Accounts of Indian Life

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Accounts of Indian Life

 Plains Indian men used to wear stories on their backs. Buffalo skins
painted with the wearer's exploits in battle or the brave acts of his
tribesmen were used to show status and displayed on ceremonial occasions.
But beginning in the 1860s and 1870s, as the destruction of buffalo herds
made hides scarce and Plains people were forced onto reservations, they
began to use new materials to tell their stories. They drew with pencils
and crayons on paper, often on the lined pages of ledgers obtained at
trading posts or in raids.

The medium changed the message. Just as the tribes' own movements were now
conscribed, artists were forced to find ways to render large movements
onto a smaller surface, and developed a shorthand four horseheads, for
example, to show four stolen horses. And while hide art and early ledger
art depicted battles, later drawings in ledgers, which could be shown more
privately than buffalo skins, usually depicted domestic scenes:
ceremonies, courtship, and rituals.

More than 200 such ledgers exist, according to Ross Frank, an associate
professor of ethnic studies at the University of California at San Diego.
But they have been scattered among various collections or even taken apart
by dealers eager to cash in on the market for American Indian art. Mr.
Frank is working to preserve the books and keep them intact. His Plains
Indian Ledger Art Project creates digital reproductions of entire ledger
books that scholars and the public can browse on a Web site.

"Things matter in terms of their context," says Mr. Frank. "The way
drawings are arranged in a book may have larger ramifications that are
simply lost when the book is split up."

"Some of the ledgers were drawn by one artist, some by several, but in all
cases, the act of drawing was a communal one because the scenes depicted
were communally recognized deeds," he says. Much of the research done so
far on the ledger drawings has been an effort to identify ethnological
elements, such as the dress, decoration, and weapons depicted. Scholars
are just beginning to form larger questions, Mr. Frank says, about the
significance for the tribe of a dream sequence, for example, or the larger
meaning within tribal cosmology of symbols marked on a figure's body.
"These ledgers give rise to better questions, and someday to better
answers," says Mr. Frank. "We've only scratched the surface."

To see more ledgerart, visit the project's Web site
(http://plainsledgerart.org).

http://chronicle.com Section: Notes From Academe Volume 53, Issue 21, Page
A56

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