Visitors to the Hood Museum's current exhibit should search for signs of the vibrancy and unique wisdom of Native life in the art displayed, Colin Calloway, professor of history and Native American studies at the College at a panel on Friday. The panel, moderated by Calloway, featured Joe Horse Capture, assistant curator at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, and University of New Mexico art professor Joyce Szabo.
Men such as Dartmouth College founder Eleazar Wheelock and Fort Marion proprietor Richard Henry Pratt attempted to "civilize" Native peoples, believing that westerners had nothing to learn from Indians, Calloway said. According to Calloway, the current Hood exhibition gives Dartmouth students "the opportunity to see things [about Native culture] that Eleazar Wheelock and Richard Henry Pratt missed."
Ledger art is a medium of self expression that developed among Plains Indian men as they reacted to the encroachment of Euro-American settlers on the Native land and way of life in the second half of the 19th century, according to a press release about the exhibit. For example, when several hundred Apache men were imprisoned and subjected to a harsh program of western assimilation at Fort Marion in Florida, they attempted to preserve their Native culture and record their reactions to an enforced non-Native way of life with ledger drawings.
Rendered on pages of account books provided to Indians by white settlers, traders and military officials, these drawings are generally small, colorful and finely detailed. According to the press release, they borrowed from and build upon the ancient Native tradition of recording exploits in hunting and battle pictorially on rocks, buffalo hides and tipis. Indeed, ledger drawings illustrate a wide variety of traditional scenes, from bloody battles to tender courtship sequences, but the context in which they were created one which stifled the Native ability to preserve these traditions established ledger art's universal theme of the Natives' "struggle for cultural survival," according to the press release.
Faced with a body of work so disparate and yet so cohesive, curators grappled with how to organize the show most effectively, Horse Capture said. The curators wanted the exhibit to highlight the stories and experiences of the artists themselves, thus creating a bond between art creator and art examiner, Horse Capture said.
"We wanted to find a way for the audience to make connections with the drawings, so they can make a connection with the people," Horse Capture said.
He cited a Lakota bead worker who had once stressed to him that art, whether beadwork or ledger drawings, should not be thought of as mere "objects." Instead, the bead worker told Horse Capture, art should "come alive," conjuring thoughts of the artist by whom it was imagined and created, he said.
With this manifesto in mind, Horse Capture divided the drawings featured in the exhibit into various theme groups, including topics such as "Day to Day," "Battles with Outsiders" and "Beauty of the Horse." In addition to their aesthetic appeal, the drawings in each of these groups reveal something crucial about Native culture.
Drawings in the "Beauty of the Horse" section of the exhibit, for example, speak to the vital role that the introduction of the horse played in Plains Indian culture. The European import of horses into the Plains changed the dynamics between tribes in the area, with each group competing to accrue as many horses as possible, thereby gaining greater prestige and power. Acquiring more horses granted tribes an advantage in battle and allowed them to kill more buffalo, contributing to both their status and livelihood.
Visually, the drawings in this section highlight the technical skill that ledger artists exhibited. Although the ledger artists lacked formal artistic training, their representations of the "beauty of the horse" display both exquisite detail and inventive use of color.
The bright shades utilized in a ledger drawing of an Osage War Dance, part of the "Day to Day" section, also demonstrate this color savvy. Knees bent and backs crooked, the vibrantly colored dancers in this piece inform viewers of the vivacity and joy of Native ceremonies.
Despite ledger art's clear technical innovation, it only began to be viewed as "real art" in the 1970s, Szabo explained during a question-and-answer section following the panel discussion. Even today, few universities offer students the chance to study Native American art academically, Szabo said.
Dartmouth community members are lucky to have one of the world's largest collections of this unique art form right at their fingertips, Calloway emphasized in his opening address. As such, he has organized a Leslie Center for the Humanities Institute called Multiple Narratives in Plains Ledger Art: The Mark Lansburgh Collection, which will bring major scholars to campus this fall in order to study Dartmouth's vast ledger art collection in a collaborative academic environment.
"Native American Ledger Drawings from the Hood Museum of Art: The Mark Lansburgh Collection" opened Oct. 2, and it will be on display through Dec. 19. A companion exhibition, "Contemporary Native American Ledger Art: Drawing on Tradition," will be on display through Jan. 16.
