (Howard 1965, 80).

9. These were areas inhabited by peoples who either retained some degree of historical continuity with prehistoric cultures such as the Pawnee (via the Upper Republican phase, AD 1000–1350), or the Eastern Sioux, who were neighbours of Iroquoian and Algonquian effigy-making groups living in the boreal forests around the Great Lakes. These Woodland peoples were known for their soft stone carvings and clay effigy pipes and, among Iroquoians, wooden ceremonial masks (Ewers 1979, 1986; Hamell 1998; Mathews 1978, 1980; Wright 2004). The production of clay pipes among the Iowa and Eastern Sioux, and masks among the Assiniboine paired with their proximity with Algonquian and Iroquoians groups, has been used to infer direct cultural influxes from the Woodlands to the Plains (Brasser 1987, 101; Skinner 1914, 501–505).

10. Enemy effigies were also produced in rawhide cut-outs by several Plains groups. These images were hung from the central pole of the Sun Dance as an embodiment of the foes to be fought, and by extension, the personification of evil (Ewers 2005; Schwarz 1985).

11. Anecdotally, the Crow had special stones that breathed, gave birth to offspring, and instructed people about where to find buffalos and good weather (Lowie 1922, 385–390).

12. Although not frequent, visualisations of named spirits appear in Plains Indian material production. One example is the anthropomorphic feast bowls made along the eastern and northern fringes of the Plains by numerous tribes. Among the Yankton Sioux, such bowls are the personification of Eyah, the spirit of gluttony whose piercing eyes watch over his extended belly that forms the container itself (Penney and Longfish 1994, 112; but see also Maurer 1986, 12, Fig. 12, 13, Fig. 14).

13. Similar visual strategies to convey the personhood of things and animals is discussed by anthropologist Tim Ingold in his treatment of Inuit visualisations of human–animal relationships (Ingold 2000, 114, Fig. 7.1, 122, Fig. 7.5). The ontological status of animals, things, and natural phenomena as persons has been recorded in Athapaskan and Algonquian societies from the subarctic regions and the boreal forests north and west of the Great Lakes (Goulet 1998; Hallowell 1960). Equally, in the arts of the Northwest Coast the application of conventionalised human characteristics to certain animals marks them as ancestors, a category of social being that is clearly different from other animals. This is even more explicit in the so-called ‘transformation’ masks where the human face appears nested inside outer masks that open to reveal the real nature of the being represented (Morphy 1977, 76).

14. Although personal medicines would be permanently kept in proximity of – or directly on – the body, temporal transfer of powers by handling powerful objects was equally common in Plains Indian practice. In this regard anthropologist Alfred Bowers reports that Mandan women could absorb spiritual power from holding to their breasts sacred bundles offered to them by men impersonating sacred buffaloes. This power would then be transmitted to their husbands in private everyday interactions (Bowers 2004, 336–337). Similar practice is reported among the Crow, where sacred zoomorphic or oddly shaped stones called bacoritsti’ste transmitted their beneficial power by being held against the chest/breast (Lowie 1922, 385–390).

15. If detectable evolutions in artistic styles and motifs are indeed evidence of the emergence of new subjectivities engendered by the colonial encounter, then it should be no coincidence that realistic self-portraits appear first among the native peoples from eastern tribes, which were the first ones to access Euro-American visual cultures. Among the first artists that painted themselves there are Hillis Hadjo, whose self-portrait dates back to 1815 (aka Josiah Francis, Creek 1770c.–1818) (King 1999, 85, Fig. 85), and the reported self portrait of a Ho-Chunk chief on his personal pipe that he produced around 1829 (Ewers 1986, 87).

16. Instances of human–animal transformation and, vice versa, animals turning into humans, are recorded in oral traditions from various linguistic groups of the Plains, from both personal experiences and tribal histories. Stories of ancient beings that demonstrate their true nature under the shape of another species abound and are too numerous to mention. Among the most well-known are the Arikara, who narrate the transformations of Bear woman (Parks 1996, 146) and Buffalo woman (Dorsey, cited in Harrod 2000, 55–56), and the Hidatsa who tell of the eagles that turned into men (Bowers 1992, 469). The Crow describe how a hawk shapeshifted into a human being (Lowie 1922, 326), while the Cheyenne report of the inverse process: a man who was favoured by the eagles and changed into one (Grinnell 1972, Vol. II: 108).

17. Similar attitudes to the European art of portraiture were recorded among the Algonquian-speaking Salteaux (or Northern Ojibwa) around the same period by Canadian artist Paul Kane (1810–1871) who reports the recalcitrance of women to be painted for fear that the process may endanger their life (Kane 1968, 69). In the case of the Dakotas painted by draughtsman Seth Eastman (1808–1875) in the 1830s, his wife recorded how his abilities in rendering people’s likeness was by all considered wakan, a term that in the Siouan Dakota language has the connotation of mysterious, sacred, and awesome (White 1994, 385). In the words of anthropologist Raymond DeMallie, this term conveys the sense of ‘anything that cannot be explained’ (cited in White 1994, 384).

18. The fact that despite the first stage of resistance Catlin’s pictorial skill granted him the status of ‘great medicine man’ (Catlin 1973, vol. 1, 106–107) is further evidence that portraiture could be a means to elevating one’s rank through spiritual medicine at the time when competition for goods, guns, and horses had started replacing status obtained through visions (Albers and Parker 1971; Keyser 1979; Mishkin 1992). Further evidence of the power attributed to portraiture can be found in Maximilian’s account of one of Karl Bodmer’s Piegan sitters (Pioch-Kiaiu, or The Distant Bear) who reported of his satisfaction of not being hurt after a battle against the Assiniboines, which was surely because of the strong medicine contained in his portrait (Thomas and Ronnefeldt 1976, 132).