Sites of Belonging and Renewal:

Architectural Themes in Native American Art, 1904–1945

by

Alexander Brier Marr

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by Professor Janet Catherine Berlo

Program in Visual and Cultural Studies Arts, Sciences and Engineering

School of Arts and Sciences

University of Rochester Rochester, New York

2017

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Table of Contents

Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgments v Abstract viii Contributors and Funding Sources ix List of Figures x Introduction 1

Chapter One Models: Kiowa Tipis and the Mooney Commission 35 Chapter Two Graphic Art: Architectural Themes from Cusick to Velarde 90 Chapter Three Built Environment: Framing Native Art at Hopi House 147 Chapter Four Photography: Will Wilson’s Animate Dwellings 212 Conclusion 252 Bibliography 256

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Biographical Sketch Alexander Brier Marr was born in Madison, Wisconsin. In 2008, he earned a Bachelor of

Arts degree from Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, with departmental honors in Art

History. In 2009, Alex enrolled in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at

the University of Rochester, under the supervision of Professor Janet Berlo. While at the

University, he worked as a teaching and research assistant, organized the annual Visual

and Cultural Studies graduate conference, served on the editorial board for InVisible

Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, co-curated two exhibitions at the Rare

Books and Special Collection Library, and taught in the Department of Art and Art

History. He has received a Celeste Hughes Bishop Award and a Henry Luce Foundation

Award from the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, a Teaching Fellowship

from the College Dean’s Office, and a Research Travel Grant from the Susan B. Anthony

Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.

During his time at the University, Alex published the following: Art of the North American Indians: The Thaw Collection. Revised edition. Co-edited with Eva Fognell. Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum, 2016. “Scales of Vision: Kiowa Model Tipis and the Mooney Commission.” Winterthur Portfolio 49, nos. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 2015): 93–125. Review of book For a Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw, ed. by Nancy Mithlo. Afterimage 42, no. 6 (2015): 36–37. Review of exhibition “Will Wilson: Toward a Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange.” Afterimage 41, no. 4 (2014): 26–27.

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“Changing Hands, Shifting Paradigms: Materiality, Craft, and Identity in Twenty First-Century Native Art.” Co-written with Janet Berlo. American Indian Art Magazine 38, no. 3 (2013): 58–69. “Making Sense of Visual Culture.” Special issue, InVisible Culture 18 (Spring 2013). Introduction co-written and issue co-edited with Alicia Inez Guzmán. http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/introduction-issue-18-making-sense-of-visual-culture/ Review of exhibition “Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast.” Museum Anthropology Review 6, no.1 (2012): 87–88. “Introduction to the AIDS Education Poster Collection.” Website of the AIDS Educational Poster Collection (October 2011). http://aep.lib.rochester.edu/node/47657.

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Acknowledgments This dissertation would not be possible without the support, assistance, and friendship of

many people. Janet Berlo has guided my work in the field of Native art studies, broadly,

and has provided insightful readings of numerous chapter drafts, course papers, and cover

letters. Generous, thoughtful, and deeply perceptive, Janet’s words have opened worlds.

Bob Foster has helped me, among many other ways, to better observe and relay the

changing values of things as they move through the world. Joan Saab has continually

encouraged me to push my writing and analysis further, into larger scales, and to stake

out the implications (cultural, political, aesthetic) of my arguments. And Robert

Westbrook has enabled me to conceive of and describe the fluid, yet ever-present,

relationships between cultures, politics, and ideas in early-twentieth century American

history. The faculty members of this dissertation committee deserve my sincerest

gratitude.

A number of relationships sustained and enriched my time at the University of

Rochester. A host of faculty members shaped my thinking in the classroom or through

conversation: Joel Burgess, Douglas Crimp, Paul Duro, Rachel Haidu, Eleana Kim,

William Schaefer, and more. Marty Collier and Cathy Humphrey have made Morey Hall

a wonderful place to spend years. Stephanie Frontz, Art and Music Library staff, and staff

of Rush Rhees Library have made research to seem often effortless and always enjoyable.

At the University, friendships have provided the intellectual and emotional fuel that

power this dissertation. Thank you, especially, Tiffany Barber, Ryan Conrath, Carlie

Fishgold, Abigail Sara Glogower, Amanda Jane Graham, Alicia Inez Guzmán, Erik

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Hmiel, Jessica Horton, Gloria Kim, Jenevive Nykolak, and Chris Patrello. From late-

night chats during coursework to long-distance calls in the last few years, these friends

have provided key support and encouragement.

The research I present in this dissertation was made possible with the help of

institutions and individuals across the country. I must reserve first thanks for Candace

Greene, who showed me the Kiowa model tipis at the National Museum of Natural

History in July of 2010 as part of her program, the Summer Institute for Museum

Anthropology. This viewing provoked a broad series of questions about how architectural

forms appear across the range of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Native art

practices, questions I take up in this dissertation. Curators and staff at other museums

have helped with research. Thank you, Curator Christina Burke, who furnished

information about the Bruce Timeche’s connections with the Philbrook Museum, as well

as Curators Nicolette Meister and Craig Hadley at Beloit College Museums. Thank you

to Curator of Photography Eric Lutz at the Saint Louis Art Museum for viewing together

and discussing the photographs of John K. Hillers. Thank you, as well, to the collections

staff at the National Museum of Natural History, Bandelier National Monument, and the

Western Archeological Conservation Center.

In addition to work in museum collections, archival research informs this

dissertation. At the Smithsonian Institution, I owe a debt to the professional staff of the

National Museum of American Indian Archive Center, the National Anthropological

Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution Archives. At the Grand Canyon, I am grateful

for Colleen Hyde at the Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection and Henry

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Karpinski at Hopi House. Staff at the Cline Library at Northern Arizona University and at

the Museum of Northern Arizona facilitated research in Flagstaff. Bertram Tsavadawa of

Ancient Pathways Tours led a fascinating tour of the village of Oraibi, on the third Hopi

mesa. In Phoenix, Mario Nick Klimiades and Betty Murphy provided access to

manuscript material at the Billie Jane Baguley Library and Archives of the Heard

Museum. And staff at the University of Arizona Special Collections Library in Tucson

helped with archival research.

This project is much better due to a number of artists, editors, friends, and

advanced scholars beyond Rochester who have provided critical feedback on chapter

drafts, responded to conference presentations, discussed the dissertation topic over

coffee, or in other ways directly shaped the project. Thank you, Bill Anthes, Kathleen

Ash-Milby, Josh Bell, Nichole Bridges, Rebecca Brown, Rebecca Dobkins, Amy Earls,

Cynthia Falk, Maribeth Graybill, Regan Huff, Elizabeth Hutchinson, Ira Jacknis, Michael

Jordan, Carolyn Kastner, Karen Kramer, Jennifer McLarren and Tom Patin, Jennifer Jane

Marshall, Alan Michelson, Kate Morris, Radhika Natarajan and Padraig Riley, Jo Ortel,

Nancy Parezo, Ruth Phillips, Wendy Red Star, Jolene Rickard, Jonathan Schroeder and

Janet Borgerson, Daniel Swan, Rebecca Trautmann, Norman Vorano, Marie Watt, and

Will Wilson.

Finally, I send my abiding love and gratitude to my family. My parents and Jen

provided remarkable support and encouragement at every step. This dissertation would

not be possible without you. This is for you.

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Abstract In this dissertation, I examine some of the ways Native American artists represented the

built environment in the first half of the twentieth century. I focus on the coincidence of

two trends: long-running changes in North American building styles and the early-

twentieth century development of fine art paradigms for viewing indigenous material

culture. Scholarship tends to treat Native American art and architecture separately. This

separation emphasizes—in turns implicitly and explicitly—the loss of so-called

traditional indigenous structures. If Native architectural styles are lost, then pictures of

buildings would seemingly flatten houses and empty them of their associations with

indigenous landscapes and memories. Many scholars may conceive of Native architecture

as being lost, though twentieth-century artists have attended to a plurality of Native

building styles and spatial epistemologies. Here, I examine the representation of

buildings through case studies, art historical narratives, and comparative analyses.

Chapters are divided by media: sculptural house models, drawings and paintings, the built

environment, and photographs. By looking at the depiction of buildings, I argue that

Native architectural styles have remained vital, if transformed, in the work of Native

American artists through the twentieth century.

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Contributors and Funding Sources A dissertation committee of Professors Janet Berlo, Robert Foster, and Joan Saab of the

Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, and Robert Westbrook of the Department of

History supervised this work. The student completed all work independently. Support

from the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology provided the opportunity for initial

research on the collection of Kiowa model tipis at the National Museum of Natural

History (Washington, DC). A grant from the Phillips Fund for Native American Research

at the American Philosophical Society supported travel to Hopi House at the Grand

Canyon and the Hopi village Oraibi, as well as archives at the Grand Canyon National

Park, Museum of Northern Arizona (Flagstaff), Northern Arizona University (Flagstaff),

Heard Museum (Phoenix), and University of Arizona (Tucson). A Research Travel Grant

from the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the

University of Rochester supported travel to the Smithsonian Institution Archives

(Washington, DC), the National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center

(Suitland, MD), and the National Anthropological Archives (Suitland, MD).

A version of chapter one has been published as, Alexander Brier Marr, “Scales of Vision:

Kiowa Model Tipis and the Mooney Commission,” Winterthur Portfolio 49, nos. 2/3

(2015): 93–125. Sections of chapter three have appeared as, Alexander Brier Marr,

review of exhibition “Will Wilson: Toward a Critical Indigenous Photographic

Exchange,” Afterimage 41, no. 4 (2014): 26–27.

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List of Figures

Figure Title Page

Figure 1 Alan Michelson, Cherokee Phoenix Print Shop, 2012. 1

Figure 2 Alan Michelson, Prophetstown installation, June 2012. 3

Figure 3 Unattributed Anishinaabe artist, Wigwam model, 1847–1853. 8

Figure 4 Ganondagan longhouse, February 2013. 14

Figure 5 Preston Singletary, Clan House Screen with Posts, 2015. 20

Figure 6 John White, Village of Secoton, 1585–1593. 21

Figure 7 Victor and Cosmos Mindeleff working on models, c. 1855. 24

Figure 8 James Mooney, “At Work in the Corral,” 1897. 25

Figure 1.1 Ton-akai, design owner, Hanpe, artist, Turtle Tipi model cover, 36

1896–1903.

Figure 1.2 Mary Buffalo alongside Tipi with Battle Pictures, c. 1916. 44

Figure 1.3 James Mooney, Sun Dance Camp Circle of the Kiowa and 47

Apache Indians during the Medicine Lodge Treaty, 1867, 1896.

Figure 1.4 Adalboingyato, design owner, daughter of Gaapiatan, artist, 54

Eagle Tipi model cover, 1896–1904.

Figure 1.5 Gaapiatan, design owner, Tama, artist, 55

Bird Picture Tipi model cover, 1896–1904.

Figure 1.6 Tohausen II, design owner, Charles Oheltoint, artist, 59

Tipi with Battle Pictures model cover, 1896–97.

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Figure 1.7 Walani, design owner, Tipi of Standing Among Men 61

model cover, 1896–1904.

Figure 1.8 Adalboingyato and Brave Boy, design owners, 61

Leg Picture Tipi model cover, 1896–1904.

Figure 1.9 Leg Picture Tipi model assembled, c. 1977. 61

Figure 1.10 Zemoguani Tipi model cover, 1896–1904. 62

Figure 1.11 Detail, James Mooney, “Kiowa Woman and Man 66

Erecting Model Tipis in Canvas Corral,” 1897.

Figure 1.12 Bureau of American Ethnology Exhibit—Model of 69

Kiowa Indian Camping Circle, 1897.

Figure 1.13 Frank Rinehart, Kiowa tipi models at Trans-Mississippi 70

Exposition, 1898.

Figure 1.14 James Mooney, “Paul Zotom with Painted Tipi,” 1897. 75

Figure 1.15 Detail, Photograph of Eagle Tipi model cover at 77

Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, 1904.

Fig. 1.16 Titian Peale, Sioux Lodge, 1819. 79

Figure 1.17 George Catlin, Comanche Village, 1834–5. 80

Figure 1.18 Samuel J. Guernsey, Diorama of camp circle of the 81

Central Plains Indians, c. 1900.

Figure 1.19 Koba, artist, Courting Lodge (Tipi with Battle Pictures), 1876. 85

Figure 1.20 Dixon Palmer, Tipi with Battle Pictures, 1973. 87

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Figure 2.1 Dennis Cusick, Drawing of the Buffalo Creek Mission School, 94

July 1821.

Figure 2.2 Dennis Cusick, Drawing of the Buffalo Creek Mission School 94

attached to Collection box, April 1822.

Figure 2.3 Dennis Cusick, Collection box, 1822. 98

Figure 2.4 Zotom, On the Parapet of Ft. Marion the Day after Arrival, 101

c. 1876.

Figure 2.5 Unattributed Mandan artist, Painted Robe, c. 1780–1825. 104

Figure 2.6 Unattributed Quapaw artist, Robe, c. 1740. 104

Figure 2.7 Detail, Unattributed Quapaw artist, Robe, c. 1740. 105

Figure 2.8 Zotom, Kiowa Camp North Fork of Red River, c. 1876. 106

Figure 2.9 Zotom, Arrival at Indianapolis Ind., c. 1876. 107

Figure 2.10 Zotom, Leaving Lean Bear at Nashville, c. 1876. 108

Figure 2.11 Frederick Alexcee, Port Simpson, c. 1900. 111

Figure 2.12 Detail, Frederick Alexcee, Port Simpson, c. 1900. 111

Figure 2.13 Frederick Alexcee, Indian Village of Port Simpson, 1915–1916. 116

Figure 2.14 Frederick Alexcee, Pole Raising at Port Simpson, c. 1900. 116

Figure 2.15 Frederick Alexcee, House front, early-twentieth century. 118

Figure 2.16 Jesse Cornplanter, Green Corn Dance, 1903. 119

Figure 2.17 Earnest Spybuck, Dance at Sauk and Fox Sacred Bundle Feast, 123

c. 1910.

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Figure 2.18 Earnest Spybuck, Singeing Dogs by Sauk and Fox for 124

Sacred Bundle Feast, c. 1910.

Figure 2.19 Earnest Spybuck, My Home, 1921. 124

Figure 2.20 Earnest Spybuck, Delaware Annual Ceremony in Oklahoma, 127

1912.

Figure 2.21 Pablita Velarde, Harvest Dance, c. 1940. 131

Figure 2.22 Pablita Velarde, Harvest Dance, c. 1940. 132

Figure 2.23 Pablita Velarde, Women’s Hairstyles and Activities, c. 1940. 135

Figure 2.24 Pablita Velarde, Mural, 1939. 135

Figure 2.25 Gallery installation at Bandelier National Monument, c. 2010. 137

Figure 2.26 Tyuonyi Pueblo, 1920–1940. 137

Figure 2.27 Civilian Conservation Corps complex at 138

Bandelier National Monument, c. 1940.

Figure 2.28 Pablita Velarde, Guard Turning Tourists Away, c. 1940. 143

Figure 2.29 Pablita Velarde, Santa Clara Feast Day, c. 1940. 144

Figure 2.30 Pablita Velarde, Pueblo Craftsmen, Palace of the Governors, 145

1941.

Figure 3.1 Porter Timeche and Daggett Harvey, 1940. 147

Figure 3.2 Hopi House exterior, 2013. 148

Figure 3.3 Albuquerque Indian Building Demonstration Room, c. 1903. 153

Figure 3.4 Albuquerque Indian Building Demonstration Room, c. 1903. 154

Figure 3.5 Pueblo Building at Alvarado complex, c. 1903. 154

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Figure 3.6 Albuquerque Indian Building, c. 1902 158

Figure 3.7 Mary Colter, Desert View Watchtower, 1932. 158

Figure 3.8 Fred Kabotie, Desert View murals, 1932. 159

Figure 3.9 Unattributed Hopi artist, murals in original (East) 159

Hopi House stairwell, c. 1905.

Figure 3.10 Mary Colter, Tile floor in Union Station restaurant, 1939. 160

Figure 3.11 Telegraph pole as joist in Hopi House, 1904. 161

Figure 3.12 Thomas Moran, Chasm of the Colorado, 1873. 164

Figure 3.13 Bright Angel camp, c. 1897. 164

Figure 3.14 Shacks of railroad employees at South Rim of the 166

Grand Canyon, c. 1910.

Figure 3.15 Hopi House sign, 2013. 167

Figure 3.16 Hopi House, c. 1905. 168

Figure 3.17 Postcard of Hotel El Tovar. 170

Figure 3.18 Photograph Hotel of El Tovar. 171

Figure 3.19 Tonita Lujan, San Geronimo Fiesta, 1936. 173

Figure 3.20 Aerial photograph of Hopi House and Hotel El Tovar, c. 1970. 174

Figure 3.21 Fred Kabotie, Mural in bar of Bright Angel Lodge, 1958. 175

Figure 3.22 First floor of Hopi House, 1905. 179

Figure 3.23 Northwest Coast salon on second floor of Hopi House, 1905. 179

Figure 3.24 Second floor of Hopi House, 2013. 180

Figure 3.25 Pottery display on Hopi House second floor, 2013. 180

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Figure 3.26 Queen Frederica of Greece on first floor of Hopi House, 1953. 180

Figure 3.27 First floor of Hopi House, 2013. 181

Figure 3.28 Porter Timeche and Fred Kimpton Hinchman outside 195

north entrance to Hopi House, 1942.

Figure 3.29 Unattributed Nez Perce artist, bag, late-nineteenth century. 195

Figure 3.30 Elle of Ganado working “near the South Rim of the 200

Grand Canyon,” c. 1920.

Figure 3.31 Bruce Timeche, Bi-La-Qwai Kachina (Red Eagle Runner), 1959. 202

Figure 3.32 Nampeyo and family at first floor of Hopi House, 1905. 204

Figure 3.33 Hogans at Grand Canyon Village, c. 1936. 205

Figure 3.34 Silversmith at hogan, c. 1915. 205

Figure 3.35 Sam Pemahinye paints kachina figures. 208

Figure 3.36 Porter Timeche at Hopi House. 209

Figure 3.37 Postcard, Pual Saufkie demonstrating silverwork at 209

Grand Canyon Village hogan, 1935.

Figure 3.38 Paul Saufkie mending rug at Hopi House, 1935. 209

Figure 3.39 Hopi artist, Silver Overlay Bracelet, After 1940. 210

Figure 4.1 Will Wilson, “Auto Immune Response #1,” 2005. 212

Figure 4.2 Will Wilson, “Auto Immune Response #3,” 2005. 213

Figure 4.3 “A Hogan in Canyon Chelly,” c 1898. 215

Figure 4.4 “Modern House of a Wealthy Navajo,” c. 1898. 221

Figure 4.5 Will Wilson, “Auto Immune Response #4,” 2005. 222

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Figure 4.6 Will Wilson, “Auto Immune Response #6,” 2005. 222

Figure 4.7 Will Wilson, “Auto Immune Response # 7,” 2005. 223

Figure 4.8 Auto Immune Response installation, 2005. 224

Figure 4.9 Édouard Baldus. “Cloister of Saint-Trophîme,” 1851. 228

Figure 4.10 John K. Hillers, Wolpi, Mokitown, Arizona, 1876. 231

Figure 4.11 John K. Hillers. “Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico,” 1879. 231

Figure 4.12 Edward Curtis, “In a Piegan Lodge,” 1911. 236

Figure 4.13 Edward Curtis, “Kwakiutl House-Frame,” 1915. 241

Figure 4.14 Frederick Evans, “Lincoln Cathedral: Stairs in 243

S.W. Turret,” 1898.

Figure 4.15 Edward Curtis, “A Mono Home,” 1926. 244

Figure 4.16 Edward Curtis, “Modern Cupeño Home,” 1926. 245

Figure 4.17 Edward Curtis, “A Feast Day at Acoma,” 1926. 248

Figure 4.18 Will Wilson, “Auto Immune Response #10,” c. 2011. 249

Figure 4.19 Will Wilson, AIRLAB, 2011. 250

Figure 4.20 Will Wilson, AIRLAB, 2014. 251

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Introduction

In June 2012, the sculptural installation Prophetstown occupied a section of the Art

Gallery of New South Wales. Created by the artist Alan Michelson (b. 1953, Mohawk),

Prophetstown contributed to the 2012 Sydney Biennale, “All Our Relations.”1 The

installation featured eight small-scale paper cabins. Michelson placed each on a pedestal

and arranged these in two rows. Evoking a village, this layout created a network of

relationships between individual sculptures. One row included fictional dwellings such as

a settlers’ dugout attacked by Comanche characters in John Ford’s 1956 Western movie

The Searchers. The other row featured buildings from the historical American landscape

including the 1820s print shop of the Cherokee Phoenix, a bilingual newspaper printed in

English and Cherokee syllabics (fig. 1). Cherokee publishers built and operated the shop

in New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation from 1825 to the late 1830s.

Michelson meticulously researched the structures he miniaturized. He often reproduced

primary source material—archival documents, movie scripts, published literature—on the

miniature paper walls, superimposing text on cabin. Text in the Prophetstown installation

1 Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, All Our Relations: 18th Biennale of Sydney (Woolloomooloo: Biennale of Sydney, 2012), 173. Michelson first developed the installation for the 2011 Eiteljorg Fellowship in Indianapolis. Kathleen Ash-Milby, “Alan Michelson: Landscapes of Loss and Presence,” in We Are Here: The Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, ed. Jennifer Complo McNutt and Ashley Holland (Indianapolis: Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 2011), 21–31. During an interview on April 3, 2012, the artist explained to me that he had visited the site of the eponymous Prophetstown village at the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash Rivers in present-day Indiana. Razed by the US Army in 1811, the village had served as a base for a broad coalition of Native groups seeking to halt American expansion westward. See Colin G. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (New York: Penguin, 2007), 137, 143–144.

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worked to highlight alternate perspectives on the familiar, one-sided story of American

expansion in the nineteenth century. These perspectives opened a view on histories of

migration, dwelling, and displacement.

The artist has referred to the text-overlain sculptures as “part toy, part

handbook.”2 On the print shop model, pages from the newspaper sprawl across walls. The

masthead spans the front gable. Articles from December 17, 1824, report on federal

attempts to relocate the Cherokee nation from its Georgia homeland. On the roof appears

the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, an unauthorized accord that provided justification for the

military to remove Cherokee peoples to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, a

shameful chapter of American history commonly known as the Trail of Tears.3 The

newspaper and the treaty provide differing narratives of Cherokee removal. This

multiplicity of stories works to cast doubt on popular narratives of American territorial

expansion, wherein yeomen farmers supposedly domesticate wild frontier space by

transforming the forest into a cabin with adjacent cultivated fields. In treating

architectural history as a collection of stories, rather than a singular and heroic narrative,

the artist effectively deconstructs the cabin. With Prophetstown, Michelson dispelled the

nineteenth-century romanticism associated with an architectural form while still

recognizing its transformative effect on the North American landscape, its outsized role

in accommodating and shaping so many cross-cultural acts of violence and

rapprochement.

2 Michelson, interview with the author, New York, NY, April 3, 2012. 3 Theda Perdue and Michael Green, The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996).

3

In Sydney, cabins appeared to multiply and recede as dramatic lighting and glass

cases created intertwining reflections (fig. 2). For viewers walking through the

Prophetstown installation, spectral dwellings projected themselves onto nearby works. A

concatenation of reflections undermined any clear distinction between structure and

image. Michelson thus suggested how buildings make pictures, how they impress

themselves on the world. The ghostly qualities of Michelson’s cabins—the stark

whiteness and the haunting reflections on glass cases—suggested the instability of all

structures, the potential for buildings to physically decay while enduring and changing in

memory. Prophetstown thus raises questions about the shape of buildings and built

environments before settlers’ cabins reconfigured the North American landscape. Which

buildings have withdrawn from this land?

Native American architecture has changed dramatically over the past four

hundred years. Beginning in the East Coast and Southwest in the seventeenth century and

continuing through the twentieth century in the Great Lakes region, Southeast, Plains,

Mountain West, Northwest Coast, and Alaska, Native peoples have largely moved from

ancestral dwellings to Euro-American style buildings. Nineteenth-century missionaries

and then government agents championed architectural change as an engine of

reformation. They tended to believe moving to new houses would spur individual Native

subjects to reform their lives, becoming more like the settlers themselves. Of course,

Native peoples made sense of new housing on their own terms.4 And some Native

4 Joy Monice Malnar and Frank Vodvarka, New Architecture on Indigenous Lands (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 3–4; Timothy McCleary, Thomas Carter, and Edward Chappell, Tipis and Square Houses: The Chief Plenty Coups

4

peoples, including the inhabitants of the Pueblos of Taos and Acoma, have continued to

occupy Aboriginal-style dwellings into the twenty-first century. With one strand of this

dissertation, then, I trace changes in Native North American building styles. This line of

inquiry helps only to build context, though, for the primary research questions: how have

Native artists imagined historical buildings and their absences? How have historic Native

American buildings appeared to diverse audiences since the beginning of the twentieth

century?

Indigenous artists have engaged with the built environment since ancient times by

painting on walls of plaster, hide, and wood. More recently, artists have moved from

architecturally based art forms to the formal depiction of buildings. Through the

nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Native artists began to treat houses as subjects

in the independent and movable media of painting, photography, and sculptural

modeling. As styles of dwellings changed Native artists developed new ways of engaging

with the built environment. In the early-twentieth century, American audiences began to

perceive Native-made works as art, as opposed to earlier designations of curio and

artifact. Works by Native artists at this time started to circulate through the institutional

and commercial venues of fine art. A series of major exhibitions from the 1920s to the

1940s helped to establish a canon of Native art. While this canon largely omits buildings,

the depiction of built structures played an unrecognized role in efforts to establish fine art

paradigms. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the widespread Homestead and the Building of the Crow Indian Reservation in Central Montana, 1884–1910 (Helena: Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, 2005); Dennis Sun Rhodes, “The Arapaho Tipi,” in Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains, ed. Nancy Rosoff and Susan Kennedy Zeller (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 2011), 56–67.

5

representation of the built environment helped to link historic forms of material culture to

contemporaneous art practices, institutions, and markets.

Architectural themes in Native American art have received scant attention,

leaving unexamined the idea that Native building styles constitute a lost tradition.

Scholars largely treat indigenous art and the built environment as separate topics. While

art historians tend to consider the adornment of buildings, such as Northwest Coast house

screens, anthropologists largely focus on the synchronic uses of interior spaces or the

layout of villages. By considering art and architecture distinctly—rather than examining

their continuities—scholarship may assume the loss of so-called traditional buildings.

This lacuna, in turn, may encourage some viewers to see images of Native buildings as

essentially flat, as devoid of the rich personal memories and cultural associations that

seemingly adhere to architectural forms. After all, popular imagery frequently associates

Native dwellings with some supposedly more authentic—but ultimately lost—past.

Narratives of architectural and cultural decline thus often arrive implicitly, falling

unexamined through the cracks of scholarly specialization.5 Yet some scholarship in the

past twenty years has pushed back against the popular notion that Native American

building styles are lost. Architectural historians have examined buildings recently

constructed on Indigenous lands, helping to bring scholarship on Native built

5 A few twentieth-century studies explicitly decry architectural change in Native communities. See, for instance, William Fenton, “From Longhouse to Ranch-type House: The Second Housing Revolution of the Seneca Nation,” in Iroquois Culture, History, and Prehistory: Proceedings of the 1965 Conference on Iroquois Research, ed. Elisabeth Tooker (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1967), 7–22.

6

environments up to the present.6 Still, Native American built forms have received little

attention as a theme in studies of art history and visual culture.7

Like the architectural historians considering the incorporation of Indigenous

design principles in contemporary building projects here I also raise the question of how

Native peoples use and relate to their historic dwellings. Rather than considering how

architects collaborate with communities today, I inquire about the work of Native

American artists in the early-twentieth century. By considering models, drawings,

paintings, and photographs of the buildings, as well as performative demonstrations of

artistic labor in architectural settings, I develop the claim that when we know where to

look, i.e. visual culture and not just the built environment, we can apprehend that historic

building styles are not lost. Instead they remain present, if transformed, in the work of

Native American artists. Rather than examining the differences between art and

architecture, I identify some of their relationships.

6 Malnar and Vodvarka, New Architecture; Carol Herselle Krinsky, Contemporary Native American Architecture: Cultural Regeneration and Creativity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 7 Noteworthy exceptions that look at contemporary art include Gerald McMaster, ed., Reservation X: The Power of Place (Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1998); Janet Catherine Berlo, “Drawing (upon) the Past: Negotiating Identities in Inuit Graphic Arts Production,” in Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, ed. Ruth Phillips and Christopher Steiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 178–193; and Elizabeth Kalbfleisch, “Bordering on Feminism: Home and Transnational Sites in Recent Visual Culture and Native Women’s Art,” (PhD dissertation, University of Rochester Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, 2009).

7

Materiality and Agency in Visual Culture Studies

In this dissertation, I examine the relationships between Native art and architecture in the

early twentieth century. I take particular interest in the representation of buildings as a

theme in work made by Native artists. The onset of an architectural theme marks a

significant turn in the history of Native North American art and visual culture. Before the

nineteenth century, buildings rarely appeared as subject matter in artworks. Rather, artists

tended to use building walls and structural posts as a material for carving or substrate for

painting. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for example, Ancestral Puebloan artists

in the Southwest painted scenes across the walls of subterranean religious kivas at

Awatovi in present-day Northeast Arizona.8 Yet the forms of Native American buildings

changed dramatically following contact with Europeans. As indigenous peoples moved to

settler-style dwellings, artists addressed architectural space anew. Responding to

experiences of displacement, artists across North America depicted their former homes in

their artwork. Perhaps this was a way to conceptually bridge the schism opened between

self and home when artists moved and the look of dwellings changed.

8 Watson Smith, Kiva Mural Decorations at Awatovi and Kawaika-a with a Survey of Other Wall Paintings in the Pueblo Southwest, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 37 (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum, 1952). Groups outside of the Southwest similarly painted murals. On the Northwest Coast, artists elaborately carved and painted wooden house posts and screens. George MacDonald, Haida Monumental Art: Villages of the Queen Charlotte Islands (1983; reprint Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014), 18–30; Aldona Jonaitis, Art of the Northern Tlingit (1986; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), 14–19. On the Plains, high-ranking men adorned hide and canvas tipi covers with records of spiritual visions. John C. Ewers, Murals in the Round: Painted Tipis of the Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache Indians (Washington, DC: Renwick Gallery, 1978).

8

Architectural themes arose in Native art at least by the mid-nineteenth century,

when women in the Great Lakes region made small-scale versions of their former homes

as souvenirs for tourists at Niagara Falls and other vacation destinations. Around 1850,

for example, an Anishinaabe artist created a miniature wigwam in birchbark and adorned

the house in porcupine quillwork. (fig. 3) By this time Native peoples in the Northeast

and Midwest had lost nearly all of their territories and had adopted the houses and

clothing of settlers. Consequently, souvenir production evoked ways of life that were,

increasingly, associated with the past.9 Here the wigwam form reinforces associations of

quaintness conjured by pictures of flowers and hunting. Later, at the end of the century,

Native artists approached the subject of architecture differently. Artists miniaturized

historic structures as ethnographic models, contributing to new scientific recreations of

Native American buildings (see chapter one).10 In the early-twentieth century, artists

transferred practices of mural painting from the walls of kivas and other Native structures

to schools, churches, post offices, and administrative buildings.11 Artists also depicted

9 Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 93. 10 Adrianne Santana, “Toys, Models, Collectibles: Miniature Tipis in the Reservation Era,” in Painters, Patrons, and Identity: Essays in Native American Art to Honor J. J. Brody, ed. Joyce Szabo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 9–31. 11 Jennifer McLerran, “Indian New Deal Mural Projects,” in A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933–1943 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 161–198; Jessica Welton, “The Watchtower Murals: 1930s Paintings by Fred Kabotie,” Plateau: The Land & People of the Colorado Plateau 2, no. 2 (2005–2006): 42–51; W. Jackson Rushing, “The Legacy of Ledger Book Drawings in Twentieth-Century Native American Art,” in Plains Indian Drawings 1865–1935: Pages from a Visual History, ed. Janet Berlo (New York: Abrams, 1996), 56–62; Rosemary Ellison, Contemporary Southern Plains Indian Painting (Anadarko, OK: Oklahoma Indian Art and Crafts Cooperative, 1972), 14–22.

9

buildings in the transportable new media of drawings, easel paintings, and prints (see

chapter two). Following changes in housing across the continent, Native artists began to

depict architectural forms through a range of media. This created a dynamic life for

indigenous buildings in the visual arts, even as such buildings risked slipping from the

landscape.

In this dissertation, I examine the set of relationships between a form of historic

material culture—Native American buildings—and novel modes of visual representation

in the early twentieth century. The bonds between Native art and architecture have

received scant attention, though studies of the built environment and its relationship to

fine arts contribute significantly to European art history.12 This topic has also received

some recent attention regarding arts outside the Europe.13 Yet in the histories of Native

12 The study of European modernism has focused on contexts for viewing art. See Nancy Troy, The De Stijl Environment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983); Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); and Katherine Kuenzli, “The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum: The Folkwang as Gesamtkunstwerk,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 72, no. 4 (December 2013): 502–529. A number of studies look at the contemporary entanglement of art and architecture around the globe, including Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2006); Guiliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007); Christian Bjone, Art + Architecture: Strategies in Collaboration (Birkhäuser: Berlin, 2009); Robin Clark, Automatic Cities: the Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art (La Jolla: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2009); and Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex (London: Verso, 2011). 13 Joanne Pillsbury, ed., Design for Eternity: Architectural Models from the Ancient Americas (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015). Pillsbury’s exploration of architectural models adds a fascinating chapter to the long genealogy of scholarship on Mesoamerican and Andean buildings. One strain of African art studies examines buildings. See Suzanne Preston Blier, The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Steven Nelson, From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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North American art, buildings and their representations merit greater attention. Here I

work across a scholarly lacuna to identify some relationships between Native buildings

and Native art. At the heart of this study is a question about how the material and the

visual dimensions of the world relate. The project contributes to the broader studies of

visual culture by examining the place where a number of discourses intersect: art and

architecture, art history and anthropology, American and Native American visual culture.

The key interstitial discourse here is the relationship between one form of material

culture, buildings, and its representation through a range of visual media: photography,

painting, museum displays, and the built environments of tourist destinations. Some

readers may imagine the dissertation subject as the “disintegration” of structure to form, a

teleological movement from building to image. Yet I have little patience for critiques of

visual culture as the study of the dematerialized, of the simulacrum. Here I take

inspiration from Jennifer Roberts’s study of how paintings register the distances they

traveled in British America and the early American republic.14 The context and subject of

this dissertation differs from Roberts’s study. But her theorization of a “material visual

culture,” the way works of art engage with and respond to their material conditions,

inspires the operative concept. I argue that Native American architecture remains vital

and active, if transformed, in the work of Native American artists. If it is commonly

believed that Native American architecture is a so-called lost tradition, outside of a few 14 Jennifer Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). I also draw on W.J.T. Mitchell’s distinction between images and pictures. According to Mitchell, images are dematerialized while pictures are images with material support. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

11

groups that maintain historic building styles, then perhaps we should look beyond the

built environment to see how it has persisted through the twentieth century. To do so

requires a comparative approach, one that identifies links between artworks and buildings

(rather than using comparison to throw distinctions into relief).15

Recognizing links between visual representation and material life serves as a

corrective to dominant methods of critical inquiry in visual culture studies and Native art

studies. Writing on early-twentieth century Native art has tended to emphasize the

limiting frameworks established by white patrons, writers, and curators. This line of

scholarship largely seeks to reveal the political agendas and social histories that motivate

any range of cultural expressions, affording Native artists little room for power, agency,

or intellectual reflection. At its most pat, this method risks prescribing a formula for

critical inquiry.

In 2003, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick looked back at developments in humanities over

the previous fifteen years. “In a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence

of systematic oppression,” Sedgwick writes, “to theorize out of anything but a paranoid

critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant.” Sedgwick argues that it is

a “great loss,” that scholars have broadly conflated critical inquiry with paranoid thought,

rather than viewing the hermeneutics of suspicion, “as one kind of cognitive/affective

15 In art history classrooms, a standard exercise involves projecting two images next to each other, so that students can better apprehend distinctions between artworks. In anthropological theory, the comparative method was key to imagining the evolution of cultural forms. As I address later, by comparing examples of a type—Pueblo buildings contrasted with Haudenosaunee longhouses, for example—American anthropologists in the late-nineteenth century could isolate cultural features to arrange in developmental diagrams.

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theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds.”16 She is not alone in her diagnosis.

Restricting his remarks to studies of the visual world, in 2005 W.J.T. Mitchell similarly

identified a dominant method: the practice of overcoming “natural vision.” By this,

Mitchell means that the study of visual culture has relied too heavily on the idea that

images are socially constructed, “a system of codes that interposes an ideological veil

between us and the real world.” Mitchell finds fault with these entrenched critiques of

“natural vision” insofar as they discourage scholars from considering how vision might

transcend “specific or local forms of ‘social construction’ to function like a universal

language that is relatively free of textual or interpretive elements.”17 Sedgwick and

Mitchell move beyond the cynical hermeneutics of suspicion to find rigor—and joy—in

the everyday relationships that entangle subjects with the world. To be sure, I do not

believe we should abandon consideration of the political dimensions of North American

visual cultures. Rather, we perpetually require better accounts of how Native artists

negotiated forms of power and systems of representation in cross-cultural settings.

In arguing for the twentieth-century vitality of Native architectural forms in works

of art, the project hinges on recognizing the agency of artists in navigating intercultural

spaces. The project also depends on acknowledging the agency of buildings and artworks,

16 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 125–26. Paul Ricoeur developed the concept of the hermeneutics of suspicion to describe an attitude shared by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. This attitude imagines scholarly interpretation as unmasking and revealing the invisible ideological underpinnings of texts and cultural formations. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 17 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 344.

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a topic that I address in chapter four.18 In thinking about agency I take inspiration from

practice theory, which balances considerations of institutional power with everyday

tactics people use to negotiate such forms of authority.19 I also find it helpful to consider

a spatial metaphor for agency. In representing buildings, early-twentieth century Native

artists developed a sense of cultural and artistic interiority. Here I draw on the concept of

interiority as developed in cultural studies. Closely linked with studies of affect,

interiority describes how various identities—national, gendered, racial, class-based—take

shape in a large-scale society. The concept of interiority has taken root in the American

academy, fueled by key texts such as Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, Michael Herzfeld’s

Cultural Intimacy, Susan Stewart’s On Longing, and Mark Wigley’s The Architecture of

Deconstruction.20 While these studies are not free of paranoid thinking, they have granted

18 See, for instance, Irving Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View,” in Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, ed. Stanley Diamond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 19–52; Bill Brown, “Objects, Others, and Us (The Refabrication of Things),” Critical Inquiry 36 (Winter 2000): 183–207. 19 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Sherry Ortner, High Religion: A Cultural and Political Theory of Sherpa Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 20 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge: 1990); Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 1997); Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1984); Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). For attempts to codify the notion of interiority, see Christine McCarthy, “Toward a Definition of Interiority,” Space and Culture 8, no. 2 (May 2005), 112–125; Christopher Castiglia, “Interiority,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York: New York University Press, 2014). http://keywords.nyupress.org/american-cultural-studies/essay/interiority/ Accessed online November 5, 2015. The concept of interiority is now spreading beyond the academy into broader American consciousness, perhaps similarly to the spread of the

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a degree of credibility to individual subjects in describing how private lives participate in,

and escape from, established systems of power. Basically, then, interiority can be defined

as the space between the world and the self. This spatial metaphor helps to conceive of

agency in relational, rather than absolute, terms. That is, in the intercultural histories of

Native art, I see agency not as an a priori force but as a situational sense of power, an

ability to act that arises in the overlapping spaces between the world and a range of

human and other-than-human actors.

Architectural Change

Native buildings are perhaps most visible today when institutions such as history

museums and historical sites reconstruct dwellings.21 At the Ganondagan State Historic

Site in Victor, New York, a 1998 longhouse stands in for a Seneca village that occupied

the area in the seventeenth century (fig. 4). Running sixty-five feet in length, the building

features the typical internal divisions that create rooms for individual families united

under the roof of their clan. Showing a facsimile of what once existed there, the

Ganondagan longhouse responds to a history of architectural change. Today, most Native concept of society at the beginning of the twentieth century. The public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates borrowed a line from Richard Wright, “Between the world and me,” to title his recent, popular meditation on American history and his own racial identity; Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015). On notions of interiority and personal reflection in non-academic writing, see also, Michael Pallen, A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams (New York: Penguin, 1997). 21 A company called Ancient Lifeways Institute based in Michael, IL, was responsible for creating many full-size models of historic buildings in the eastern United States during the last three decades of the twentieth century, including the Pawnee earth lodge at the Field Museum in Chicago and the Seneca longhouse at the Ganondagan site near Victor, NY. http://www.ob1.com/iae/Supporters/Ancient/Lifeways.htm Accessed January 21, 2017.

15

peoples live in cities alongside Americans of other cultural backgrounds. On reservations

and in rural communities, the prevalence of single-family houses reflects two centuries of

federal initiatives to relocate and rehouse indigenous populations. Still, Native

communities and interpretive sites across North America reproduce historic buildings for

a range of purposes—religious, cultural, educational. Recreated buildings additionally

work politically to assert a contemporary indigenous presence in, and claim historical

narratives about, the North American landscape. A lack of historical analysis may

promote the misunderstanding that architectural change amounts, unequivocally, to

cultural loss. As the Ganodagan longhouse attests, historic buildings reappear to take on

new social functions and support new political formations.

In ancient times, Native building styles transformed as peoples moved across the

continent, met new groups, and exchanged ideas and technologies. However, over five

hundred years of contact and colonization have also affected indigenous architecture and

material culture. The establishment of Christian missionary villages, displacement from

ancestral lands, and administration of federal reform efforts all affect the form of Native

buildings. The origins of architectural change are foggy. Perhaps the best-documented

early changes occurred among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in present-day New York

State. By the late-eighteenth century communal longhouses had shrunk in size.22 At the

same time, Quaker missionaries helped to build villages of single-family houses.23

22 Elisabeth Tooker, Lewis H. Morgan and Iroquois Material Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 6–7. 23 Fenton, “Ranch-type House,” 12. The architectural historians Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton noted that by 1798 longhouses at the Burnt House community of traditionalists stood apart from the numerous Seneca villages where nuclear families

16

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Euro-Americans removed countless

Native peoples beyond the western frontier, a complex series of forced migrations that

affected deeply the material culture of the displaced peoples. Following the Civil War as

the frontier closed, the federal government established reservations among communities

in the West and initiated a program of cultural reform. This resulted in sudden, large-

scale architectural change. By the end of the nineteenth century, missionaries advocated

for different housing among Northwest Coast groups. For instance in 1888, students in

Sitka, Alaska, built the first three “model cottages” at the Presbyterian Sheldon Jackson

School. Recent graduates of the school—often newlywed couples—could purchase a

cottage with a loan from the home building committee of the Women’s National Indian

Association. Designed as an extension of the school reform project, cottages were

supposed to facilitate transitions to Christian homes. The cottages fostered a community

that proved crucial to the civil rights movement for Native Alaskans that began around

World War I.24 Despite the assimilatory aims of missionaries and school administrators,

cabin occupants used their new social roles to advance their own agendas.

lived in white-pine log cabins. Nabokov and Easton, Native American Architecture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 86. 24 Kristen Griffen, Early Views: Historical Vignettes of Sitka National Historical Park (Anchorage: National Park Service, 2000), 84–97; Joyce Walton Shales, “Rudolph Walton: One Tlingit Man’s Journey through Stormy Seas, Sitka, Alaska, 1867–1951,” (PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia Department of Educational Studies, 1998), 91–100; Bertrand K. Wilbur, “The Model Cottages,” The North Star, August 1895, 1. Many residents of the cottages worked as cultural brokers—for example, the carver Rudolph Walton ran a souvenir shop. There he sold, among other things, his carved bowls and engraved jewelry. Walton was among the first generation of Tlingit artists to teach themselves historic-style design outside of the apprentice system. Walton apprehended tourists’ curiosity about Southeast Alaska Native cultures and deftly capitalized on this interest by carving and selling artworks that combine elements of

17

By the end of the nineteenth century, adaptations in housing frequently

accompanied federal, as well as missionary, programs to transmute Native cultures into

mainstream America. This continued at least through the 1950s, when the federal

government relocated Native peoples from reservation communities to distant cities.25

This history of change has led some mistakenly to believe that Native architecture

constitutes a so-called lost tradition. Though missionaries and federal agents deliberately

disrupted Native building traditions, historic architectural styles today persist on Native

lands. Many Native families living on reservations use both historic dwellings and non-

Native houses. Looking at the Southwest, for instance, in the Rio Grande Pueblos adobe

and modern houses sit side-by-side. On the Plains, many families gather in tipi camps for

special occasions in summer. And across North America, reservations frequently feature

communal longhouses or roundhouses.26

Given the general confusion about “Native American architecture,” it will help to

outline the concept. Architecture implies an intentional system of design and

construction. For far too long, architectural scholarship restricted itself to considering

buildings designed by academically trained experts. As I discuss later, ethnologists in the historical Northwest Coast design with Euro-American naturalism. Erna Gunther, A Catalogue of the Ethnological Collections in the Sheldon Jackson Museum (Sitka, AK: Sheldon Jackson College, 1976), 38–41. 25 Donald Lee Fixico, The Urban Indian Experience in America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000); Susan Lobo and Kurt Peters, eds., American Indians and the Urban Experience (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2001); Donna Martinez, ed., Urban American Indians: Reclaiming Native Space (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016). 26 Krinsky, “Modified Continuity,” in Contemporary Native American Architecture, 69–81. In the Western United States many groups build and maintain communal structures, including the Yoruk Blue Creek-Ah Pah village on the Klamath River in Northern California with redwood plank house, sweat house, and brush dance pit.

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late-nineteenth century used the term architecture to describe Native American buildings.

Primarily interested in the relation between built forms and social structures, in diverse

forms of Native building they recognized principles of defense in construction—as

realized through village walls and embankments—and communism in living, as seen with

extended house groups where multiple families lived together.27 This interest in structure,

of course, served the prevailing goal of arranging all indigenous cultures in a single, rigid

evolutionary schema. To speak of Native architecture without taking recourse to

problematic notions of cultural evolution, we do well in turning to the concept of

vernacular architecture.

In the second half of the twentieth century, scholars in a number of fields began to

research structures that theretofore largely escaped academic histories of architecture.

Significant scholarship followed postwar efforts to recast architectural hierarchies. These

included Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 book and exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art,

Architecture without Architects, which compiled and presented photography of complex

village construction from around the world.28 The term “vernacular” most often applies to

homes made in a distinctive regional style such as the Louisiana shotgun house or

buildings that represent global traditions, such as the beehive-shaped teleukhas made by

27 Lewis Henry Morgan, “Houses of the Mound-Builders,” The North American Review 123, no. 252 (July 1876): 60–85. See also Victor Mindeleff, A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola (1891; reprint, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989). 28 Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1964).

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Mousgoum peoples in Chad and Cameroon.29 Focusing on buildings that lack

professional architects or engineers, scholarship on vernacular architecture tends to

privilege the experiences of laborers and occupants. Suzanne Preston Blier laments that

scholars largely relate vernacular forms to “considerations of physical need (security,

shelter) and environment (materials, climate), rather than technological know-how,

innovation, and concerns with social and creative expression.”30 Still, the concept of the

vernacular helps upend assumptions about what constitutes architecture, and therefore

promises to expand canons of architectural history. In Native American Architecture

Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton survey historic types of Native North American

buildings.31 Throughout their 1989 book, the authors show no small diversity of

indigenous building styles, meticulously linking each with the makers’ cultural history.

Making a signal contribution to the study of vernacular architecture, Nabokov and

29 Fred B. Kniffen, “Louisiana House Types,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 26, no. 4 (1936): 179–193; John Michael Vlach, “The Shotgun House: An African Architectural Legacy,” in Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, ed. Dell Upton and Vlach (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 261–78; Jay D. Edwards, “Shotgun: The Most Contested House in America,” Buildings and Landscapes 16, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 62–96. Nelson, Cameroon to Paris. 30 Suzanne Preston Blier, “Vernacular Architecture,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Webb Keane (London: Sage, 2006), 231. Scholar of American folklore and material culture Henry Glassie has attempted to work through this basic problem between the industrial and the folk in architectural studies. Glassie notes that, on the one hand, relationships to material and community set apart the two manners of building. Vernacular architecture implies direct access to materials and close-at-hand social resources such as labor, whereas industrial production makes use of “imported materials and complex machinery.” On the other hand, an impulse toward mastery unites vernacular and industrial architectures. Glassie thus conceives of vernacular and industrial architecture as existing on a continuum. Henry Glassie, Vernacular Architecture (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000), 31. See also Malnar and Vadvarka, New Architecture on Indigenous Lands, 3. 31 Nabokov and Easton, Native American Architecture.

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Easton’s account encourages consideration of plural Native architectures. This broad

definition encompasses ancient and historic dwellings, single-family homes, and

contemporary structures made for indigenous use. Native architectures thus represent

dynamic, ongoing traditions of alteration and experimentation.

Recently, Native buildings have not only interpreted Native American history, as

with the Ganondagan longhouse, but also blended contemporary structures with historic

principles.32 In the final decades of the twentieth century, Native groups began

collaborating with architects to design schools, offices, houses, museums, and community

centers. One of the most significant recent examples of this hybrid architectural approach

is the Walter Soboleff Building in downtown Juneau, Alaska (fig. 5). Dedicated in May

2015 by Sealaska Heritage Institute—an organization that promotes Native Southeast

Alaska language, culture, and art—the building features a Tlingit clan house nestled

between galleries, a gift shop, offices, and collections storage space. The Institute

commissioned artists to create work for the building, just as Tlingit artists had historically

adorned clan houses.33 Such contemporary structures evince “the movement toward self-

32 Krinsky, Contemporary Native American Architecture; Sun Rhodes, “The Arapaho Tipi,” in Rosoff and Zeller; Malnar and Vodvarka, New Architecture on Indigenous Lands. This practice dates to 1935, at least, when New Deal workers completed construction of the Navajo Nation Council House in Window Rock, Arizona. John Collier, “Indian Reservation Buildings in the Southwest: Mayers, Murray & Phillip, Architects,” American Architect and Architecture 150, no. 2658 (June 1937): 34–40; Rachel Leibowitz, “Constructing the Navajo Capital: Landscape, Power, and Representation at Window Rock,” (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois Landscape Architecture, 2008). 33 A Guide to the Walter Soboleff Building (Juneau, AK: Sealaska Heritage Institute, 2015). http://www.sealaskaheritage.org/sites/default/files/WSBBooklet_WebWithCover.pdf Accessed November 2, 2016. When I visited the site during construction in December

21

determination” in contemporary North American society, according to architectural

historian Carol Herselle Krinsky.34 A story of perpetuation thus runs parallel to the

history of architecture change. The movement from ancestral to settler forms of housing

is dynamic rather than unilateral. It is cyclical rather than teleological. Yet the great

variety of historic Native American architecture is still missing from the North American

landscape. How might an art historical account—rather than a study of contemporary

architecture—begin to address this absence? How have artists remembered, represented,

and reconfigured Native architecture?

Architecture and Anthropology

The earliest representations of indigenous architecture from North America appear in the

notes and drawings of European explorers. One of the first renderings dates to 1585,

when English colonist John White drew Secoton, an Algonquin town in coastal Carolina.

(fig. 6). Since representations transform that which they seek to show, White’s pictures

necessarily reconstructed the scene. White uses the drawing line to define what were

indeterminate and ever-changing relations between people, buildings, and the world.

White organizes his drawings around the vertical axis of the village. This composition—

which includes farming, ceremony, and hunting—treats buildings as central to the order

2014, carver Wayne Price was concluding a yearlong project to hand finish wooden planks and beams with an adze. Meanwhile in Seattle, Preston Singletary was planning to make a large, seventeen by twelve feet, dance screen of glass rather than the customary material of wood. 34 Krinsky, Contemporary Native American Architecture, 4.

22

of the place.35 The historical architecture of western Native peoples first appeared in

detailed ink and watercolor sketches from early nineteenth-century American and

Canadian explorer-artists Titian Peale, George Catlin, and Paul Kane. By the second half

of the nineteenth century, a scattershot collection of explorers’ writings and pictures

furnished fodder for early ethnographic writing. Anthropological research, in turn,

fostered some of the fist systematic attempts to represent Native American buildings.

The burgeoning field of ethnology supported broad studies of material forms,

especially architecture. Research into indigenous dwellings primarily examined structure,

in turn contributing to a wider nineteenth-century scholarly quest to identify the origin

and evolution of architectural forms.36 Lewis Henry Morgan’s studies of Native

American buildings, in particular, contributed to early theoretical understandings of

architecture. Toward the start of his career in ethnology, Morgan elaborated his famous

theory of cultural evolution. According to this theory, groups of people progress through

developmental stages—from savagery to barbarism and then civilization—by adapting

new institutions and technologies. Morgan believed examining Native cultures could help

to shed light on the origins of Euro-American society, the social system Morgan placed at 35 The printmaker Theodore de Bry (1528–1598) adapted White’s drawings as engravings for book illustrations. For other engravings de Bry used additional sources such as Jacque Le Moyne’s drawings of Native American villages in Florida. Rachel Doggett, Monique Hulvey, and Julie Ainsworth, New World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492–1700 (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992); Hugh Honour, The European Vision of America (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art; Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1975); Paul Hulton and David Quinn, The American Drawings of John White, 1577–1590 (London: Trustees of the British Museum; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964); Henry Keazor, “Theodore De Bry’s Images for America,” Print Quarterly 15, no. 2 (June 1998): 131–49. 36 Victor Buchli, An Anthropology of Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 25, ff.

23

the top of his evolutionary schema. At the end of his career, Morgan developed a serious

interest in the forms of buildings. Architectural research helped Morgan to bring his

theory of socio-political evolution to bear clearly on the material world. For his final

book, Houses and House-Life of the North American Aborigines (1881), Morgan drew on

a wealth of evidence about indigenous dwellings—much gathered secondhand from

travelers’ accounts—to compare house-types. This comparison isolated specimens, the

better to discern the evolutionary status of the various inhabitants. Morgan argued, for

example, that the agricultural village-dwellers of Haudenosaunee longhouses enjoyed a

higher evolutionary status than other groups because their style of building houses

promoted the civilizing principle of communism in living.37 Nineteenth-century

ethnologists thus largely inquired into the form and structure of indigenous dwellings, the

aspects that provided fodder for comparative analysis.

Beginning in the late 1870s, Morgan’s friend and follower John Wesley Powell

oversaw the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE). The BAE sponsored much early

work to compile data on the built environment. Administered within the Smithsonian

Institution and closely aligned with its National Museum, the BAE collected data and

sought to fill in the details of Morgan’s evolutionary schema. Powell charged a number

of expeditions with gathering information about Native American architecture, in

particular the Southwestern Pueblos.38 The photographers William Henry Jackson and

37 Lewis Henry Morgan, Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines (1881; reprint, Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2006). 38 Peter Nabokov, “Introduction,” in Victor Mindeleff, A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola (1891; reprint, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), xii-xiv; Don D. Fowler, “The Mindeleff Brothers,” in A Laboratory for

24

John K. Hillers accompanied early expeditions. In the 1880s, Victor Mindeleff (1860–

1948) and Cosmos Mindeleff travelled frequently to the Southwest to measure and map

Pueblo architecture. In 1891,Victor published A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan

and Cibola as part of the Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. The book-length

study reproduced numerous site plans, architectural photographs, and detailed drawings.

When not conducting research in the Southwest, the Mindeleff brothers worked in the

Smithsonian shop in Washington, DC, modeling buildings and villages. In a photograph

from around 1885, the brothers collaborate on an architectural model (fig. 7). Light

streams from clerestory windows at top, illuminating them absorbed in their work.

Miniature cities in varying states of completion surround the brothers and fill the bottom

half of the picture. In village plazas, tools rest and bowls of plaster drip. The models,

incomplete and slanting, reflect late-nineteenth century scientific practice—the

meticulous measurements taken on-site, the painstaking process of reproducing a distant

village at a smaller scale, the cramped work space of a growing institution—as much as

they reveal the shape of a Pueblo village.

Ethnology thus helped create an iconography of Native American architecture in

American visual culture. The National Museum displayed the Mindeleffs’ models at

numerous world’s fairs. International expositions at this time typically pitted exhibitions

of ethnological material against industrial machinery and other examples of advanced

Anthropology: Science and Romanticism in the American Southwest, 1846–1930 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 140–43; Don D. Fowler, Myself in the Water: The Western Photographs of John K. Hillers (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 85.

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American engineering, dramatizing a narrative of cultural progress.39 In scholarly

publications and world’s fairs displays, Native forms of building accrued association with

the ostensibly earlier stages of cultural development. In the 1890s, a few ethnographers

sought to refute the comparative theory of cultural evolution. Scholars including Franz

Boas and James Mooney related forms of cultural expression directly to their cultural

milieu, rather than looking at formal variation across cultural contexts. In his study of

Kiowa tipi painting, as I discuss in Chapter one, Mooney linked designs to a whole range

of Kiowa names, songs, histories, and art forms. Mooney commissioned Kiowa heirs to

paint their proprietary tipi designs—paintings that had fallen out of use with the last

generation. One of Mooney’s photographs from the mid-1890s shows three Kiowa

women working on model tipis in Anadarko, Oklahoma (fig. 8). As in the photograph of

the Mindeleffs (see fig. 7), work engrosses the model makers. But rather than relying on

scientific measurements to create the scaled-down buildings, the artists marshaled their

own memories of the painted designs.

As Native American architecture seemed to withdraw from the American

landscape, it grew more visible in American popular culture. Around the turn of the

twentieth century, Americans encountered reproductions of Native buildings in touring

Wild West shows, ethnographic museum displays, living villages of Native peoples at

world’s fairs, and in entertainment districts at the fairs. Despite the movement away from 39 Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); Don Fowler, “World’s Fairs, Museums, and Modern Anthropology,” in A Laboratory for Anthropology, 203–219; Don Fowler and Nancy Parezo, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

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evolutionary theory in ethnographic study, the popular link between Native buildings and

the notion of a primitive culture endured. Beyond ethnology and popular culture, though,

architectural forms appeared in the work of Native artists. In the first half of the twentieth

century, works of art fostered new ways of seeing historic Native American buildings.

The Rise of Native American Art

In the early-twentieth century, wide audiences came to see Native American material

culture as fine art. This aesthetic development has received considerable scholarly

attention, though its basic features merit quick review. In the first decades of the

twentieth century, commercial displays and marketing campaigns promoted Native-made

works as fine art rather than curios, specimens, or souvenirs. Art collectors and advocates

increasingly championed Native art, and audiences started to recognize a select few

indigenous artists by name. Art museums initiated collections and staged exhibitions of

Native material. Not just a modernist recasting of historic works, the new category helped

to shape contemporaneous artistic practice. Some artists explored new materials and

methods by taking on watercolor drawing and photography, among other media.

Educational institutions in Oklahoma and northern New Mexico sponsored programs in

easel painting, an innovation in Native American art history. Other artists, such as basket

weaver Louisa Keyser, experimented within existing artistic practices. Keyser developed

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a new shape of basketry, the degikup, which appealed to prevailing tastes in early

markets.40

Some of the most concerted and collaborative endeavors to professionalize Native

art took place in northern New Mexico in the 1920s.41 There, advocates worked with

artists to promote and maintain forms of expression perceived as purely indigenous.

These activists and patrons found deep fault with the work of government programs to

reform Native cultures, efforts that included a system of boarding schools and a campaign

to ban dances. Early boosters also worked against certain economic forces, especially

mass production for tourist markets, which they understood to degrade Native art. Groups

including the National Association on Indian Affairs—and later in the 1930s, the federal

Indian Arts and Crafts Board—rallied artists to revive production of historic art forms.

Patrons and institutions encouraged self-taught artists including Quah Ah (Tonita Peña),

Awa Tsireh, Fred Kabotie, and Velino Shije Herrera to experiment with watercolor

drawing in the 1920s. In publications and exhibitions, advocates linked emerging forms

with historical art by relating easel painting, for instance, to earlier paintings on the walls

of adobe buildings and ceramic pots. Like late-nineteenth century ethnographers, the

reformers, artists, and cultural brokers in Taos and Santa Fe looked for aspects of Pueblo

culture unsullied by external influences. Unlike salvage-paradigm anthropologists—who 40 Marvin Cohodas, Degikup: Washoe Fancy Basketry, 1895–1935 (Vancouver: Fine Arts Gallery, 1979). 41 Bruce Bernstein and Jackson Rushing, eds., Modern by Tradition: American Indian Painting in the Studio Style (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995); J. J. Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900–1930 (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1997); Margaret Jacobs, “Women and the Indian Arts and Crafts Movement,” in Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures 1879–1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 149–179.

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sought to rescue from the tide of industrial modernity the last bits of so-called authentic

cultures—activists and then government agents labored to tell a story of continuity

between historic Native art and twentieth-century life.

Over the past thirty years, a major line of research addresses the development of

Native American art as an aesthetic category. A series of conference panels in the mid-

1980s led to the publication of Janet Berlo’s edited volume The Early Years of Native

American Art History in 1992. Another key text soon followed, Jackson Rushing’s Native

American Art and the New York Avant- Garde. Noteworthy book-length contributions in

the past ten years include Elizabeth Hutchinson’s The Indian Craze: Primitivism,

Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 and Bill Anthes’s Native

Moderns: American Painting, 1940–1960.42 In these studies and others, scholars trace the

42 Janet Berlo, ed., Early Years of Native American Art History: The Politics of Scholarship and Collecting (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992); Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant- Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Bill Anthes, Native Moderns: American Painting, 1940– 1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Elizabeth Hutchinson, Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Since 2011, the Multiple Modernisms project has given rise to a series of conferences around the globe. The project brings together a number of scholars to address the relationships between twentieth-century indigenous artists and modernity. A series of books based on conference proceedings are in the works. http://multiplemodernisms.maa.cam.ac.uk Accessed April 15, 2017. Relying on principles of aesthetic autonomy, the category of Native American art is linked to modernism. Native American art also relates to modernism via an anti-modern impulse that accompanied experiences of modernity. As cities grew and industry took hold on daily life, Americans increasingly turned to Native cultures to combat new senses of alienation. The strain of cultural nationalism in the early-twentieth century United States also contributed to the development of Native American art as an aesthetic category, as Americans sought to form a cultural identity that had little to do with long-exalted European cultures.

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cross-cultural networks that coalesced around new ways of seeing indigenous cultural

production.

As I mentioned previously, the history of Native art has largely omitted

considerations of architecture. This leaves lingering within the discourse problematic

understandings of Native built environments, ideas that stem from nineteenth-century

evolutionary thinking. Many contemporary Native artists engage Native architecture.

These include Alan Michelson and, as I address in chapter four, Will Wilson. Yet a

number of contemporary artists depict buildings, including Hannah Claus, Kent

Monkman, Nora Noranjo-Morse, Marianne Nicolson, Wendy Red Star, Jolene Rickard,

Frank Shebageget, C. Maxx Stevens, and Marie Watt. Despite the broad interest in

architecture among these and other artists, a conversation around the contemporary

entanglements of Native art and architecture has yet to develop. In order to better

comprehend this contemporary emphasis on buildings, we would do well to apprehend

how architectural themes contributed to early-twentieth century Native art. During this

time some historical works initially made for Native architectural settings appeared in

exhibitions and books. In 1941, as part of the exhibition Indian Art of the United States,

Fred Kabotie and other Hopi artists painted the walls of the Museum of Modern Art with

recreations of ancient Hopi murals from Awatovi. Still, institutional programs engaged

with Native building traditions on an occasional basis only. This likely related to the

practical limitations of exhibiting buildings at their full scale, as well as a desire to avoid

the stereotypes often evoked in popular depictions of tipis and other Native dwellings.

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In order to write buildings into a historiography of Native art, here I look to

lesser-known aspects of the story. These include minor exhibitions such as displays of

Kiowa model tipis at world’s fairs (Chapter one), works of Native easel painters who

depict buildings naturalistically (Chapter two), and non-institutional and commercial

venues such as the tourist site Hopi House (Chapter three). Attending to questions of

agency, I argue that Native architectural styles remained vital and active in the twentieth

century through the work of Native artists. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Native

makers have pictured houses as a way of responding to their own shifting senses of

belonging and dislocation. In the twentieth century, artists began to depict houses and

other buildings in works of fine art. In some cases, Native artists pictured architectural

forms as a way of expanding a new canon to include buildings, as I explore in Chapter

two. So, when artists represented buildings in the first half of the twentieth century, they

not only maintained and amended historic building styles but also sought to shape an

emerging field of art.

Chapters

Through four chapters I address the quotation of historical building styles in varied art

forms, with each chapter focusing on a particular medium. In chapter one I examine

archival sources and Kiowa aesthetics to consider the production and display of one

group of model tipis. In chapter two I look at the history of drawing and painting,

showing that architectural subjects in Native art often correspond to moments of cultural

and stylistic change. In chapter three I consider oral histories, museum collections, and

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Pueblo Revival architecture to address how one site, Hopi House, used Pueblo building

styles to market Native art to tourists at the Grand Canyon. And in chapter four I compare

Edward Curtis’s photographs with a contemporary photographic and installation series,

Auto Immune Response, by artist Will Wilson (Diné). I have not sought to write four

stand-alone case studies. Rather, across diverse venues and from multiple vantages, I

attempt to outline some of the relations that bind Native art and architecture in the early-

twentieth century.

The chapters are divided by media, and follow a loose chronology. In chapter one

I introduce key ideas—the ethnographic interest in architecture at the end of the

nineteenth century, the role of world’s fairs displays in the developing paradigms for

viewing Native material culture as art, change and continuity in Native building styles—

that provide a foundation for research I present in subsequent chapters. Across the

chapters I relate the story of how Native artists responded to changing built environments

and changing categories of visual culture in the early-twentieth century. In terms of the

period this project covers, I start with 1904 because this is the year that anthropologists

first displayed Kiowa model tipis as paintings, as opposed to earlier exhibitions where the

works modeled an historical encampment. The project concludes in 1945 when Pablita

Velarde, one of the first Native artists trained in easel painting, completed a series of

paintings depicting Pueblo art and culture, and which feature buildings prominently. I

occasionally venture beyond this period, 1904–1945, looking back in time to discuss the

long history of Native architectural styles or to provide greater art historical context. I

have also fast-forwarded to the twenty-first century. The final chapter disobeys this loose

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chronology, for instance, by comparing the contemporary work of Diné photographer

Will Wilson with the historical (and historically-minded) architectural photographs of

Edward Curtis.

In chapter one I start with an anthropological commission and conclude with a

fine art display. Beginning in the 1890s, Smithsonian anthropologist James Mooney

intervened in ethnographic studies of Native American architecture by commissioning

fifty model painted tipis from Kiowa heirs to these proprietary designs. The production

and display of the models indicate deep bonds between art and architecture in nineteenth-

century Kiowa society. Based on aesthetic systems treating each miniature as a renewal

of the tipi, rather than a replication of historic architecture, Kiowa artists used the model

project to extend and amend historic forms of visual culture. At the same time, Mooney’s

exhibition of the miniatures at world’s fairs treated them as both architectural models and

paintings.

In chapter two I focus on depictions of buildings in the graphic arts. Throughout

the nineteenth century, a few self-taught Native American artists naturalistically rendered

architectural space in drawings. Around the turn of the twentieth century some, including

Earnest Spybuck and Jesse Cornplanter, painted architectural scenes for anthropological

commissions. Around the same time, self-taught painters in northern New Mexico

worked with non-Native arts patrons to develop a genre of painting where figures dance

across a groundless page and animals pose in spare, stylized landscapes. I conclude the

chapter with Pablita Velarde, one of the first studio-trained Native American easel

painters. In 1939 Velarde began to include architectural elements in her paintings,

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departing from the abstracted configurations of space in the established genre of

watercolor drawing. Conscious of recent efforts to establish a canon of Native art,

Velarde pictured buildings as part of a unity of Puebloan art forms. Throughout this

history of drawing and painting, depictions of architecture largely occur in intercultural

contexts—trading villages, reform colonies, anthropological commissions, and federal

works projects. This longer context helps to elucidate how Native artists have depicted

architecture as a way to observe, and to participate in, the mechanisms of cultural change

and continuity.

In chapter three I look at one site in the built environment. At the South Rim of

the Grand Canyon, a Pueblo-style building called Hopi House has operated as a gift shop

and gallery of Native American art since 1905. Architect Mary Colter based the design

for the building on a block of houses from the Hopi village Oraibi. In its first decades,

merchandise displays and artist demonstrations at Hopi House helped visitors to see

Native American material as fine art. At the end of the twentieth century, critics

contended that Hopi House had created a flattened picture of Southwestern peoples by

staging fanciful versions of Native cultures for touristic consumption. Yet the site has

also facilitated interpersonal encounters across cultural borders. Tourists and Native

employees bring distinct perspectives to, and take their own memories from, Hopi House.

In chapter four I consider the agency of the house and the photograph. From 1904

to 1930 Edward Curtis created The North American Indian, a photographic and

ethnographic compendium of Native North American culture. Curtis relied on pictorialist

techniques of fine art photography and thus partially abstracted buildings. As studies in

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shape and surface, Curtis’s photographs transform Native American architecture.

Working a century after Curtis, Will Wilson harnesses the transformative power of Diné

architecture in his Auto Immune Response photographic series. In this body of work,

hogans help to regenerate the post-apocalyptic Diné homeland. The animistic and

reproductive facility is consistent with Diné understandings of hogans, the historic

architecture of the group. As a whole, then, in this dissertation I acknowledge the

entanglements of art and architecture to show that Native American architecture is active

and ongoing, and that its iconography encompasses much more than associations with the

past.

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Chapter One

Models: Kiowa Tipis and the Mooney Commission

In late 1894 the anthropologist James Mooney (1861–1921) recorded his vision for how

best to display Native American material culture. With the influential and encyclopedic

exhibits from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition fresh in his memory, Mooney

imagined another path for museum anthropology. Called the “Outline Plan for Ethnologic

Museum Collection,” Mooney’s proposal advocated for a comprehensive exhibit devoted

to the Kiowa, an Indigenous nation centered in western Oklahoma.1 The “Outline Plan”

centered on a Kiowa Pavilion, not unlike the state pavilions ubiquitous at international

expositions in the United States. The building would house a recreation of a Kiowa camp

made up of 250 model tipis, and about a fifth of these models would feature painted

designs. Arranged on the pavilion walls would be clothing, tools, aboriginal drawings,

and photographs of, “every individual in the tribe.”2 Like so many world’s fair

impresarios, James Mooney made no little plans.

1 Kiowa history tells that around the year 1800 the group migrated from the Northern Plains to an area of the Southern Plains. James Mooney, “Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians,” Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, pt. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898), 152–54. In the late nineteenth century Kiowa families briefly shared a reservation with Comanche and Apache people in western Oklahoma. The 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge established the temporary reservation, which the federal government dissolved in 1901, then opened to non-Native settlers. 2 James Mooney, “Outline Plan for Ethnologic Museum Collection,” November 10, 1894, folder 4788, National Anthropological Archives (hereafter cited as NAA), Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, MD.

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Though the pavilion never materialized, the idea spurred Mooney to commission

a major recreation of nineteenth-century Kiowa painted tipis. When that project

concluded in 1904, Kiowa people had miniaturized fifty painted tipis, or lodges.3 The

models scale down a graphic art form that had existed exclusively on full-size tipi covers.

Ranging from abstract symbolism to representational imagery, designs painted on a tipi

help to channel spiritual power. For example, the tipi of a medicine man named Turtle

(Ton-akai) pictures a turtle-thunderbird (fig. 1.1). A follower of the medicine man

painted the model of Turtle’s tipi for the Mooney commission. To display the entire

design of the model the door seam is open, spread across the top of the photograph.

Otters flank the door. Two rainbow bands run across the tipi cover. These symbols mark

the powers of turtle medicine and water that the owner received as a teenager when he

supplicated the water spirits in a vision quest.4 For a Kiowa man to paint his lodge with a

symbol was to publicly announce a unique claim to his power and to dwell with it in the

most intimate spheres of his life. As highly valuable property, tipi designs are subject to

Kiowa systems of ownership. Hide tipi covers required nearly annual renewal from wear

and weathering, so it was the rights to tipi designs that garnered significant value and

power, as opposed to their material embodiment on a tipi cover.5

3 James Mooney (n.p.) to William Henry Holmes, Washington, DC, October 24, 1904, Bureau of American Ethnology (hereafter cited as BAE) Letters Received 1888–1906, NAA, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, MD. 4 John C. Ewers, Murals in the Round: Painted Tipis of the Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache Indians (Washington, DC: Renwick Gallery, 1978), 27. 5 Candace Greene and Thomas Drescher, “The Tipi with Battle Pictures: The Kiowa Tradition of Intangible Property Rights,” Trademark Reporter 84, no. 4 (July/August 1994): 418–433.

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In this chapter I examine the collaborative production and public displays of

Kiowa model tipis. While there has been persistent scholarly interest in the Kiowa

models, and important work has been committed to describing the iconography, the

models rarely receive sustained attention.6 I believe that this has to do with disciplinary

boundaries predisposing the separate consideration of architectural aspects by

architectural historians and of painted designs by art critics and historians. This

separation implicitly encourages narratives of cultural decline by emphasizing the loss of

so-called traditional architectures and their flattening in visual representation. In order to

encourage accounts of cultural survival, here I focus on the ways Kiowa model tipis

connect Kiowa architecture and art.

I argue that the model tipis have allowed Kiowa artists and American audiences to

perceive continuity within Kiowa visual culture between nineteenth-century architecture

and twentieth-century fine art painting. To produce the models James Mooney worked

6 John Ewers’s exhibition and catalog identifies the designs, historical owners, and makers of many models. Ewers, Murals in the Round. Many scholars have mentioned the Kiowa model tipis. See L. G. Moses, The Indian Man: A Biography of James Mooney (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 107–111, 120–121; Nancy Fagin, “The James Mooney Collection of Cheyenne Tipi Models at Field Museum of Natural History,” Plains Anthropologist 33, no. 120 (May 1988): 262, 276; Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton, Native American Architecture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 160–161, 166–167; Janet Berlo’s introductory chapter in her edited volume The Early Years of Native American Art History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), 5; Greene and Drescher, “The Tipi with Battle Pictures”; Adrianne A. Santina, “Toys, Models, Collectibles: Miniature Tipis in the Reservation Era,” in Painters, Patrons, and Identity, ed. Joyce Szabo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 10–16, 25; Candace Greene, Silver Horn: Master Illustrator of the Kiowa (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 190–94, 196–7, 199–203, 221 ; Nancy Rosoff and Susan Kennedy Zeller, eds., Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 2011), 150–151, 155; Gaylord Torrence, Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2014), 104.

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within Kiowa cultural property codes and collaborated with heirs to proprietary designs.

By emphasizing the role of painted tipis in Kiowa culture Mooney intervened in

ethnographic studies of Indigenous North American dwellings—these studies tended to

abstract architectural data from diverse sources to arrange in a series of technological-

developmental stages. Kiowa artists had, for the most part, recently moved to settler-style

cabins by the time they began working on the model tipi project. Recreating historic

lodges provided these artists opportunity to engage with the painted tipi tradition and

extend it into the twentieth century. American and international viewers encountered the

model tipis from 1897 to 1905 at world’s fairs in Nashville, Omaha, Saint Louis, and

Portland, Oregon. Displays suggested an abiding link between painting and dwelling in

Kiowa culture.

Native American Architecture and the Bureau of American Ethnology

By the time Mooney began the model tipi project in 1895, Bureau of American

Ethnology (BAE) employees had been mapping Native architecture—dwellings of the

pueblos, especially—in blueprints, plaster models, and printed monographs for well over

a decade. In organizing a recreation of the Kiowa Sun Dance camp circle, Mooney

contested the standard uses of architecture in American anthropology. But what, in the

first place, motivated this line of research on architecture? How did late nineteenth-

century ethnographers conceive of Native American architecture? In general, the BAE

sought to accumulate as much data about Native cultures as possible, the better to fill in

the details of a broad evolutionary scheme. In particular, ethnologists saw building as the

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ur-form of material culture, the most fundamental and universal type of human

construction. John Wesley Powell founded the Bureau in 1879 intending to organize

anthropological research in the United States. Powell advocated for a classificatory

system in ethnology based on developmental stages, a system closely resembling Lewis

Henry Morgan’s (1818–1881) theorization of cultural evolution.

One of the first Americans to systematize research on Indigenous peoples,

Morgan looms large in the history of anthropology. Perhaps best known today for his

theory of cultural evolution—wherein groups of people advance in stages from savagery

through barbarism to civilization—for Morgan it was institutions and technologies that

marked progress while the ingenious human mind remained constant through time and

space.7 Morgan articulated this system most clearly in his 1877 book Ancient Society,

which outlined the institutional forms of government, kinship, and property particular to

each stage of cultural development, moving from personal rule and communal land

holdings in savagery through barbarism to more formal political and legal arrangements

in civilization.8 Studying earlier stages of advancement, Morgan claimed, could help

uncover clues about the origins of Euro-American society.9

7 Curtis Hinsley, The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in Victorian America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), 133. 8 Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (New York: Henry Holt, 1877). 9 Lewis Henry Morgan, Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines (1881; reprint, Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2006), 57.

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Morgan became increasingly interested in Native architecture at the end of his

career, though he wrote articles on the topic as early as 1869.10 He initially planned for

Ancient Society to conclude with a chapter on Native American architecture. Yet space

limited Morgan from linking architectural morphology to cultural evolution in that

volume.11 Instead, Morgan opened his final book, Houses and House-Life of the North

American Aborigines (published in 1881 as part of Powell’s series, Contributions to

North American Ethnology) with a chapter reviewing the argument of Ancient Society.

Subsequent chapters cite diverse evidence to explain Native dwellings with respect to the

social arrangement and evolutionary status of their inhabitants. For Morgan, the shapes of

buildings mirror the structures of societies.

Powell began to support architectural research at the BAE a few years after

Morgan developed an interest in Native American dwellings.12 In 1879 the Stevenson

expedition travelled to the Southwest as part of the initial research foray of the BAE.

Members of the expedition collected information about—and objects from—the

Southwestern pueblos. The expedition team included John K. Hillers, who systematically 10 Morgan, “Seven Cities of Cibola,” North American Review 108, no. 223 (April 1869): 457–498. Morgan published other articles on Indigenous architecture leading up to the 1881 publication of Houses and House-Life, including “Houses of the Mound Builders,” North American Review 123, no. 252 (July 1876): 60–85; “On the Ruins of a Stone Pueblo on the Animas River in New Mexico, with a Ground Plan,” Twelfth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1880), 536–556; “A Study of the Houses of the American Aborigines,” Annual Report of the Archaeological Institute of America 1 (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1880): 27–80. 11 Elisabeth Tooker, Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 10. 12 Peter Nabokov, “Introduction,” in Victor Mindeleff, A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola (1891; reprint, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), xii–xiv.

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photographed a number of Pueblo villages.13 In other early expeditions organized by the

BAE the brothers Cosmos and Victor Mindeleff measured architectural dimensions in

Hopi and Zuni villages for later use in model making.14 Translating Morgan’s theories to

practicable research, Powell endorsed a broad comparative approach to the study of

Indigenous cultures.

As historian Curtis Hinsley describes Powell’s method, the experiences of various

Indigenous groups constituted “only the data of Powell’s anthropology, not the final

scientific object.”15 In other words, Powell cared about particular groups of people

insofar as they provided information that could confirm a common set of social and

technological principles appropriate to their evolutionary stage. BAE ethnologists

collected information on diverse cultural forms—house designs, languages, kinship,

weapons, burial practices—to then abstract and arrange in rigid evolutionary schemes.

Against this model, Mooney undertook an architectural study that related directly to

Kiowa culture. In this and other ways throughout the mid 1890s Mooney’s approach

differed from that of his contemporaries.16 In Mooney’s heraldry studies, painted tipis

13 Don D. Fowler, Myself in the Water: The Western Photographs of John K. Hillers (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 85. Traveling in territorial New Mexico from 1879 to 1882, Hillers created some of the first depictions of Indigenous architecture for scientific purposes. 14 Nabokov, “Introduction,” ix–xli. For more on the Mindeleffs, see Don D. Fowler, A Laboratory for Anthropology: Science and Romanticism in the American Southwest, 1846–1930 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 140–43. Cosmos Mindeleff eventually took a position with the US National Museum preparing architectural models for exhibition. 15 Hinsley, The Smithsonian, 138. 16 Hinsley, The Smithsonian, 219. Mooney especially challenged the techno-developmental view of culture proposed by Morgan and put into practice at BAE. Mooney’s work contributed to the broader development of new approaches to American

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had more than an evidentiary role in establishing the evolutionary status of Kiowa

culture. To paraphrase: if Powell apprehended tipis as data, then Mooney understood tipis

to be the final scientific (and artistic) object.

Reviewing key features of Plains tipi construction and development provides a

baseline for addressing how changing representations affect tipi forms. Constructing a

tipi first requires arranging up to twenty poles vertically to form an imperfect cone, then

covering the timber skeleton with a sewn mantle of hide or canvas. Tipis lack a center

pole. This absence creates an open floor plan, which allows smoke to rise in an

unswerving column. Most tipis include a liner, a piece of fabric that runs along the

interior wall.17 Tipi liners help to regulate climate by directing drafts upward and drops of

water downward and away from occupants. At the top of a tipi two exterior flaps protect

the smoke hole. These adjustable protrusions enable the owner to shield the opening from

wind and rain. Poles fit into pockets, or “ears,” at the tip of the flaps. From the ground,

occupants use these poles to alter the angle of the smoke hole without reorienting the

anthropology at the time. Franz Boas perhaps best articulated in theoretical terms the need to move away from evolutionary thinking, and Mooney was certainly aware of Boas’s writing. Unlike Mooney, who remained committed to museum practice, Boas advocated for anthropology to professionalize in university settings. 17 Tipi liners often feature women’s geometric abstractions in paint, beads, or quill. And sometimes liners serve as the medium for men’s depiction of battle exploits. Tipi liners have recently piqued the interest of art historians. For published analysis of particular liners, see Joe D. Horse Capture, “Collecting Our Past, Presenting Our Stories,” in From Our Ancestors: Art of the White Clay People, ed. Joe D. Horse Capture, George P. Horse Capture, Sr., and Sean Chandler (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2009), 20–33; Susan Kennedy Zeller, “The Rain-in-the-Face Tipi Liner,” in Rosoff and Zeller, Tipi, 77–98.

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lodge itself.18 Though some Great Lakes and California groups built conical structures

covered in plant fiber, adjustable smoke holes and a cover of hide (or later, canvas)

distinguish the Plains tipi.

Not all Plains nations lived in tipis. Mandan and Hidatsa peoples historically

resided most of the year in circular earth lodges often built on river bluffs. The Caddo,

Wichita, and some other peoples of the southern Plains constructed grass houses. And the

Plains groups that build tipis employ diverse construction styles. Kiowa people and most

other tipi builders on the southern Plains use a tripod to provide structural support, resting

auxiliary poles high in a crotch formed by the three main poles. Northern Plains groups

such as the Apsáalooke (Crow) and Blackfoot build tipis with bases of four poles, which

tend to provide more space but less stability than three-pole tipis.19 The four-pole tipi was

likely used for thousands of years. Archaeologists link the structure to the 5,000-year-old

circular rock formations that stipple the northwest Plains. In contrast to this long history,

Ted Brasser suggests that the three-pole tipi (the type used by the Kiowa) arrived on the

Plains in the centuries just before contact. Around this time some Cree people moved

from the Great Lakes westward to areas bordering the northern Plains, in the process

altering the material culture of neighboring groups. One change included the introduction 18 Ted Brasser, “The Tipi as an Element in the Emergence of Historic Plains Indian Nomadism,” Plains Anthropologist 27, no. 98, pt. 1 (November 1982): 310. 19 Historians Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton outline a wider set of differences between southern and northern Plains tipis: “In the southern Plains, tipi poles usually did not lift as far above the smoke hole as those in the north . . . Around the hem of northern tipis, hardwood stakes were driven into the ground through cloth loops . . . The southern tipi doorway was usually an inverted V . . . northern tipis often had an oval door tailored into the cloth.” Nabokov and Easton, Native American Architecture, 153–156. See also Reginald and Gladys Laubin, The Indian Tipi: Its History, Construction, and Use (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957).

44

of a hide-covered conical lodge constructed with a base of three poles. With slight

modifications, this would become the three-pole tipi.20 Spanish explorers of the early

sixteenth century had noted smaller tipis on the southern Plains than Americans would

encounter in the nineteenth century.21 Horses introduced by the Spanish helped increase

the scale of tipis after contact. These animals could carry longer tipi poles and heavier

covers than dogs, the previous beasts of burden.

When Kiowa people translated full-size lodges into miniature during the 1890s

for the Mooney commission they continued a tradition of architectural experimentation.

During the reservation era (1867–1901) Kiowa people began using tipis differently. At

this time Kiowa families moved in and out of wooden houses, often pitching summer

tipis or tents in the yard. When Charles Oheltoint constructed a Tipi with Battle Pictures

in 1916 it was the first full-size Kiowa painted lodge built in over twenty years (fig.

1.2).22 Oheltoint’s lodge helped to shift the use of painted tipis from dwellings to works

of art and sites of memory. In miniaturizing their painted lodges for Mooney’s project,

Kiowa people began to develop new capacities for historic forms of painting and

architecture.

20 The Cree used moose hide. Brasser, “The Tipi as an Element,” 309–21. 21 Herbert Bolton, ed., Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542–1706 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 226–7. 22 Ewers, Murals in the Round, 15. Mooney believed the Tipi with Battle Pictures, used by Little Bluff II and his son White Bull through the winter of 1891 and ’92, had been the last painted tipi in Kiowa camps.

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Mooney in Kiowa Territory

A mostly self-taught ethnologist in the days before anthropology took root in the

American academy, Mooney began his career with the BAE in 1885. His initial fieldwork

focused on a group of Cherokee people in North Carolina. In 1889 the burgeoning Ghost

Dance religion, a millenarian movement, drew him to the Plains. Mooney continued to

focus on Indigenous Plains cultures, especially Kiowa visual culture, through the 1890s.

With his work on the Plains, Mooney began to distance himself from Washington, DC,

and the theories of cultural evolution that reigned at the BAE. Mooney’s biographer

writes that while his superiors such as J. W. Powell “were busily sculpting the final

ornamentation on their theories of developmentalism at the bureau, Mooney was

announcing his apostasy, his emancipation from the bondage of the idea of ‘stages of

civilization.’”23 With his research on the Ghost Dance and subsequent work, Mooney

downplayed the comparative approach, a method that Powell favored for its ability to

magnify cultural difference.24 Though not free from the prejudices of his time, Mooney

showed remarkable sensitivity to Native agency by explaining cultural phenomena

through local accounts and in other ways highlighting a sense of humanity that transcends

cultural borders.

Like many ethnologists of the late nineteenth century, James Mooney studied

Indigenous visual culture in considerable depth. His first study of Kiowa culture used 23 Moses, Indian Man, 87. 24 James Mooney, “The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890,” Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, pt. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896). The dynamics of colonialism were not entirely absent from Mooney’s writing, as Jackie Thompson Rand notes in Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008).

46

pictorial calendars to write a history of this nation in the nineteenth century.25 After

completing the manuscript for A Calendar History of Kiowa Indians in 1894 Mooney

began an intensive study of Kiowa painted shields and tipis. Both shields and tipis

featured cosmologically powerful designs. In the regimented use of these designs

Mooney discerned a structure to Kiowa society. Using the term “Kiowa Heraldry” to

describe the designs and their use, Mooney suggested a similarity between Kiowa

insignia and coats of arms used by medieval European families.26 Even more, Mooney

contended that Kiowa people lack the clan system, undermining the evolutionist position

that all Native American groups occupied the same stage of social development.27 With

his study of heraldry Mooney downplayed notions of technological developmentalism.

Given the changes Mooney witnessed in Kiowa architecture and daily life in the

1890s, the Sun Dance circle of 1867 accrued particular significance for his study of

painted tipis. At that gathering Kiowa emissaries signed the Treaty of Medicine Lodge,

which established a reservation for their peoples. For Mooney, 1867 divided Kiowa

history into an earlier era of freedom and a later period of confinement on the reservation.

Working in the later period, Mooney undertook sustained fieldwork to recreate the 1867

camp. In order to model the camp, Mooney needed to determine which painted tipis the 25 Mooney, “Calendar History.” Like Lakota peoples of the Northern Plains, the Kiowa of the Southern Plains maintained pictorial calendars. A symbol represented each summer and winter. Symbols were used as mnemonic devices that helped people recall a past year based on the signature event. For more on Kiowa calendars see Candace Greene, One Hundred Summers: A Kiowa Calendar Record (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 26 Mooney later continued his heraldry research beyond the Kiowa, working with George Dorsey at the Field Museum to commission similar objects from Southern Cheyenne people. See Fagin, “The James Mooney Collection.” 27 Moses, Indian Man, 103–4.

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1867 circle included, who owned them and where each owner set up his lodge. For

firsthand accounts from owners, Mooney could turn to a few men living in the 1890s who

had pitched their painted lodges in the 1867 circle. In other cases, children who grew up

in painted tipis helped Mooney piece together an image of the 1867 Sun Dance circle.

Based on interviews with people who formerly inhabited the painted tipis,

Mooney carefully mapped the Sun Dance circle of 1867 (fig. 1.3). Each summer before

the 1867 circle dispersed family camps would join lodges in a large ring to celebrate the

Sun Dance, the central religious and social event of the year. In the center of the tipi ring

stood the medicine lodge. The Sun Dance or medicine lodge is made up of numerous

rafters, which connect the circular exterior posts to the forked Sun Dance pole in the

center of the structure. The architectural historians Peter Nabakov and Robert Easton

characterize the Sun Dance pole as “the pivot of the cosmos, the conduit for collective

prayers.”28 In addition to the significance of the medicine lodge, the large tipi ring

designated an order for each lodge. Mooney believed this arrangement made visible some

of the less tangible aspects of Kiowa relations.

Mooney’s map numbers each tipi, painted and unpainted, accounting for 228. A

series of hand-drawn tipis make up a ring, and notations indicate the position of specific

painted lodges. Tohausen’s Tipi with Battle Pictures, for example, occupied the most

prominent position, immediately south of the circle entrance. As Candace Greene writes,

Mooney found Kiowa heraldry “to be a vehicle for access to many aspects of Kiowa

knowledge—social organization, history, religion, symbolism, mythology, medicine, the 28 Nabokov and Easton, Native American Architecture, 168. For Mooney’s description of the Kiowa Sun Dance, see Mooney, “Calendar History,” 242–244.

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laws of descent and heredity, and name systems.”29 In the Sun Dance circle Mooney

traced the shape of the Kiowa world. Marking the cardinal directions, the map shows the

east-facing opening of the circle. Six continuously arranged groups form the ring,

beginning with the Kata band south of the opening. Proceeding clockwise, the next band

in the circle was the Kogui, then the Ka’igwu, Kinep, Semat (Plains Apache or Kiowa-

Apache) and Konta’lyui. In the Sun Dance circle all doors face east. As opposed to a

more defensive position where tipi doors might face the camp circle interior, a Kiowa

Sun Dance circle forms a kind of Mobius strip where dwellings greet the rising sun.

Uniting spiritual life, social structure and daily living, the camp circle provided Mooney

with an architectural “master encoding” of Kiowa society.30 For Mooney, the shapes of

Kiowa dwelling mirrored the contours of Kiowa cosmology.

Mooney considered his heraldry research—and especially the branch dealing with

architecture—to be an urgent matter. As Mooney collected information on historic

painted tipis and helped facilitate their recreation in miniature, he witnessed a domestic

migration to cabins and houses. Mooney’s time on the reservation coincided precisely

with the period when the Bureau of Indian Affairs most forcefully encouraged settlement.

Following the 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge a number of Southern Plains peoples

resisted settlement for nearly a decade. In April 1875 the US Army arrested 70 Cheyenne,

Kiowa, Arapaho, and Comanche resisters and imprisoned them in Ft. Marion, at St.

29 Greene, Silver Horn, 190. 30 Farella, The Main Stalk: A Synthesis of Navajo Philosophy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984), 100–101. I borrow the term “master encoding” from John Farella, who coined it to describe the symbolic richness of hogans, the house form of the Diné (Navajo).

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Augustine, Florida; while imprisoned at Ft. Marion, men filled drawing books with

memories of life back home and often-disorienting views of their experiences in

Florida.31 Some Fort Marion artists, including Oheltoint, would paint model tipis for the

Mooney commission. On the reservation the federal government first divided lands into

plots, then assigned the plots to individual owners. After the allotment process ended in

1901, the government dissolved the reservation borders and opened the land to non-

Native settlement.32 Government officials intended allotment to curtail existing ways of

life and encourage a sedentary relation to the land, one based on high-yield farming.33

Key to this engineering of cultural change was the construction of permanent wooden

dwellings on the Kiowa reservation.

At a crucial moment, Mooney collaborated with a generation of Kiowa people

who grew up in and around painted lodges. Most painted tipis had been unused since the

1870s or ’80s. In his first publication on Kiowa culture, Calendar History of Kiowa

31 Richard Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 105. On the Fort Marion drawings see, for example, Karen Daniels Petersen, Plains Indian Art from Fort Marion (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971); Edwin L. Wade and Jacki Thompson Rand, “The Subtle Art of Resistance: Encounter and Accommodation in the Art of Fort Marion,” in Plains Indian Drawings, 1865–1935: Pages for a Visual History, ed. Janet Berlo (New York: Abrams, 1996), 45–49; Joyce M. Szabo, Art from Fort Marion: The Silberman Collection (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). 32 Rand, Kiowa Humanity. For photographic accounts of the area following allotment of the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation, see Kristina Southwell and John R. Lovett, Life at the Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita Agency: The Photographs of Annette Ross Hume (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010); Nancy Mithlo, ed., For a Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw (Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, 2014). 33 William D. Pennington, “Government Policy and Farming on the Kiowa Indian Reservation, 1869–1901” (PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma Department of History, 1972).

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Indians, Mooney carefully notes when Kiowa families first occupied settler-style cabins

and chronicles further changes in Kiowa house construction. In 1887 the federal

government built ten houses for prominent Kiowa families. The families initially declined

to move, remaining in tipis until the government offered additional gifts of furniture. By

the end of the 1880s, after living in those houses for a few years, many families returned

to tipis.34 By 1892, though, Kiowa people used revenue from leasing pasturelands to

build about 60 cabins, which remain as some of the oldest Kiowa-built structures in their

territory.35 In the 1890s and early 1900s these houses were hubs of activity.36 This

historical use resonates in contemporary Kiowa culture. As the anthropologist William

Meadows writes, “Although modern Kiowa have not attempted to preserve these

structures, many view them as historical sites and as representations of some of the

earliest traces left by their ancestors on the reservation.”37 Though introduced with the

intent to unsettle Kiowa life in its most intimate realm—the home—cabins have sheltered

Kiowa culture under the guise of conformity.38

34 James Mooney, “Calendar History,” 342–43. William Meadows notes these houses were built near the Meers Gap north of Mount Scott. Meadows, Kiowa Ethnogeography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 148. 35 Mooney, “Calendar History,” 364. 36 Early wooden frame houses or cabins among other Plains groups similarly served as centers of reservation life. For example, in Montana a state park features the 1884 house of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Chief Plenty Coups. See Timothy McCleary, Thomas Carter, and Edward Chappell, Tipis and Square Houses: The Chief Plenty Coups Homestead and the Building of the Crow Indian Reservation in Central Montana, 1884–1910 (Helena: Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, 2005). Dennis Sun Rhodes describes how his grandmother maintained aspects of tipi life in her cabin in Sun Rhodes, “The Arapaho Tipi,” in Rosoff and Zeller, Tipi, 58–60. 37 Meadows, Kiowa Ethnogeography, 150. 38 Indigenous groups across the Plains brought to their cabins senses of dwelling that were distinct from the Anglo American mythology of the frontier cabin. See Sun Rhodes,

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Forms of Identity and Ownership

Most nineteenth-century Kiowa men received tipi designs through dreams, vision quests,

or inheritance, though some designs came from other Plains groups. The Tipi with Battle

Pictures, for example, originated with the Cheyenne. Around 1850 the Cheyenne chief

Sleeping Bear presented the rights to renew his tipi, one decorated with pictures of his

victories on the battlefield, to the Kiowa chief Tohausen. Tohausen augmented the

Cheyenne imagery by picturing scenes of Kiowa valor, adding rows of lances, and

including black stripes where previously there had been only rows of yellow.39 If the Tipi

with Battle Pictures represented a gift of diplomacy, then Kiowa people also acquired at

least one tipi design through an act of warfare. For the Mooney commission, a female

relative of Wolf Chief II reproduced his yellow tipi. Wolf Chief II (d. 1885) received the

rights to paint the yellow tipi from his father, who obtained the design himself by

counting coup, an honored feat of bravery in Plains warfare, on a yellow tipi in a rival

Ute camp.40

Symbols on painted tipis represent a form of power uniquely tied to the tipi

owner. It was Kiowa men who built and owned painted tipis, while women made and

owned unpainted tipis, the vast majority of Kiowa lodges.41 As with some other historic

“The Arapaho Tipi.” Conveying this distinct sense of dwelling in a museum installation, Lakota artist Arthur Amiotte has reconstructed his great grandfather Standing Bear’s 1911 log cabin at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming. 39 Greene and Drescher, “The Tipi with Battle Pictures,” 421–22. 40 Ewers, Murals, 41, fig. 38. A yellow tipi of Arikara origins also factored into the Mooney commission. 41 Rosemary Ellison, Painted Tipis by Contemporary Plains Indian Artists (Anadarko, OK: Oklahoma Indian Arts and Crafts Cooperative, 1973), 11–14. Women tanned, cut, and sewed up to twenty buffalo hides to create a tipi cover. Typically women worked

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forms of Native art, Kiowa tipis picture an external source of power to which the artist-

owner enjoyed a privileged relation. In particular, Kiowa painted tipis channel dwdw, a

spirit force or medicine that animates the universe. This force manifests in degrees. As

anthropologist Benjamin Kracht describes, “All spirits possessed dwdw according to a

hierarchical scheme: predators were more powerful than their prey, and ‘powers from

above’ had stronger dwdw than earthly animals.”42 Only a few elite men could seek such

power. In the four days of fasting and isolation that make up a vision quest a supplicant

could receive a vision directly from a source of dwdw. Claiming the power of the vision,

he returned from the vision quest to adorn his tipi and shield. To dwell in a painted tipi

was to surround oneself in a zone of power—to inhabit the medicine the painting

channeled.

Though personal claims to cosmological powers largely originated in vision

quests, a man would occasionally first apprentice and obtain a less direct form of power

from someone already endowed with dwdw.43 A limited distribution of heraldic shields

helped to regulate apprenticeships. For instance, around 1850 the medicine man

Adalboingyato (c. 1800–1870) gave a bird shield to an apprentice named Gaapiatan (c.

together to build a tipi, led by a supervisor accomplished in cutting and fitting hides. There is evidence that Kiowa women formed a sewing society. J. T. Rand, Kiowa Humanity, 21–24. This group likely paralleled the collaborative work of sewing societies in other Plains nations. For more on Plains sewing societies and the tipi, see Barbara Hail, “To Honor Her Kindred,’” in Rosoff and Zeller, Tipi, 119–133. 42 Benjamin R. Kracht, “Kiowa Religion in Historical Perspective,” American Indian Quarterly 21, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 16. 43 Kracht, “Kiowa Religion,” 16–17.

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1824–1902).44 This was one of about ten copies Adalboingyato made for a group of

acolytes known as the Bird Shield Warriors.45 This group formed a different type of

sodality than the Yàpfàhêgàu, prestigious Kiowa military societies.46 Less martial, shield

societies tended to coalesce around healing medicine.47

Adalboingyato received his powerful bird medicine in a vision quest as a boy, as

Ron McCoy describes it. While accompanying a Kiowa hunting party he strayed to

examine a pond lined with trees. A zemoguani—a horned underwater monster—had

stripped the bark from the trees (see below). As Adalboingyato rested by the shore, a

young man appeared, leading Adalboingyato to a tipi painted with stars and birds. A

rainbow band ran along its top and bottom. In the lodge, nine people greeted him,

throwing off their eagle and star robes and revealing themselves to be various species of

44 Among other names, Adalboingyato is also known as Fair Hair Old Man, and Gaapiatan is also known as Sheathed Lance, Feathered Lance, or Haitsiki. 45 Ron McCoy, ‘“I Have a Mysterious Way’: Kiowa Shield Designs and Origin Stories Collected by James Mooney, 1891–1906,” American Indian Art Magazine 29, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 74. McCoy has examined Mooney’s heraldry work in a series of essays in American Indian Art Magazine (hereafter cited as AIAM), including “James Mooney’s Fieldwork Among the Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache,” AIAM 20, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 64–71; “Searching for Clues in Kiowa Ledger Drawings: Combining James Mooney’s Fieldwork and the Barber Collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum,” AIAM 21, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 54–61; “A Shield to Help You through Life: Kiowa Shield Designs and Origin Stories Collected by James Mooney, 1891–1906,” AIAM 28, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 70–81. 46 William Meadows, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche Military Societies: Enduring Veterans, 1800 to the Present (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 36–49. For more on Yàpfàhêgàu, see Meadows, Kiowa Military Societies: Ethnohistory and Ritual (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010). On the role of tipis in military societies, see Daniel C. Swan and Michael P. Jordan, “Tipis and the Warrior Tradition,” in Rosoff and Zeller, Tipi, 145–163; Dixon Palmer and Lyndreth Palmer, “The Tipi of the Kiowa Tonkongya (Black Leggings Warrior Society),” in Rosoff and Zeller, Tipi, 165–167. 47 Adalboingyato’s bird shield included some war powers.

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bird. Each bird offered the young man medicine and instruction. After Adalboingyato

received his bird medicine he exited the tipi, and the dwelling vanished. A few years later

Adalboingyato created his first bird shield. Decades later he raised the Eagle Tipi, a lodge

that mimicked the decorations of the spectral tipi where he received his dwdw.48

A daughter of Gaapiatan renewed Adalboingyato’s Eagle Tipi for the Mooney

commission, painting three rows of eagles and a bat (fig. 1.4). In most instances, the

person who painted a model for the Mooney commission worked directly with the

historical owner or one of his descendants. Men who owned tipi designs sometimes

passed away before formally transferring rights to their lodges. This appears to have been

the case with Adalboingyato’s Eagle Tipi and some other tipis renewed in the mid 1890s

for the Mooney commission.49 By authorizing his daughter to paint Adalboingyato’s

Eagle Tipi Gaapiatan did not necessarily claim a right to that lodge. Rather, Gaapiatan

likely sought to maintain important cultural knowledge and used Mooney to achieve this

goal.50

By the time Gaapiatan was a young man Adalboingyato had been leading a group

of students for years. As an apprentice Gaapiatan received a copy of Adalboingyato’s

48 McCoy, “‘I Have a Mysterious Way,’” 70–75. Adalboingyato painted the Eagle Tipi only after dwelling in a different one, the Leg Picture Tipi. 49 In contrast with the open-ended questions of ownership around the Eagle Tipi, Adalboingyato clearly transferred rights to his other painted lodge, the Leg Picture Tipi, where he lived before making the Eagle Tipi. Around 1857 Adalboigyato gave his Leg Picture Tipi to Brave Boy, who transferred it to his own son. Ewers, Murals, 29. 50 McCoy, “’I Have a Mysterious Way,” 75. Ron McCoy writes that Gaapiatan had worked with Mooney for a decade before agreeing to share information on Adalboingyato’s sacred bird shield. McCoy supposed Gaapiatan was motivated by a desire to preserve Kiowa history, even if sharing with the ethnographer posed a challenge to historic limitations on esoteric knowledge.

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bird shield. But according to John Ewers, the older man then refused to pass on the rights

to his Eagle Tipi. Adalboingyato granted that as long as Gaapiatan dreamed a bird vision

himself, though, the apprentice might make a similar tipi. So around 1867 Gaapiatan

dreamed a vision of birds and painted his tipi with his own design, a distinct claim to bird

medicine.51 Similar to the way Adalboingyato arranged his Eagle Tipi, Gaapiatan divided

his lodge cover into northern and southern zones (fig. 1.5). Gaapiatan painted birds,

perching and airborne, on the northern section and filled the southern part with stars. And

like Adalboingyato’s tipi, Gaapiatan’s features a rainbow border at top and bottom. Both

lodges are known, in the Kiowa language, as Guati-Do-Gaut.52

In 1894 Gaapiatan worked with his daughter Tama to create a model of his Bird

Picture Tipi for the Mooney commission. The miniature includes a number of bird

species—including a bald eagle, great horned owl, and swallow-tailed kite—as well as

dragonflies and bats, all animals from the powerful sky realm. Rather than interacting

with each other, the animals proudly display themselves to be seen. When the lodge is set

up it appears that the birds have flown from miles around to gather at the side of the tipi.

Or perhaps they are projected from within. Either way, the painting suggests Gaapiatan

can willfully summon an incongruous mix of winged creatures. Like most other tipi

designs, Gaapiatan’s Bird Picture Tipi channeled the dwdw he received in a vision quest.

Marking this vision on his tipi, Gaapiatan made personal experience a matter of public

record. Gaapiatan likely claimed exclusive rights to the tipi based on his vision. 51 John Ewers, “Outline of Kiowa Tipi Study,” 55, box 26, series 2, John Canfield Ewers Papers, NAA, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, MD. 52 Ewers, “Outline of Kiowa Tipi Study,” 55.

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Despite the similar motif and close association between the lodges of

Adalboingyato and Gaapiatan, the tipis channeled distinct sources of power. Consider

how tipi designs fostered a unique and intimate bond between a Kiowa man and the spirit

world. It is not simply the visible dimensions of tipi paintings that form this bond.

Significant nonvisual patterns are at play, too. The private associations that visitors and

passersby made with each painted lodge helped to validate the link between its design

and its owner. Beyond many such small acts of looking a more formal and communal

code of ownership bound tipi designs with specific elite men. Hide tipi covers lasted one

or two winters, so tipi owners reconstructed lodges nearly every year. Constantly wearing

out and being replaced, the tipi cover merely supported a spiritual vision. In this rhythm

of rebuilding, painted designs and their associated powers garnered value. Rather than

merely replicating a lost building, Kiowa people renewed proprietary designs when

building and painting lodges in the spring.

Anthropologist Candace Greene and legal scholar Thomas Drescher distinguish

this system of design ownership from US copyright laws. Whereas American legal codes

protect forms of expression, the Kiowa manage access to the thing represented.53 In the

case of painted tipis, the thing represented counts as the source of dwdw, the unique

cosmological power the tipi ensures. For example, in a 1909 lecture James Mooney

recalled Gaapiatan, his frequent host in Kiowa country. Gaapiatan had marshaled an

assemblage of painted objects, Mooney described, to help transmit his bird medicine.

Along with his painted tipi and a shield featuring “representations of various kinds of

53 Greene and Drescher, “Tipi with Battle Pictures,” 429.

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birds which were his protecting spirits,” face painting and imagery painted on his horse

made up Gaapiatan’s cosmological complex of adornment.54 Indeed, tipi designs fit into a

broader system of identity and ownership in Kiowa society, one that regulates the rights

to perform songs, recount heroic exploits, and answer to formal names. In this system

cosmological power and cultural property laws associated with full-size tipis also apply

to models.

Kiowa men obeyed this proprietary code when painting, displaying, and

bequeathing their tipi designs. According to Kiowa systems of ownership, a man could

transfer a tipi image and its associated power to a relative. But if someone painted the

image without authorization, she or he would commit identity theft in a most invasive

degree. For this reason, Gaapiatan took care to distinguish his Bird Picture Tipi from

Adalboingyato’s Eagle Tipi. The model of Adalboingyato’s correctly includes a bat. A

bat also appears on the model of Gaapiatan’s tipi. Gaapiatan’s lodge never featured a bat,

however, and Gaapiatan made sure that Mooney was aware of this mistake on the Bird

Picture Tipi model.55 Taking care to distinguish his tipi from Adalboingyato’s was a

matter of maintaining personal identity. By noting the inaccuracy, Gaapiatan laid claim to

a life of his own, one distinct from the doyen of the Bird Shield Warriors.

54 James Mooney, “In Kiowa Camps,” Proceedings of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association 3 (1909–1910): 55. For a photograph of Gaapiatan with some of these objects, including a bird shield, see Ewers, Murals in the Round, 31, fig. 28. 55 Mooney, “Notes on Heraldry,” 40–1, volume 2, MS 2531, NAA, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, MD.

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Figural and Abstract Iconography

To dwell in a painted tipi was to occupy a position of stature. In the prereservation era

roughly 20 percent of Kiowa tipis bore designs. Though a small portion of Kiowa

families lived in painted lodges in the nineteenth century, Kiowa camps still contained

some of the highest concentrations of painted tipis on the Plains.56 The designs employ a

diverse iconography. The painted miniature tipi covers form a continuum of potent

imagery that ranges from narrative action—as in the southern sections of the Tipi with

Battle Pictures—to fields of color, including two distinguishable tipis painted solidly red.

One of the standard ways that scholars have categorized historic arts of the Plains is a

binary system that distinguishes narrative biographical arts from ceremonial works that

use abstract iconography.57 The variety of Kiowa tipi designs, functioning in both social

and spiritual realms, precludes a simple classification as either ceremonial or

biographical. Considered on their own terms, the model tipis reflect historical contours of

Kiowa visual culture. A close engagement with the models shows, in particular, how

painting and architecture worked in tandem to nurture systems of identity in nineteenth-

century Kiowa society.

56 Ellison, Painted Tipis, 18. By comparison, one in ten Blackfoot tipis featured painted designs. 57 James D. Keyser, “A Lexicon for Historic Plains Indian Rock Art: Increasing Interpretive Potential,” Plains Anthropologist 32, no. 115 (1987): 43–71. In his introductory essay to a 1992 exhibition catalog of Plains art, Evan Maurer expands Keyser’s study. Maurer, “Visions of the People,” in Visions of the People: A Pictorial History of Plains Indian Life, ed. Evan Maurer (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1992), 15–46. Whereas ceremonial art creates images of cosmological power, biographical art depicts acts of bravery and is typically used as a mnemonic device as a warrior retells his battlefield exploits.

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Most tipi paintings represent animals, mythical creatures, stars, or rainbows. In a

major study of the model tipis from 1978, anthropologist John C. Ewers notes that human

figures appear only twice in models painted for the Mooney commission.58 These include

perhaps the most famous Kiowa painted tipi, the Tipi with Battle Pictures (fig. 1.6). In

this iteration of the battle pictures, Native warriors and US soldiers engage in combat.

Columns of weapons flank the battle scenes and confine the action to the north section of

the tipi cover. The artist drew each figure in profile, a technique that pervades nineteenth-

century Plains narrative arts. Profiles set figures in movement and allow artists to render

intricate detail while emphasizing the story.59 In the nineteenth century full-size versions

of the tipi provided the owner with room to represent more battle scenes than the seven

painted on the model.

In many Plains cultures men used narrative arts of drawing and painting to make

visible their acts of bravery. Here ownership of the picture—and the act represented—

resides in the subject. If a man himself did not draw, he worked with a local artist and

gave permission to draw his figure in battle. One of the most visible and prominent places

a man could portray his war honors was the Tipi with Battle Pictures. With new covers

58 Ewers, Murals, 52. 59 With Kiowa protagonists fighting mostly on the right of the US soldiers, the narrative action of this Tipi with Battle Pictures proceeds from right to left. This movement maintains consistency with a general pattern in nineteenth-century Plains art whereby artists would position a valorous figure (this figure often represented the artist himself) on the right side of the composition, facing an adversary on the left. Candace Greene, “Structure and Meaning in Cheyenne Ledger Art,” in Plains Indian Drawings, 1865–1935, 26–33.

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the battle scenes changed, each time honoring the brave deeds of Kiowa men.60 As John

Ewers describes, the lodge “constituted a partial record of recent tribal history.”61 The

owner of the Tipi with Battle Pictures, then, would work with specific men who

committed acts of bravery in order to depict these acts on the lodge. The man would

either paint his own acts or permit a designated artist to portray his bravery, so multiple

artists often worked on a single cover for the Tipi with Battle Pictures.

Scholars speculate that Charles Oheltoint, the artist of the model Tipi with Battle

Pictures and a relative of its historical owners, maintained the key compositional features

of the design but depicted imaginary events.62 This decision would have allowed

Oheltoint to complete the commission for Mooney without securing permission from

men honored in previous full-size versions. This counts as a practical solution in

attempting to recreate an ever-changing lodge with scenes of war in a culture that had

effectively lacked the formative experiences of warfare for the previous twenty years. By

not representing specific war honors, the logic goes, Oheltoint deferred to the rights of

men previously depicted on the Tipi with Battle Pictures. There is, however, a possibility

that Oheltoint painted scenes from his own memories. After all, Oheltoint was one of the

Ft. Marion artists and would have experienced conflict with the US Army in the years

leading up to his capture and imprisonment.63 Whether imagined or remembered,

60 Candace Greene, “Exploring the Three ‘Little Bluffs’ of the Kiowa,” Plains Anthropologist 41, no. 157 (August 1996): 229. 61 Ewers, Murals, 16. 62 Greene and Drescher, “Tipi with Battle Pictures,” 426; Ewers, Murals, 16–17. 63 I thank a reviewer who suggested the possibility of connecting Oheltoint’s Ft. Marion experience with the model Tipi with Battle Pictures that he painted for the Mooney

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Oheltoint’s painting suggests that he conceived of the Tipi with Battle Pictures as an

ongoing and active design, one open to experimentation, alteration, and play.

The other tipi with human figures that Ewers notes is the Tipi of Standing Among

Men (fig. 1.7). A Plains Apache man named Standing Among Men first made this lodge

in 1861.64 Here the artist sparingly depicts two figures, together grasping a pipe and

flanked by minimal rainbow forms. Yet another model tipi cover—one that Ewers

perhaps overlooked—depicts the body differently (fig. 1.8). Painted with legs and arms,

the Leg Picture Tipi assumes a human form.65 A collections photograph from the

National Museum of Natural History shows the Leg Picture Tipi spread flat, the way the

museum stores the model lodge covers. A series of red pipes runs down the center of the

hide. Given that tipi doors face east and the door seam extends across the top of the

photograph, the column of pipes separates the painting into northern and southern zones.

Coloration emphasizes the compositional division. The artist painted the limbs red on the

north side and blue on the south. The line of pipes, then, forms a spine. This axis balances

north and south. When assembled, the feet and hands wrap around the lodge to meet at

the entrance (fig. 1.9).66 The flaps at top form a neck or a collar, with the ears of the tipi

flaps approximating the ears of a body. A rising column of smoke would take the place of

commission. On Oheltoint at Fort Marion, see Ewers, Murals, 15; Greene, Silver Horn, 52. 64 Ewers, Murals, 46. John Ewers notes that Standing Among Men bequeathed rights to the design to his daughter, Make See Plain, and that one of Standing Among Men’s sons made the model for the Mooney commission. 65 For a comparison of the Leg Picture Tipi with other “embracing” figures on Plains tipis, see Ted Brasser, “The Pedigree of the Hugging Bear Tipi in the Blackfoot Camp,” AIAM 1, no. 5 (Winter 1979): 32–39. 66 Box 26, Ewers Papers, ser. 2, NAA, BAE.

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a head. Whereas the paintings of the Tipi of Standing Among Men and the Tipi with

Battle Pictures show human relations, the Leg Picture tipi suggests equivalence between

houses and bodies.

These three models stand out for their figuration, which indicates a link between

individual identity and heraldic design. This link may appear most clearly in cases when

the tipi owner shares a name with his lodge, as with the Tipi of Standing Among Men or

Turtle’s Tipi (see fig. 1.1). Even when the relationship between the design and the owner

is not immediately apparent tipi imagery usually imparts a specific dream or vision of the

owner, often in the form of animals. Elk and buffalo appear not infrequently in the model

tipi collection, painted with a heart line running from inside their bodies to the openings

of their mouths. Other models depict porcupines, bears, and horses similarly. With their

proximity to the sun and associations with celestial power, birds figure heavily as well. A

few tipis depict chimerical animals, including the horned underwater monster zemoguani

(fig. 1.10).67

Still other tipi paintings lack representational imagery altogether, forgoing

powerful creatures in favor of abstract forms and geometric patterns. A few men covered

their tipis with white discs to evoke the night sky. In addition to filling entire covers, such

elements contributed to pictorial designs. For example, white discs adorn the blue field at

the top of the Zemoguani Tipi. At bottom, a long blue band connects the lodge to the

water realm. Above the water float the two zemoguani.

67 John Ewers, “Water Monsters in Plains Indian Art,” AIAM 6, no. 4 (Autumn 1981): 38–45.

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The Zemoguani Tipi represents one of four conventions for composing Kiowa tipi

designs. Gathering with friends to paint his tipi, an owner would prepare the cover with

either a solid field of color, a set of thin stripes, a vertical division that separates the tipi

into northern and southern sections, or with wide horizontal bands forming three stacked

zones.68 The three horizontal sections of the Zemoguani Tipi suggest a stratification of

the earth into sky, surface, and subterranean realms. The Tipi with Battle Pictures fuses

two of these patterns (see fig. 1.6). Not only is the lodge divided into northern and

southern sections, but the northern part contains alternating black and yellow stripes.

Kiowa tipi paintings differ from other Plains groups in their diverse iconography

and range of compositional schemes. The Blackfeet of the Northern Plains, for example,

adhere to a fairly conservative set of guidelines when painting their lodges. As with the

Kiowa Zemoguani Tipi, horizontal bands separate Blackfeet painted tipis into three

zones, each evoking a level of the group’s multi-tiered universe.69 But whereas almost all

Blackfoot tipis follow this principle, it is only one option for Kiowa lodge owners. When

deciding how best to paint their lodges and dwell with their power, Kiowa men in the

nineteenth century employed a range of pictorial conventions and artistic sensibilities.

Exhibiting the Models as Architecture

With his “Outline Plan” and model tipi commission, Mooney challenged cultural

evolutionism and contested its investiture in ethnological display practice. After all,

68 See the diagrams in Ewers, Murals, 51, and Ellison, Painted Tipis, 33. 69 Ellison, Painted Tipis, 32. For more on Blackfoot tipis, see George B. Grinnell, “The Lodges of the Blackfeet,” American Anthropologist 3, no. 4 (1901): 650–688; Walter McClintock, “The Blackfoot Tipi,” Southwest Museum Leaflet no. 5, 1936.

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Mooney drafted his “Outline Plan” within a year of viewing the anthropology displays at

the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. Coordinated displays in the anthropology building and the

US government building at Chicago formalized a comparative approach to the exhibition

of Native cultures.70 This comparative approach was consistent with the overarching

theme of the fair. According to the mastermind of the Chicago exhibition program, as a

whole the fair illustrated “the steps of progress of civilization and its arts in successive

centuries and in all lands up to the present time.”71 To illustrate this supposed progress,

the Smithsonian exhibit featured a number of life-size dioramas arranged by culture area.

Here was the comparative evolutionary approach actualized in display practice, with all

of Native North America immobilized and carefully arranged.

Mooney, too, believed in a classical period of tipi making and wished to recover

what he considered to be its final moment: the Kiowa Sun Dance camp circle of 1867.72

Combined with his desire to accurately reproduce historic painted tipi designs, it was

Mooney’s anxiety about irrecoverably losing the painted tipi tradition that spurred the

ethnologist to commission the models. As Mooney saw Kiowa people move from tipis to

cabins, he also watched as painted tipis reappeared in settings deliberately staged for 70 Robert Rydell, “The Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893: ‘And Was Jerusalem Builded Here?,’” in All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 38–71. For an overview of the activities of the Department of Ethnology at the fair, see F. W. Putnam, “Ethnology, Anthropology, Archaeology,” in The World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893: A Complete History of the Enterprise, ed. Trumball White and William Igleheart (Philadelphia and Saint Louis: P. W. Zeigler, 1893), 415–435. 71 George Brown Goode, quoted in Rydell, “The Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition,” 45. 72 James Mooney, Anadarko, OK, to W. J. McGee, Washington, DC, September 6, 1895, box 109, BAE Letters Received, 1888–1906, NAA, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, MD.

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popular consumption, such as the various wild west shows and “living villages” at

American world’s fairs. Mooney saw real danger in ceding ethnological authority on tipis

to more popular forms of display.73 At the same time, Mooney undertook the tipi model

project partly to alter the course of American anthropology and to modify that

ethnological authority, which was in danger of reifying a strict cultural hierarchy that

placed Native groups in varying stages of lower development. Mooney’s insistence on

describing painted tipis in relation to Kiowa culture—as opposed to comparing them with

the tipis of another group or describing the tipis through technological accounts—marked

a departure from prior scholarship on Native American architecture.

After attending the Chicago Columbian Exposition in the summer of 1893,

Mooney returned to Washington, DC, to finish his manuscript on the Ghost Dance.74

With the book completed in June 1894, he set off for the Kiowa reservation to begin his

heraldry project. A two-month interruption from fieldwork in November 1894 afforded

Mooney the chance to write his “Outline Plan.” Following up from the Kiowa reservation

in January 1895, Mooney submitted a formal plan to miniaturize a Kiowa tipi circle.75

Much work in 1895 involved researching tipi and shield designs.76 In the winter of 1896

and ’97 Mooney hired a carpenter to construct a circular workspace made of wood and

73 James Mooney, St. Louis, to W. H. Holmes, Washington, DC, July 3, 1904, box 109, BAE Letters Received, 1888–1906, NAA, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, MD. After arriving at the Saint Louis fair in early July 1904, Mooney dispatched a letter to the director of the BAE. In it Mooney harshly critiqued the neglectful treatment fair organizers afforded the Native Americans who participated in living villages. 74 Mooney, “Ghost Dance Religion.” 75 Mooney, Anadarko, OK, to G. B. Goode, Washington, DC, January 29, 1895, box 109, BAE Letters Received, 1888–1906, NAA, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, MD. 76 Mooney to McGee, September 6, 1895.

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canvas measuring 50 feet in diameter (fig. 1.11). This space was adjacent to the St.

Patrick’s Mission in Anadarko, Oklahoma, and Mooney arranged for people working on

the tipi project to eat at the mission. He and the workers camped nearby.77 St. Patrick’s

Mission would coincidentally play an important role in the twentieth-century

development of easel painting among the Kiowa.78

Kiowa people painted and assembled tipi models in the corral. This open-air site

walled off the rapidly changing environment in southwest Oklahoma, creating a

communal space where Kiowa people performed new roles as artists. Historical owners

of tipis worked with Mooney, often authorizing a relative to paint the tipi designs. If the

owner were no longer living, Mooney would secure rights from his family. Though he set

out to record the historic male art of tipi painting Mooney employed many women,

helping to expand the work of women artists to include representational forms. Tama, for

example, painted the model of a tipi that belonged to her father, Gaapiatan (see fig. 1.5).

Mooney didn’t always note the name of women who worked on the project—sometimes

referring to them simply as the daughter of a named male tipi owner. Still, the records of

Mooney’s commission furnish some of the first names of female artists in studies of

77 Mooney, Anadarko, OK, to W. J. McGee, Washington, DC, March 9, 1897, box 109, BAE Letters Received, 1888–1906, NAA, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, MD. 78 Rosemary Ellison, Contemporary Southern Plains Indian Painting (Anadarko, OK: Oklahoma Indian Arts and Crafts Cooperative, 1972), 14–18; Jackson Rushing, “The Legacy of Ledger Book Drawings in Twentieth-Century Native American Art,” in Berlo, Plains Indian Drawings, 57. As early as 1914, Sister Olivia Taylor taught art to Jack Hokeah, Spencer Asah, James Auchiah, and Stephen Mopope. Along with Lois Smoky and Monroe Tsatoke, these four enrolled in the University of Oklahoma School of Art in the late 1920s, where they famously worked with Oscar Jacobson. In 1929 Hokeah, Asah, Auchiah, and Mopope painted a series of murals in a new memorial chapel at St. Patrick’s Mission.

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Kiowa art. By contrast Kiowa male artists were known by name to American audiences

by the 1870s through their drawings from prison at Fort Marion.

The models scale down a graphic art form that had existed exclusively on full-size

tipi covers. When assembled, the tipis measure 26 inches high. Mooney specified that

Kiowa artists use material similar to that of full-size tipis. Due to the absence of buffalo,

the painted models employ deer hide. In addition, Mooney intended for 200 canvas tipi

covers to represent undecorated tipis and fill out the camp circle model. Mooney

commissioned a number of such model canvas tipis. Listing an inventory in 1897,

Mooney describes “115 canvas tipis of uniform size, cut according to Indian pattern &

sewn upon sewing machines by white women . . . to save the expense of buckskin, but

the effect is . . . unsatisfactory & they should be discarded. The cloth can be used for

wrapping & other purposes.”79 By the 1880s canvas replaced buffalo hide in Plains tipis.

When buffalo became scarce, Plains people acquired canvas from traders for lodge

coverings. It may be tempting to consider the substitution of canvas for buffalo hide as a

sign of cultural decline. Yet one expert writes that “canvas enabled the tipi-making

specialist to refine various structural details of the tipi—the smoke flaps became

trimmer—the entire cover was more lightweight and thus more manageable.”80 Folding

79 James Mooney, Anadarko, OK, to W. J. McGee, Washington, DC, February 1, 1897, box 2, MS 4733, NAA, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, MD. 80 Ellison, Painted Tipis, 14. No matter the exterior material, wooden poles created the structure. Most tipi makers on the grassy Plains prized the straight lodgepole pine when making poles for a tipi (though red cedar worked, too). Sources for this crucial wood include the Black Hills in South Dakota, the Laramie Mountains just north of the Colorado Front Range, and, north of the Laramies, the Big Horn Mountains.

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new material into existing forms of construction was hardly a new development among

Plains Indians.

Mooney never had enough space in world’s fairs to recreate the 1867 circle with

unpainted tipis. As a result, Mooney’s multiple displays provided fragmentary views of

the 1867 camp. But even if he could have recreated the Sun Dance tipi ring completely,

the model circle still would only partially account for nineteenth-century Kiowa tipi

designs. Painted tipis could appear in the Sun Dance camp circle for just one year,

supplanted by a new design the next summer. Undoubtedly many nineteenth-century

designs eluded Mooney’s focus. Some tipi designs fell from use before the 1867 camp

circle.81 Moreover, a few Kiowa men created new tipi designs in the twentieth century.82

The 50 miniature lodges Kiowa people made for Mooney and the US National Museum,

then, offer only a sampling of nineteenth-century Kiowa painted lodges.

By February 1897, 39 of the 50 painted tipis were complete.83 With an upcoming

display, Mooney could demonstrate his vision of anthropological research devoted to a

single group. The Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897 provided Mooney with his

first chance to exhibit the models. In Nashville Mooney assembled twenty-five painted

tipis on a raised semicircular platform. A layer of soil covered the platform, furnishing a

surface tipi poles could pierce. Per standard practice in world’s fairs of the era, the

81 There was necessity in choosing to recreate the 1867 circle, Mooney wrote. “As the [design] elements were continually changing by reason of the death of individuals, the extinction of old tipis and shields and the birth of new ones the study had to be made for a fixed date.” Mooney to McGee, September 6, 1895. 82 These include the Peyote Tipi and the Calendar Tipi, illustrated in Ellison, Painted Tipis. 83 Mooney to McGee, February 1, 1897.

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director of the United States federal pavilion at Nashville issued a book-length report of

the displays. The proceedings include a brief written description and a photograph of the

tipi display (fig. 1.12). Although not all twenty-five tipis are visible in the image,

identifiable ones include Gaapiatan’s Bird Pictures Tipi (see fig. 1.5), the Tipi with Battle

Pictures (see fig. 6) and the Zemaguani Tipi (see fig. 1.10). The photograph lacks any

fairgoers for scale. Still, we can deduce that the tipis would have appeared to most

viewers at chest level.84 A miniature medicine lodge made of cottonwood branches

occupied the middle of the platform, just as a full-size lodge stands in the center of a

Kiowa Sun Dance circle.

The Nashville fair included relatively little ethnological material when compared

with international expositions hosted by other American cities in the 1890s. The

miniature tipi display was the most prominent aspect of the Smithsonian exhibits in

Nashville, which otherwise featured standalone cases filled with taxidermic animals,

early American coins, and images of the Buddha, to name a few. Most American world’s

fairs strategically pitted displays of new industrial technologies against ethnological

exhibits, dramatizing a narrative of American progress. To be sure, the Nashville fair put

progress on display. But like the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in

Atlanta, the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition departed from standard

practice by focusing attention on the vitality of the New South and the successes of post–

84 The models measure 26 inches high when assembled, and the height of the platform is roughly equal to that of the tipis. The top of the tipis, then, would reach just over 4 feet from the ground.

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Civil War reconciliation between southern and northern states.85 Given the relatively light

emphasis on ethnology at Nashville, it would be difficult to argue that Mooney’s display

of Kiowa heraldry enacted any real paradigm shift in American anthropology. Instead,

with the Nashville display and the Omaha exhibit the next year, we glimpse a version of

American anthropology that could have been, a continuing BAE commitment to material

culture that would have balanced Boas’s emerging theories. The latter eventually moved

the center of anthropological gravity from the museum to the university, diminishing the

role of material culture studies in early twentieth-century anthropology.

Mooney set up model tipis as a semicircle in Nashville, and the next year he

extended this arc. At the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha

Mooney arranged the model painted tipis in a circle around a medicine lodge replica (fig.

1.13). Like the work corral at Anadarko, a circular enclosure creates the viewing area at

Omaha. This wall screens out the setting, forming an interior space apart from the

world’s fair. Of the four international expositions at which Mooney exhibited Kiowa

model tipis, this display in Omaha most closely approximated his vision of recreating the

Sun Dance circle. Mooney wanted to immerse American viewers in a distinct visual

world, one particular to the Kiowa. In the “Outline Plan” Mooney proposed an exhibit

“so broad and systematic that any one entering the room would feel for the moment that

he was in the camp of a prairie tribe, and so genuine and exact in detail that a Kiowa

Indian would be satisfied with it.”86 Mooney purposefully conflated an exhibition hall

85 Robert Rydell, “The New Orleans, Atlanta, and Nashville Expositions: New Markets, ‘New Negroes,’ and a New South,” All the World’s a Fair, 72–104. 86 Mooney, “Outline Plan.”

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and an actual tipi circle. By allowing viewers to walk through the circle and around the

miniatures the ideal display imagined in the “Outline Plan” would supposedly enable a

view from the inside of Kiowa culture.

Mooney devised still other unrealized plans for exhibiting Native American

architecture. Impressed by the model tipi display at the Nashville fair, organizers of the

1898 Omaha Exposition earlier had invited Mooney to help plan their exposition.

Mooney’s resulting proposal focused on exhibiting Native American dwellings. In a work

report, he wrote about organizing a display of Native American culture “based upon the

house as the primary unit.”87 An article in the Omaha Bee from November 15, 1897,

provided details of the plan. Mooney imagined a 50-acre map of the United States

landscaped in high relief. This field would provide the setting for an exhibit of Native

house types. Both Mooney’s “Outline Plan” of 1894 and his map plan for exhibiting

architecture at the 1898 Omaha Exposition imagine Native American architecture to

operate somewhat similarly to national pavilions. In each case architecture expressed a

particular national character.

Beginning with the Paris fair of 1867, governments from around the world had

constructed buildings typical of their own national architectural styles at world’s fairs

abroad.88 Absent from the Omaha exposition was a then-familiar mix of buildings—such

87 James Mooney, “Mooney Report,” November 1897, box 2, MS 4733, NAA, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, MD. In the work report Mooney notes that he had recently visited Omaha to view the future exhibition grounds and to “confer with the management in regard to the proposed government Indian exhibit.” 88 For analysis of the links between late nineteenth-century exhibitions of architecture and nationalism, see Barry Bergdoll, “Not at Home: Architecture on Display from World’s Fairs to Williamsburg,” April 21, 2013, pt. 4, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at

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as Japanese pagodas, Swiss chalets, and Norwegian stave churches—that supposedly

expressed national character. Most foreign nations opted out of the Trans-Mississippi

Exposition, doubtful about the viability of a fair in Omaha.89 Perhaps Mooney foresaw

Native architecture replacing international pavilions at Omaha. The landscape map plan

never took shape.90 Still, displays of Native housing would constitute an important

component of the Omaha Exposition. The exposition featured an Indian Congress, a

gathering of 500 Indigenous people from twenty nations.91 Many participants camped in

the North Tract, a 4-acre section of the exposition grounds set aside for the Indian

Congress. Central to the public displays of the Congress was a large Wichita grass

house.92 Other forms of architecture, mostly tipis, filled the North Tract of the Omaha

Exposition grounds. These structures served as family dwellings for members of the

Indian Congress and as exhibition pieces for fairgoers at Omaha.93

the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, audio recording of lecture, <www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/audio-video/mellon.html>. 89 Rydell, “The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, Omaha, 1898: ‘Concomitant to Empire,’” in All the World’s A Fair, 107. 90 A number of factors prohibited the realization of Mooney’s architectural exhibition. These included congressional delays in appropriations and the unyielding authority of Captain William Mercer, an Indian Affairs agent dispatched to oversee the Indian Congress. 91 Moses, Indian Man, 118–119. The Indian Congress didn’t begin until after the fair opened. When the Indian Congress opened, Captain Mercer had different expectations for the Indigenous delegates, staging mock battles and slowing Mooney’s attempts to bring the gathering back into the realm of science. For portraits of Native participants in the Omaha fair, see Simon Ortiz, ed., Beyond the Reach of Time and Change: Native American Reflections of the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004). 92 Mooney, “The Indian Congress at Omaha,” American Anthropologist 1, no. 1 (January 1899): 132, ff. 93 Moses, Indian Man, 118.

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The architectural displays of the Omaha Indian Congress represented an

adulterated version of a plan Mooney devised. Mooney emphasized local meanings of

tipi designs, as opposed to merely subsuming the tipis in a comparative history of

architecture. For example, in an interview for an Omaha Bee article from October 1898,

Mooney takes great care to describe the significance of specific painted tipis in Kiowa

culture and to relate each to its historical owner. Mooney’s intended lesson did not

always match, of course, the ways viewers made sense of the model tipis. Between the

needless abstractions of cultural evolutionism and the unwarranted essentialism of

popular entertainment, Mooney sought to develop a third way to present Native

American architecture in the late nineteenth-century American exhibitionary complex. At

its best, the Kiowa pavilion Mooney proposed in the “Outline Plan” would demonstrate

the singularity of Kiowa cultural formations and the shared humanity of Kiowa peoples.

Beyond the Model: Exhibiting Tipi Covers as Paintings

Mooney began the heraldry project in 1895, when Kiowa families were largely moving to

cabins. Given the architectural history and Mooney’s desire to accurately recreate the

1867 camp circle, it is tempting to view the models as replicas, as secondary objects

merely suggesting that which has been irrevocably lost to the past. This understanding

treats the copy as a degeneration of the original. Yet as anthropologist Gwyneira Isaac

argues, Indigenous aesthetic systems often conceive of replication differently.94 The

visual regimes of the Kiowa, in particular, do not allow for an easy distinction between 94 Gwyneira Isaac, “Whose Idea Was This? Museum, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge,” Current Anthropology 52, no. 2 (April 2011): 211–233.

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original and duplicate. For the Kiowa, painting model tipis amounted to a renewal, rather

than a replication, of family symbols.

Model tipis fostered new relationships between Kiowa architecture and painting

in the twentieth century. Exercising a semiotic versatility, the models translate existing

imagery into forms that address local Kiowa viewers as well as diverse audiences of

strangers. Here Mooney’s displays helped establish the intellectual and cultural climate

necessary to view Kiowa visual production as art (for more on this perceptual shift, see

chapters two and three of this dissertation).95 Mooney occasionally incorporated

strategies for displaying fine art in exhibitions of model tipis. He departed from standard

ethnological practice by crediting tipi painters or owners. Mooney’s world’s fair

exhibition labels named the people who owned tipi and shield designs. Candace Greene

writes that the credit given on labels was “in accordance with Kiowa rather than Western

practice, with each shield or tipi design considered the product of its owner rather than of

the painter who had reproduced it on buckskin.”96 In this way and others the model tipis

95 Many scholars recognize a disciplinary shift from anthropology to the art world in the study of Native material culture in the beginning of the twentieth century, citing the rise of named Indigenous artists and the first instances of fine art spaces being used for the display of Native-made visual work. Questions about how the category of Native American art developed have fueled a major line of research over the past thirty years, beginning with a series of panels at academic conferences in the mid 1980s that led to the 1992 publication of Janet Berlo’s edited volume The Early Years of Native American Art, which was followed soon after by another key text, Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). Noteworthy book-length contributions in the past ten years include Bill Anthes, Native Moderns: American Painting, 1940–1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Elizabeth Hutchinson, Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 96 Greene, Silver Horn, 197.

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provide an architectural basis for the recognition of Kiowa art. The acknowledgment of a

fine art tradition among the Kiowa is historically significant. In the decades following the

Mooney commission a younger generation of Kiowa artists trained in painting with

Kiowa elders, such as Charles Ohteltoint and Silver Horn, and took art lessons at

institutional settings in Oklahoma, including St. Patrick’s Mission School in Anadarko,

University of Oklahoma, and Bacone College. 97

Mooney also photographed the well-known Kiowa artist Paul Zotom with the

tipis (fig. 1.14). Zotom had been one of the Fort Marion prisoner-artists of the 1870s (see

chapter two and figs. 2.4 and 2.8–2.10). During his imprisonment in Florida, Zotom filled

books with drawings of Florida, the train ride there, and memories of life on the Plains.

Zotom and others combined a long-standing Plains narrative art practice with non-Native

materials and Euro-American representational strategies such as illusionism. As a known

Kiowa artist, Zotom’s presence in the photograph helps viewers conceive of painted tipis

as artworks, thus expanding their utility beyond scientific modeling. Mooney’s

photograph links the painted model tipis with the cosmopolitan, hybridizing art that

Zotom created at Fort Marion. It appears, however, that Mooney choreographed the

picture since Zotom’s name is found nowhere in detailed project records.98 Still, the fact

that Mooney arranged such a photographic performance with a known artist bespeaks his

desire to treat the Kiowa-made models as works of art.

97 Lydia Wyckoff, ed., Visions and Voices: Native American Painting from the Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa: Philbrook Museum, 1996); Ellison, Contemporary Southern Plains Indian Painting; Rushing, “The Legacy of Ledger Book Drawings,” 56–62. 98 In a personal conversation during the summer of 2010, Candace Greene suggested to me that the photograph is staged.

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Mooney took caution to secure permission from hereditary heirs to tipi owners.

Even if he suspended proprietary custom to photograph Zotom posing with a painted tipi

model, Mooney meticulously recorded artists’ identities in his notes, often remarking on

their relations to tipi owners. To be sure, Mooney cared about the identities of tipi owners

and artists he commissioned. But as those vested with power to renew cosmological

proprietary designs, the identity of the artists mattered to Kiowa people in a different

way. In fact, a few well-known Kiowa artists, including Oheltoint and his younger

brother Silver Horn, painted models. By the time Mooney wrapped up the heraldry

project in the first years of the twentieth century, he had employed Silver Horn to create a

number of artworks.99 Continuing in this capacity, Silver Horn painted models, including

the Black Stripe Tipi, for Mooney.

The authors of the catalog from a 2000 exhibition, Transforming Images: The Art

of Silver Horn and His Successors, persuasively argue that Silver Horn’s work provided a

bridge between Native art of the twentieth century and historic Plains narrative

drawings.100 Silver Horn’s work for the heraldry project is especially interesting as it

raises questions of authorship. Silver Horn could not claim a hereditary right to renew the

Black Stripe Tipi. He executed it under the instructions of the owner of this tipi design, a

man named Black-Striped Tipi Man II.101 In painting another man’s tipi design, Silver

99 Greene, Silver Horn, 194. 100 Robert Donnelley, ed., Transforming Images: The Art of Silver Horn and His Successors (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2000). 101 The Black-Striped Tipi appears in Ewers, Murals, 40. Silver Horn, son of Tohausen II, also made a model of his father’s Tipi with Battle Pictures, which is unrelated to the Mooney commission. Now at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the

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Horn complied with the Kiowa convention that an owner might authorize someone else

to produce the image while still retaining rights to it.102 Employing historic Kiowa

conventions that regulate visual production, the heraldry project allowed Kiowa artists to

develop new roles in the twentieth century.

In 1904 Mooney unfurled the models at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in

Saint Louis (fig. 1.15). On a wall, the tipi loses its emblematic conical shape. Removed

from their wooden frames and pinned on display case walls, tipi covers appeared for the

first time as individual paintings. When considered as part of the larger Smithsonian

Institution anthropological exhibits at Saint Louis, the miniature painted lodge covers

linked Indigenous art and architecture. The new director of the BAE, William H. Holmes,

designed the ethnological exhibit to focus on large models of Maya architecture and

freestanding cases with schematics identifying symbolic decorations on examples of

Native material culture.103 Behind plaster models of pyramids, viewers encountered five

tipi covers in display cases as part of the “Heraldry of the Kiowa Indians” exhibit, along

with a number of paintings on hide. Moving beyond the simple recreation of Native

American architecture or straightforward interpretation of Indigenous art, Mooney’s 1904

heraldry exhibit brought together Kiowa art and architecture.

University of California-Berkeley (acc. no. 2-4912), Silver Horn’s Tipi with Battle Pictures is reproduced in Donnelley, Transforming Images, 106. 102 Greene, Silver Horn, 201–204. 103 Nancy Parezo and Don Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 301–303.

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In the 1904 Saint Louis Exposition, Mooney showed only five model tipis.104 In

1905 the tipis appeared in an almost identical display at the Lewis and Clark Centennial

and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair in Portland, Oregon.105 The 1904–05

displays framed the small-scale tipis more like artworks than architectural models. At

Saint Louis and Portland, American viewers began to absorb a rich and discrete history of

painting particular to the Kiowa nation. The Saint Louis display allowed a total and

unified view of the painted designs, as opposed to the partial view of a design visible on

assembled lodges. Even more, at Saint Louis a series of Silver Horn’s large narrative

paintings shared the display with the tipi covers.106 Mooney’s Kiowa contribution to the

1904 BAE exhibits in Saint Louis formally likened Kiowa tipis to painted hides, a

principal form of Kiowa art. Continuing this emphasis on the painterly tipi, a 1977–78

exhibit referred to the tipis as Murals in the Round. Curated by John Ewers, Murals in the

Round displayed 20 tipis as paintings. In addition, Ewers assembled five models with

poles.107 By both setting up and stretching out the models, Ewers allowed viewers to

consider how the miniature tipis at once model historic architecture and help to shape

Kiowa painting of the twentieth century.

104 James Mooney, “Annual Report, 1903–1904,” July 13, 1904, box 109, BAE Letters Received 1888–1906, NAA, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, MD. 105 H. B. Hardt, ed., The Official Catalog of the United States Government Exhibit: Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair (Portland, OR: Albert Hess, 1905), 34, folder 27, box 99, MS 1609, Oregon Historical Research Library, Portland. 106 Greene, Silver Horn, 196–97. 107 “Murals in the Round: Painted Tipis of the Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache Indians,” Folders 1–3, box 265, National Museum of American Art (US) Office of Program Support Records, 1965–1981, record unit 321, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC

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Ways of Seeing Tipis

Despite Mooney’s best intentions, public exhibition of the models undoubtedly

contributed to the cultural dislocation of the tipi. In forms such as toys, tourist sites, and

advertisements, depictions of tipis from non-Native perspectives seem to displace

Indigenous connections. Along with the totem pole and war bonnet the tipi has served as

an icon of Native identity in American popular culture.108 Popular cultural appropriations

encourage Americans to see tipis as classical, even timeless, forms of construction. Yet

art historians question appraisals of classicism in Native American art and architecture.

Judith Ostrowitz argues that agendas of the present time deeply affect how we perceive

classicism in Native art.109 More than reflecting any truth about the past, classicism

extracts objects from dynamic visual cultures to invent canons that affirm current

narratives and agendas.

Some of the first non-Native representations of painted tipis came from the

sketchbooks and studios of American artist-explorers. During the 1819 Long Expedition

to the Rocky Mountains, Titian Peale—son of artist, naturalist, and collector Charles

Wilson Peale—painted a watercolor of Sioux tipis (fig. 1.16). This is perhaps the first

108 Aldona Jonaitis and Aaron Glass call the three objects the “trinity of Indian icons.” Jonaitis and Glass, The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), xviii. 109 Judith Ostrowitz, “Expedience and Classicism at the Chief Shakes Community House,” in Privileging the Past: Reconstructing History in Northwest Coast Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 19–48. Ostrowitz identifies a few classicizing tendencies, such as emphasizing the “traditional” and excluding tourist arts from the Native art canon. And she considers how classicism has played out in an architectural setting, writing about the restoration of the Chief Shakes House of the Tlingit Naanya.aayi clan in Wrangell, Alaska.

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detailed image of a painted tipi created by a non-Native hand.110 Little more than a

decade later, in the 1830s, George Catlin created a detailed visual compendium of Native

life on the Plains. During one of many expeditions across the region, Catlin made striking

images of Mandan earth lodge villages. In a few other works depicting village life,

including Comanche Village, Catlin shows how tipis delineated Indigenous social space

(fig. 1.17). In Comanche Village, tall dwellings mirror the mountains behind them. Both

sets of peaks run across the horizon, receding past the frame. Through the nineteenth

century Americans came to associate large 20- and 25-foot tipis such as those depicted by

Catlin and Peale with classical Plains culture. This classicizing view ignores the dynamic

nature of tipi forms. A series of historical movements helped to condition the shape and

size of nineteenth-century tipis. Far from a timeless, classical form, the large Plains tipi,

for example, partly results from the noted migration of Cree built forms, as well as the

introduction of Spanish horses.

Mooney’s insistence on specificity in display countered the tendency of

representations in popular culture to dislocate the tipi from its Kiowa owners. Cultural

critics contend, however, that other model house dioramas have contributed to this

displacement. For instance, Cree art historian Richard Hill acknowledges the oddly

godlike pleasure of viewing models. Hill plainly relates “this desire for mastery” to “the

110 John Ewers, Artists of the Old West (1965; reprint, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), 30. Official Long Expedition painter Samuel Seymour sketched a Kiowa camp, though he placed their lodges too far in the back of the composition to show any detail. Ewers, Artists of the Old West, 25, 28.

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colonial history of the museum.”111 To illustrate this criticism of architectural

miniaturization, consider a tipi diorama constructed at the Peabody Museum at Harvard

in the first decade of the twentieth century (fig. 1.18). Five tipis in an arc suggest the

shape of a camp circle or a typical C-shaped formation. Still figures stage a fantasy. At

far right in the diorama a woman decorates a stretched hide. Nearby another woman dries

meat, while two men behind her engage in conversation. Distracted by their own activity,

the figures allow viewers a peek into a world that supposedly existed before contact: a

pure, mythic place devoid of non-Native contaminations. The diorama enables a view

from nowhere. Museum viewers gaze undetected on a scene located outside of their own

lived time, a scene that modernity had supposedly vanquished.

Hill’s critique evokes Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writing on miniatures, wherein the

structuralist anthropologist argues that reducing the scale of an object makes it less

formidable. A perceptual sense of dominance enables conceptual dominance. With

miniaturization, viewers apprehend the form as a whole, rather than as a sum of its parts.

Lévi-Strauss writes, “By being quantitatively diminished, [the miniature] seems to us

qualitatively simplified. More exactly, this quantitative transposition extends and

diversifies our power over a homologue of the thing, and by means of it the latter can be

grasped, assessed and apprehended at a glance.”112 Miniaturization thus works primarily

to empower viewers to experience control. This control functions by first removing an 111 Hill, Richard William, “Jeff Thomas: Working Histories,” in Jeff Thomas: A Study of Indian-ness (Toronto: Gallery 44, 2004), 14. 112 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1962; English ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 23. See also Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1984).

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object from its environment and then reducing its size, the better to scrutinize its features.

Lévi-Strauss describes how the miniature impoverishes the full-size thing, how the copy

differs from the original. Yet in world’s fair displays the Kiowa model tipis exceeded the

status of replicas by approaching fine art painting.

With each successive exhibition at Nashville, Omaha, and Saint Louis, Mooney

experimented with display tactics to impart the role of painted tipis in Kiowa culture. At

Nashville and Omaha Mooney mimicked the sense of enclosure and interiority he

envisioned in his “Outline Plan.” In Nashville the view was somewhat restricted, with the

models placed relatively high on a curving platform (see fig. 1.12). In Omaha a circular

enclosure afforded the experience that most closely approximated viewing tipis in a Sun

Dance ring (see fig. 1.13). Yet with models placed at ground level, viewers saw the

miniature lodges from above. Looking down, viewers could apprehend the entire design

at once, in the round. Viewers in Omaha could also apprehend formal connections

between model tipis, helping them to discern the role of painting in Kiowa social

structure. Not only did viewers see Kiowa architecture from within the closed circle, they

also peered down from above. In Saint Louis Mooney’s display treated models alongside

other forms of painting by Kiowa artists, emphasizing the imagery of Kiowa tipi covers

(see fig. 1.15).

Despite Mooney’s efforts through interpretive labels and newspaper interviews to

link model tipis to their Kiowa owners, many visitors to the Nashville and Omaha fairs

likely perceived the collaboratively produced tipi models as yet another representation of

a “vanishing” architectural form. This disjuncture between intended meaning and

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viewers’ perceptions furnishes one of the fundamental challenges to any project seeking

to represent the past. Dioramas of historical Native American dwellings, in particular, too

easily afford American audiences the pleasure of control in viewing. It would be a

mistake, though, to ascribe a consistent mode of power to the house diorama. There is no

uniform way that objects enact ideologies, shape perceptions, or impart knowledge; such

dynamics are negotiated between objects, viewers, and their environments. So even forms

of representation seeming to offer the least room for Indigenous voices can contain

counter-memories. These memories do not necessarily subvert colonialist imagery; they

often reside uncomfortably within such misrepresentations.

Aboriginal people have long used miniatures for their own purposes, as art

historian Ruth Phillips notes.113 Kiowa women made miniature tipis as toys before

producing ethnological models in the 1890s.114 If the model tipis offered American

viewers a degree of mastery, then they provided their Kiowa makers with a different sort

of control. When making tipis in the 1890s for world’s fair display, the miniatures likely

provided Kiowa men and women with an empowering sense of command over their own

recent past. Indeed, the Kiowa model tipi project fulfilled a longing to remember during a

time of institutionalized amnesia. Through the 1890s the Kiowa experienced the worst of

113 Ruth Phillips, “Representation in the Miniature: Effigy, Toy, Model, Souvenir,” in Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 72–102. 114 Santina, “Toys, Models, Collectibles”; Christina Burke, “Growing Up on the Plains,” in Rosoff and Zeller, Tipi, 181–82. For the 1893 Chicago world’s fair Mooney collected a miniature version of the Big Bow Kiowa Tipi, now in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History. The size and the wear of this miniature tipi suggest that Kiowa children used it as a toy.

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the federal assimilation policy.115 The model project helped Kiowa people imagine new

ways to use their historical architecture as they moved to log cabins and responded to a

flood of newcomers on their ancestral lands.

Counter-memories inhere in the Kiowa models. Recognizing how model tipis

factor in Kiowa visual culture can help, then, to break the impasse of colonial control and

cultural loss in the ethnological mediation of Native architecture. Attending to the display

history of the models promises to suggest still other accounts of Kiowa agency in the

model tipi project. After the 1890s Kiowa people used the miniature lodges not only as

models of their architectural past but also as models for the production of art in the

twentieth century. Visual representation has long contributed to the cultural dislocation of

Native architecture. We tend to see depictions of Native dwellings as stereotypical. They

denote a supposedly more authentic—but ultimately lost—past. Contradicting this

account, the Kiowa model tipi project forged links between Kiowa art and architecture.

By maintaining and altering the painted tipi tradition, the miniaturization project connects

historic forms of material culture with Kiowa painting of the twentieth century. Indeed,

considering how the model tipis foster relations can encourage us to reconsider broader

narratives of Indigenous cultural decline at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Ongoing Story of the Tipi with Battle Pictures

By painting miniature tipis for the Mooney commission, Kiowa people carried their

culture forward through a time of profound uncertainty. Kiowa people experimented with

115 Rand, Kiowa Humanity.

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new forms of painting when they created models. At the same time, future generations

would use tipis from the Mooney commission as models for full-size painted tipis.116

Painted tipis large and small thus form a continuum that spans classifications typically

projected onto Kiowa art. More broadly, painted tipis challenge the divisions between

nineteenth-century material culture and twentieth-century art that is in danger of

calcifying in Native American art studies. Scholarship on the artist Silver Horn that

bridges nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual cultures of the Kiowa can be applied

beyond the career of a single artist to a collaborative, community-wide project. In these

ways, architecture is essential to the shape of Kiowa art history.

To apprehend how the model tipis enabled a transition from historical material

culture to twentieth-century art, consider the history of the Tipi with Battle Pictures, in

which Silver Horn’s brother Charles Oheltoint plays a key role. Years after a Cheyenne

chief presented his Tipi with Battle Pictures as a gift to the Kiowa chief Tohausen, the

latter transferred the tipi to a nephew, Tohausen II (also known as Agiati and

Pakongya).117 A drawing from Fort Marion by the Kiowa artist Koba (1848-1880) shows

the alternating black and gold bands that fill one side of the Tipi with Battle Pictures (fig.

1.19).118 By depicting the iconic north side the Kiowa artist circumvented copyright

116 In addition to the miniature Tipi with Battle Pictures, discussed in this section, the model of Daveko’s Moon Tipi (Ewers, Murals in the Round, 44, fig. 41) appears to serve as a direct model for a full-size Moon Tipi created in the early 1970s (Ellison, Painted Tipis, 26, pl. 7). 117 Greene, “Exploring the Three ‘Little Bluffs,’” 221–242. 118 A Kiowa drawing from the 1880 Scott Ledger also pictures black and yellow stripes of the Tipi with Battle Pictures, similarly avoiding depiction of battle scenes on the south side of the lodge. The Scott Ledger is reproduced in Ron McCoy, Kiowa Memories: Images from Indian Territory, 1880 (Santa Fe: Morning Star Gallery, 1987).

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codes that regulate depictions of battle exploits, such as those appearing on the here-

unseen south side of the lodge. When Tohausen II died in 1892, he was living in the tipi

with a son. This was, for a time, the last remaining painted tipi on the Kiowa reservation.

Another son of Tohausen II, Charles Oheltoint (or Charley Buffalo), renewed the tipi as

a model in 1896 or ’97 (see fig. 1.6).

About twenty years later, in 1916, Oheltoint sponsored the renewal of the Tipi

with Battle Pictures in full scale (see fig. 1.2).119 This was one of the first full-scale

Kiowa painted tipis of the twentieth century. Regarding the production of the 1916 Tipi

with Battle Pictures, Candace Greene writes, “The renewal was a major event, including

several days of feasting, reciting of coup, and painting . . . Painting of the war deeds as

dictated by their owners was carried out by a group of artists, including [Oheltoint’s

brother] Silver Horn, his brothers White Buffalo and James Waldo, and several other

men.”120 This communal painting of the tipi counted as early art instruction for a young

relative of Silver Horn and Oheltoint, Stephen Mopope, one of the best known Kiowa

painters of the twentieth century.121 Oheltoint’s Tipi also appears in a 1920 silent movie,

119 Petersen, Plains Indian Art from Fort Marion, 168–70; Greene and Drescher, “Tipi with Battle Pictures,” 426. Though John Ewers, Murals in the Round, 15, wrote that the 1916 full-size Tipi with Battle Pictures is “no longer extant,” researchers at the Oklahoma History Center (OHS) have recently identified a tipi cover in the OHS collection as Ohteltoint’s 1916 Tipi with Battle Pictures. In May 2015 the tipi cover went on display in the Gaylord Special Exhibits Gallery at OHS. This 1916 cover is not to be confused with a version that Roland Whitehorse, another descendant of Tohausen, made for the Fort Sill Museum in 1961. Greene, “Exploring the Three ‘Little Bluffs,’” 236. 120 Greene, Silver Horn, 204. 121 According to Rosemary Ellison, in his youth the Kiowa easel painter Stephen Mopope helped his older male relatives Oheltoint and Silver Horn make paintings, including the 1916 Tipi with Battle Pictures. Ellison, Contemporary Southern Plains Indian Painting, 14.

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Daughter of the Dawn, with a large all-Native cast (many Kiowa).122 With this tipi,

Oheltoint initiated a twentieth-century tradition for Kiowa painted lodges, transforming a

familial dwelling into a lodge with strong communal associations. Since the 1890s

painted tipis have contributed to the dynamics of North American visual culture

(appearing in film, photography and exhibitions) while still helping to maintain historic

Kiowa aesthetic systems

In 1973, when Kiowa WWII veteran Dixon Palmer renewed the Tipi with Battle

Pictures for the exhibition Painted Tipis by Contemporary Plains Indian Artists at the

Southern Plains Indian Museum and Craft Center (fig. 1.20), aspects of the design were

atypical. Here the battle scenes replicate those painted on the 1896–7 model although

usually each renewed full-size Tipi with Battle Pictures features distinct scenes and often

depicts figures at a small scale in order to fit a greater number of scenes, as with the 1916

Tipi. The formal correspondences between the 1896–7 miniature and the 1970s full-size

Tipi with Battle Pictures suggests that Kiowa-made works for the Mooney commission

sometimes literally served as models for Kiowa art in the twentieth century. Scaling up

the 1890s model by Oheltoint, Palmer renewed the Tipi with Battle Pictures in the 1970s.

After renewing the Tipi with Battle Pictures, Palmer came up with the idea of creating a

lodge for the Black Leggings Warrior Society. In 1958 Dixon’s brother Gus Palmer led a

group of Kiowa veterans of WWII and the Korean War in restoring the Black Leggings 122 Over the past ten years the Oklahoma Historical Society restored the film and released it on DVD. In 2013 the Library of Congress included Daughter of the Dawn in the National Film Registry. For a consideration of early twentieth-century film projects involving Kiowa actors and their affect on the work of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw, see Hadley Jerman, “Acting for the Camera: Horace Poolaw’s Film Stills of Family, 1925–1950,” Great Plains Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 105–123.

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Society, one of ten historic Kiowa military groups. The 1973 architectural renewal

contributed to the twentieth-century formation of a prestigious Kiowa military

institution.123

Not until they moved to sedentary architecture did Kiowa people begin to work

with Mooney on the tipi project. Yet following this collaboration they developed new

uses for tipis. In the twentieth century, the Kiowa used full-size painted tipis as sites of

memory. This use continues. As recently as 2008, the Black Leggings Warrior Society

renewed the Tipi with Battle Pictures.124 For the past 100 years, Kiowa people have used

the tipi to honor their veterans and war dead and, more generally, to maintain relations

with the past. Though missing from Kiowa land since the early 1890s, the Tipi with

Battle Pictures was still present in Kiowa memory and culture. Along with other models,

the Tipi with Battle Pictures model helped to shelter Kiowa memory as it allowed

proprietary owners, such as Charles Oheltoint, to alter a continuous tradition. The social 123 Meadows, Kiowa Military Societies, 70–72. Meadows notes on 71, “Like the contemporary form of society dress, the society tipi blends past and present Kiowa military service by combining portions of the Battle Picture Tipi with symbols of modern Kiowa service in the U.S. armed forces.” 124 Dixon Palmer and Lyndreth Palmer, “The Tipi of the Kiowa Tonkongya (Black Leggings Warrior Society),” in Rosoff and Zeller, Tipi, 165–67; “Painting a New Battle Tipi,” DVD, Kiowa Black Legging Warrior Society and Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, 2009, Daniel C. Swan, executive producer, 12 minutes. An image of the 2008 Tipi with Battle Pictures also appears on page 139 of Janet Berlo and Ruth Phillips, Native North American Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). For a discussion of projects to document the painting of the 2008 Tipi with Battle Pictures and other recent collaborative projects between Kiowa people and the Sam Noble Museum at University of Oklahoma, see Daniel C. Swan and Michael Paul Jordan, “Contingent Collaborations: Patterns of Reciprocity in Museum-Community Partnerships,” Journal of Folklore Research 52, no. 1 (2015): 39–84; Michael Paul Jordan and Daniel C. Swan, “Painting a New Battle Tipi: Public Art, Intellectual Property, and Heritage Construction in Contemporary Native American Community,” Plains Anthropologist 56, no. 219 (August 2011): 195–213.

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life of the Tipi with Battle Pictures testifies to the transformational power of this model in

Kiowa visual culture. The model tipis don’t simply reflect Kiowa architectural history.

They affect it as well by providing model-makers an opportunity to conceive of new uses

for painted tipis, thus spurring a post-reservation life for historic Kiowa art and

architecture. Though Mooney believed the camp circle model would help preserve an

architectural tradition that was lost, his work actually contributed to the tradition’s

adaptation. At the same time Mooney’s world’s fair exhibitions of the model tipis were

prescient. Contributing an art-historical treatment of Kiowa culture, the displays

demonstrated the power and poetry of visual expression in Kiowa society.

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Chapter Two

Graphic Art: Architectural Themes from Cusick to Velarde

Historic Native American artworks feature the depiction of architectural forms only

rarely. Starting in the early-nineteenth century, though, individual artists embraced

buildings as a subject matter. In this chapter I provide a survey of architectural themes in

drawings and paintings by Native artists from 1821 to 1945. By depicting buildings in the

graphic media of drawing and painting, Native artists have worked to convey a lived

sense of place—an embodied, intimate experience of occupying a building or a village—

on a still and flat plane. In the first analysis, then, depictions of architecture in Native

American drawing and painting seem to convey information about place and culture. This

quality has led writers to consider Native drawings and paintings that depict architectural

space as merely ethnographic documents, a designation that solidified after World War II.

Yet depictions of the built environment also constituted a fundamental challenge to

pictorial representation. In rendering the world on a flat page, Native artists transform

built structures into images. This study works against the entrenched notion that stylistic

change in Native art and architecture constitutes a shift away from so-called traditional

forms of Native cultures.

In the first section of this chapter, I examine architectural themes in the nineteenth

century through the work of three artists. The Tuscarora artist Dennis Cusick (c. 1778–

1822) depicted the Seneca Mission School building in a number of drawings during the

early 1820s. In the mid-1870s, the Kiowa artist Zotom (1853–1913) chronicled his

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journey as a prisoner of war from the Southern Plains through growing American cities

such as Indianapolis and Nashville to his new life in the US Army prison, Fort Marion, in

Saint Augustine, Florida. At the end of the nineteenth century the Tsimshian artist

Frederick Alexcee (1853–1940) depicted his northern British Columbia village of Lax

Kw’aalams—founded in 1831 as a fur trading post—in a number of easel paintings, as

well as painted glass slides. I consider how these artists’ works relay contemporaneous

changes in the built environment and how they relate to historical art forms from the

artists’ cultures. Each artist hailed from different regions yet all worked in major North

American cultural contact zones of the nineteenth century. When Indigenous artists began

to picture buildings, they turned to their intercultural visual environments to create a

sense of space and depth on the flat page. To render structures as drawings, Native artists

adopted naturalistic approaches—foreshortening the side of a building, for instance—

from Euro-American graphic arts. Art historians have tended to explain stylistic change

by calling out the influence of white artists. Yet surely the direct observation of the

immediate built environment also helped Native artists to grapple with how to create

depth on the page.

In the second section I look to the sphere of anthropological commission. At the

beginning of the twentieth century Native artists systematically depicted the built

environment for anthropologists. I focus on work the Shawnee artist Earnest Spybuck

(1883–1949) created for anthropologist Mark Harrington from 1910 to 1921. Harrington

was interested in how groups of Algonquin peoples relocated in Oklahoma continued the

religious customs—especially the Big House ceremony—they had developed in their

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homelands in the East Coast and Midwest. He hired Spybuck to create a cycle of pictures

that show ceremonial life in early-twentieth century architectural settings. For the self-

taught painter Spybuck, the ethnographic commission provided the chance to work

professionally as an artist. Since ethnological debates about material culture had largely

focused on the built environment, it is not surprising to see a predominance of

architectural themes in the drawings and paintings of self-taught Native artists who

worked on commission.

The final section looks at architectural subjects in the paintings of Pablita Velarde

(1918–2006). From 1939 to 1945, the easel painter from Santa Clara Pueblo in northern

New Mexico worked at the nearby Bandelier National Monument. Velarde created a

series of paintings depicting Pueblo life. In these works and others from the era, Velarde

frequently included the built environment. This marked a departure from a recently

established genre of painting wherein artists set figures dancing across a groundless page.

Velarde’s interest in architectural imagery coincides with a period of intense architectural

activity at Bandelier. At the beginning of the twentieth century archaeologists excavated

the massive Tyuonyi building complex, made and occupied by Ancestral Puebloan

peoples during the fourteenth century. Additionally, during the Great Depression of the

1930s federal relief workers used the Pueblo Revival style of architecture to construct

buildings for national monument visitors and employees.

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Picturing Buildings in the Nineteenth Century

In the nineteenth century, some Native American artists began to represent buildings on

the flat drawing page. Working in intercultural settings, artists tended to develop new

representational strategies when picturing the built environment. Here I examine how

Native artists grappled with architectural change, how they imagined the future and

remembered the past when making pictures. This story features individual artists from

distinct generations and regions. Despite differences in regional and local contexts, each

artist took inspiration from his broader visual culture that included, I argue, the built

environment. Self-taught Native American artists of the nineteenth century drew from the

work of non-Native artists that they saw, as scholars have frequently noted. A largely

unrecognized model for these artists, however, is architecture and infrastructure.

Dennis Cusick, 1821–22

In the early 1820s, Tuscarora artist Dennis Cusick created some of the first

graphic studies of architectural space known in the history of Native American art.1 In

1 Cusick’s family was prominent in the Tuscarora nation, and his brother David created a series of well-known prints. The prints appeared in the second edition of David Cusick, David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (Tuscarora Village: Lewiston, Niagara Co., 1828). William Sturtevant speculates that the book sold primarily to tourists visiting Niagara Falls after the Erie Canal opened in 1825. William Sturtevant, “David and Dennis Cusick: Early Iroquois Realist Artists,” American Indian Art Magazine 31, no. 2 (Spring 2006), 45–46. Dennis and David Cusick’s father Nicholas Cusick fought in the American Revolution and their brother James was a Baptist minister; later generations of the family included Albert Cusick, head of the Six Nations, and Clinton Rickard, founder of the Indian Defense League of America. Sherry Brydon, “Ingenuity in Art: The Early-Nineteenth-Century Works of David and Dennis Cusick,” American Indian Art Magazine 20, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 60–61. The Tuscarora formed part of the Six Nations confederacy of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). After the Tuscarora

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multiple views Cusick pictured a school building operated by Christian missionaries. His

watercolor drawing from July 1821 features a notation at top left which identifies the

building as “Seneca School House,” the mission at the Seneca reservation of Buffalo

Creek near Buffalo, New York (fig. 2.1). Cusick shows the schoolhouse in meticulous,

orderly detail. On a small page he articulates the joinery of hewn logs with precision and

takes care to distinguish individual panes of glass. The building featured living quarters

on the ground floor for the missionaries James Young and his wife, with a large and open

classroom upstairs.2 Students at the school came from local Seneca and nearby Tuscarora

families. In April 1822, Cusick created another version of the schoolhouse (fig. 2.2). The

later picture features an addition to the building. Otherwise, the two appear remarkably

similar. Like the 1821 view, the 1822 drawing includes two groups of children. One

group sits inside the school building, visible through the second story windows. In the

bottom left, the other hunts outside. Scholars have previously noted that differences

between the two groups—students/hunters—epitomize the reform program that Cusick War in colonial North Carolina (1711–1713), most Tuscarora people moved to present-day New York State where they joined the confederacy. The Oneida people initially welcomed the Tuscarora migrants, though Jolene Rickard notes that the Tuscarora now reside “under the wing of our elder brother the Seneca, particularly the Tonawanda Seneca.” Jolene Rickard, “Jolene Rickard Speaks,” in Reservation X: The Power of Place in Aboriginal Contemporary Art, ed. Gerald McMaster (Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1998), 126. 2 Missionary Esther Low recalled arriving at the Seneca Mission at Buffalo Creek in 1819 with the Youngs, and described the building. “The house was built of hewn logs, two stories high. The second floor was reserved for the school.” Frank Severance, ed. Publications of the Buffalo Historical Society, Volume VI (Buffalo: Buffalo Historical Society, 1903), 278. When the Buffalo Creek Reservation dissolved after 1842, many residents moved to the Cattaraugus Reservation. William Fenton, “‘Aboriginally Yours,’ Jesse J. Cornplanter, Hah-Yonh-Wonh-Ish, The Snipe: Seneca, 1889–1957,” in American Indian Intellectuals, ed. Margot Liberty (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Company, 1978), 180.

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witnessed when he lodged at the mission school. In Cusick’s picture the groups differ in

their character and in their position vis-a-vis the mission school, with hunters outside and

students within the building. The building divides space and shapes human relations.

Cusick’s drawings portray a single new building, though during the artist’s

lifetime the built environment of Western New York changed dramatically. In the late-

eighteenth century, Quaker settlers induced Haudenosaunee people to move to log and

shingle houses on isolated plots of land, a major shift from nucleated villages of

multifamily longhouses. The anthropologist William Fenton characterizes this movement

from longhouse to single-family house as a revolution in Iroquois architecture.3 A notable

holdout in this housing revolution was the Burnt House community of traditionalist

Seneca near Allegheny, New York. The historians Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton

write, “In 1798, visiting Quakers reported that in this settlement of four hundred Indians

they found thirty bark-roofed houses, a building set aside for quests, and one council

longhouse. Elsewhere, most Iroquois families lived in white-pine log cabins.”4 To convey

how new architectural styles affected the Western New York landscape in the early-

nineteenth century it will be useful to briefly review the construction and use of

longhouses.

3 William Fenton, “From Longhouse to Ranch-type House: the Second Housing Revolution of the Seneca Nation,” in Iroquois Culture, History, and Prehistory: Proceedings of the 1965 Conference on Iroquois Research, ed. Elizabeth Tooker (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1967), 12. For Fenton, this marked the first revolution in housing; the second revolution involved ranch houses in the twentieth century. 4 Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton, Native American Architecture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 86.

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Before the nineteenth century, Iroquois villages typically featured numerous

longhouses occupied by matrilineally organized groups. Constructed of wooden framing

and covered with sheets of bark, a longhouse features a central aisle, bedding on both

sides, and portals on the east- and west-facing ends. Expanding from the center, builders

could add rooms on either end to accommodate more families. Oriented on an east-west

axis, a longhouse mirrors the arc of the sun. Since ancient times the structure served as a

model of and for the world: Haudenosaunee peoples envisioned their territory of present-

day New York state as a longhouse. Meaning “people of the longhouse,” the term

Haudenosaunee refers to the Iroquoian nations that formed a powerful league sometime

in the fifteenth century. The Mohawk and Seneca lived on the territorial borders as

keepers of the eastern and western doors, respectively. The Onandanga, keepers of the

central fire, lived in the middle of this longhouse and hosted meetings of the league. In

addition to functioning as a political and social metaphor, the longhouse developed layers

of religious symbolism in the early-nineteenth century. Beginning around 1800, the

Seneca prophet Handsome Lake (1735–1815) spurred a revivalist religious movement.

Considering the proliferation of individual family houses and Christian chapels in

Haudenosaunee communities, Handsome Lake’s religion accrued strong associations

with longhouse architecture.5 In Cusick’s drawings, the two-story Buffalo Creek mission

house may then be seen to represent the architecture of settlement and Christianity, as

opposed to the single-story longhouse associated with the religion of Handsome Lake and 5 Arthur Parker, “The Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet,” in Parker on the Iroquois, ed. William Fenton (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968), 5–26. Followers codified his teachings in the Gaiwwio, which remains central in the rites of the Haudenosaunee ceremonial calendar.

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the Haudeneosaunee past. Given these contemporaneous changes in the built

environment, as well as the religious and cultural reform programs at mission schools,

Cusick depicted architecture as site and sign of change.

Here I would like to dwell on the formal dimensions of Dennis Cusick’s

drawings. How did he render space? More broadly, how have architectural subjects

presented explicitly aesthetic challenges for Native American artists who adopt non-

Native styles of pictorial representation? To begin, the mission house in the 1821 drawing

seems rather flat (see fig. 2.1). The front and side of the building appear as a nearly

continuous surface. By splaying architectural space, Cusick works with the plane of the

page. He recognizes the disjuncture between building and drawing. Still, the artist pushes

against the strictures of flatness. In Cusick’s depiction the side of the building recedes

imperfectly to follow a vanishing point, suggesting a sense of depth. Gable logs slant.

Stairs project from the side and front of the building in divergent directions. Still other

strategies of spatial illusionism are at play. Cusick’s drawing focuses on the exterior of

the building, though it suggests activity inside. Students in the classroom appear through

unobstructed second floor windows. Smoke billowing from a central chimney indicates

the scent of a fire and, perhaps, someone preparing a meal downstairs at a hearth. In one

area, Cusick deconstructs an architectural enclosure, cutting away the front of the bell

tower to show the clanging bell. The artist attempts to include the sounds and smells of

the building. Cusick thus strives to present more than the look of the building; he presents

a multi-sensory narrative.

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In 1822, Cusick represented the building in a series of interior and exterior views

(figs. 2.2 and 2.3). He then attached these vignettes to a small wooden box for mission

money offerings, modeling the space of the Buffalo Creek mission school building.6 With

the 1822 box Cusick sought to present the building in its entirety, including how its

interior space relates to the world outside. The cutaway view of the bell tower is notably

absent from the later picture. Instead of portraying its internal workings, the artist applied

the logic of the cutaway to the entire scheme of the 1822 box. The front features the

exterior view, while two parallel sides proffer interior views. When Cusick represented

the Buffalo Creek mission school building, he not only communicated information about

the changing world (a quality that has often led scholars to class graphic works with

architectural themes as “ethnographic”) but also worked through some possibilities and

challenges of rendering that world on a flat page.

In terms of subject matter, Dennis Cusick’s work reflects the large-scale changes

taking place across Western New York. And in terms of Cusick’s style, art historians

have recognized how Dennis Cusick’s drawings show a strong affinity to vernacular

painting. Janet Berlo notes that Cusick often included with his signature the word fecit,

which translates from Latin as “he made it.” Fecit often appears on works by eighteenth-

century New England itinerant painters.7 Stylistically, his drawings strive for naturalism,

though they fall short in achieving the fidelity to eyesight that the term implies. Cusick 6 The missionary James Young sent the box, marked for the United Foreign Missionary Society, to congregations beyond Buffalo Creek to collect moneys in support of missionary work. Janet Berlo, “Dennis Cusick—A Tuscarora Artist at Seneca Mission: Missionary Propaganda and American Vernacular Culture, 1820–1822,” American Indian Art Magazine 40, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 38–51. 7 Berlo, “Dennis Cusick,” 40.

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used an imperfect version of pictorial illusionism. This disproportional and slanting

naturalism was common in the work of self-taught American painters of the time.8

Anthropologist William Sturtevant argues the Cusick’s drawings “seem to follow Euro-

American folk models.”9 Sturtevant treats the work as a departure from Tuscarora artistic

conventions, claiming Cusick’s drawings have no formal relationship with earlier

representational imagery in Haudenosaunee art such as engraving on pipes, ceramic pots,

and combs. Rather, Sturtevant contends, the drawings correspond more closely with a

group of “early Iroquois realist artists,” working in the first half of the nineteenth century,

including Dennis’s brother David Cusick, the Tuscarora or Seneca artist Thomas Jacobs,

and George Curtis (at Cattaragaus). This notion that Cusick’s work is unrelated to

cultural precedents echoes early interpretations of the work. In 1821, missionary James

Young, who worked with Cusick, wrote that Dennis Cusick, “in acquiring the arts. . . has

had no instruction except what he has received from copying.”10 To be sure, Cusick

actively engaged with the visual culture of Western New York. Rather than just

8 Jean Lipman and Tom Armstrong, eds., American Folk Painters of Three Centuries (New York: Whitney Museum, 1980). 9 Sturtevant, “David and Dennis Cusick,” 53. See William Sturtevant, “Early Iroquois Realist Painting and Identity Marking,” in Three Centuries of Woodlands Indian Art: A Collection of Essays, ed. J. C. H. King and Christian F. Feest (Altenstadt, Germany: ZFK Publishers, 2007), 129–143. 10 Quoted in Sturtevant, “David and Dennis Cusick.” Sturtevant cites “an inscription on the back of Dennis Cusick’s watercolor of the Seneca schoolhouse, signed and dated ‘Seneca Mission School House, Au. 26 1821. James Young.” Sturtevant, “David and Dennis Cusick,” fn 10, p. 55. Only recently have comprehensive accounts of Haudenosauene art history appeared, two from German publishers: Three Centuries of Woodlands Indian Art and Sylvia Kasprycki, ed., On the Trail of the Iroquois (Bonn: Kunst– und Astellungshalle, 2013). See also Noel Keating, Iroquois Art, Power, and History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012).

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regurgitating the pictorial styles he saw, Dennis Cusick drew from the breadth of visual

culture. This included a changing architectural environment.

Zotom, 1875–78

Five decades after Dennis Cusick depicted the Buffalo Creek Mission School,

Native artists from the Plains began to render buildings through long-standing practices

of drawing and painting. From 1875 to 1878, a handful of artists embraced architectural

subject matter. Like Cusick, who worked at a missionary school, they made artwork in an

intercultural space organized around a prison reform program. These men worked in the

military prison at Fort Marion in Saint Augustine, Florida, where the US Army held them

captive for three years, and sold drawings to American tourists who visited the fort.11 The

Fort Marion drawings by Kiowa artists Etadleuh Doanmoe and Zotom, as well as the

Cheyenne artist Making Medicine, demonstrate a predilection for architectural themes.

These artists remembered homes they left behind as well as cities glimpsed on their

recent journey from the Southern Plains. They also examined their new lives in a musty

seventeenth-century Spanish fort on the Atlantic Coast.

Zotom took a particularly keen interest in drawing buildings.12 In one he

represents the prisoners at Fort Marion the day after they arrived, not yet uniformed in

11 On the situation of these warrior artists, see Richard Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); Karen Daniels Petersen, Plains Indian Art from Fort Marion (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971); Phillip Earenfight, ed., A Kiowa’s Odyssey: A Sketchbook from Fort Marion (Carlisle, PA: The Trout Gallery, 2007). 12 The Silberman collection at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, in Oklahoma City, includes a number of drawings by Zotom. See Joyce Szabo, Art from

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standard-issue US Army fatigues (fig. 2.4). Men stand and sit on the parapet, looking

beyond the walls of their new prison while guards flank the group. The prisoners take in a

view of islands, ships, and open water, certainly an exotic scene for men who were more

accustomed to seas of grass than salt water. In the drawing Zotom pays close attention to

the inner-workings of the fort structure. His vantage point takes in a view of walls below

the parapet, and a large opening in the center of the fort. Zotom has truncated some

features on the side of the building to provide a cut-away view, rather than fully

extending the fort walls closer to the viewer along complex vanishing points. To show

construction and materials of the massive fort, Zotom outlined each stone block, and

differentiated wooden parts of the structures through rows of tight parallel lines on a

yellow ground. At left a tower juts into the sky. Above the men, on the other side of the

Fort wall, ships move freely across an expanse of blue. In this drawing Zotom carefully

describes his new space of confinement at Fort Marion. The artist attempts to make sense

of an alien environment by studying the details of its construction, how it all fits together.

Zotom and other Fort Marion prisoners experienced an extreme sense of

displacement from their former lives on the Southern Plains. First, the US Army moved

the captives far from their homelands. Then, at the Fort, Army Captain Richard Henry Fort Marion: The Silberman Collection (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008); Zotom’s work also appears in the collection of the Autry Museum. See also Joyce Szabo, Imprisoned Art, Complex Patronage: Plains Drawings by Howling Wolf and Zotom at the Autry National Center (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2011). The collection of the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center features a book of drawings by Zotom, accessed May 11, 2017, https://plainsledgerart.org/plates/index/8. The Beinecke Library at Yale also has drawings by Zotom. See, Dorothy Dunn, 1877: Plains Indian Sketch Books of Zo-Tom and Howling Wolf (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Press, 1969). The collection of the National Museum of the American Indian also includes a collection of drawings that Zotom created at Fort Marion.

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Pratt undertook an experiment in reform, an attempt to transform his charges’ religious,

economic, and cultural life. Imprisonment at Fort Marion had put an end to nearly a

decade of conflict on the Southern Plains. In 1867, representatives of five indigenous

nations and the US government signed the Treaty of Medicine Lodge on the banks of

Medicine Lodge Creek near the present-day border between Kansas and Oklahoma. Soon

thereafter, some Native leaders advocated for war against the US Army and resisted

settlement on reservations, a term prescribed by the Treaty of Medicine Lodge. In April

1875, the Army arrested Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Comanche warriors whom had

violently resisted the 1867 treaty. Zotom accompanied seventy other men and one woman

on the long journey by wagon, train, and boat to Fort Marion.13 The prison worked to

convert its charges from nomadic Plains warriors to sedentary, wage-earning Christians.

At the Fort, men engaged in various forms of labor to learn how to participate in a

capitalist economy. For the reform-minded Pratt, making money was a key part of the

program. This work sometimes involved maintaining buildings, including such tasks as

re-shingling the barracks roof.14 Selling drawings to tourists visiting St. Augustine was

another way to make money, and Pratt provided the prisoners with sketchbooks and

colored pencils. If Zotom’s drawing of prisoners on the fort parapet evinces fascination

with the space of his confinement, it also pictures the fort as a platform from which artists 13 Pratt, 105. 14 In one drawing the artist Bear’s Heart details the individual window panes and shingles on a church, then zooms out to show the arduous process of moving the building with an elaborate system of ropes and, perhaps, pulleys. See Earenfight, 94, fig. 89. Another artist, Making Medicine, shows the process of replacing the shingle roof on the prison barracks. See Szabo, Art from Fort Marion, 26, fig. 11. Making Medicine rendered the shingles through countless small U-shapes, a repetitive act of drawing that recalled the tedium of removing each shingle only to replace it.

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engaged with the world beyond the Plains.15 The process of making a drawing and then

exchanging it with someone else attests to that engagement.

If Pratt saw drawings as a source of income for prisoners, then artists had their

own ideas about the power of pictures. In the nineteenth-century, Plains men made

drawings and paintings in accord with established conventions. Since well before contact

Native men on the Plains recorded their own courageous deeds in paintings on hide and

rock. These autobiographical pictures generally attested to acts of valor—horse capture

and battlefield triumph, for instance. Men also depicted significant personal religious

experiences.16 To aid communal memory, some groups also kept pictorial calendars of

the principal events from past years.17 The oldest known examples of Plains graphic arts

15 The collected drawings in Oklahoma City, believed to originate from two books, include Zotom’s picture of prisoners looking beyond the parapet. Zotom made at least two other significant drawings of Fort Marion. In these drawings he shows the Fort as a site for public performance. See Szabo, Art from Fort Marion, 79, fig. 56. One depicts a number of prisoners (wearing something other than uniforms—yellow pants and solid shirts of different colors), their bodies cast in poses around a large fire in the Fort courtyard. Huddled around the courtyard perimeter sit a group of onlookers, all clad in black hats with rims that indicate American fashions of the mid-1870s. More audience members watch from the parapets and windows above. The other drawing shows the fort from outside. See Szabo, Art from Fort Marion, 81, fig. 59. Again, a large group of local residents and tourists crowd near the fort walls and parapets. At bottom left, four prisoners on horseback, followed by a guard, chase down a steer. This relates to a well-known episode where Pratt brought in an animal to recreate a buffalo hunt. 16 For a broad overview of the history of Plains narrative art, see Evan Maurer “Visions of the People,” in Visions of the People: A Pictorial History of Plains Indian Life, ed. Maurer (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1992), 15–45. In addition to the biographical arts, Maurer describes a parallel convention of ceremonial or visionary painting. On shields, shirts, lodge covers, and rock walls men depicted “icons of power: abstract or representational symbols of a spiritual concept that must be honored through specific rituals.” Maurer, “Visions of the People,” 31. 17 James Mooney, “Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians,” Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, pt. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898), 129–445; Candace Greene, The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts

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feature a spare style that presents figures with a minimum of identifying features.

Consider a Mandan robe in the Peabody Museum at Harvard (fig. 2.5). Famously

associated with the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–06 , the robe is a paragon of the

early, economical style of narrative painting. Twiggy legs flare to prop up torsos of

trapezoids, arches, and M-forms. The action depicts battle between Lakota and Mandan

forces around the Upper Missouri River. Groups of figures spread across the groundless

surface of the hide. The scenes do not clearly relate to one another, and most likely the

painting conveys a number of events.18 Evan Maurer argues this sense of placelessness

allows “figures to float in a timeless world of indeterminate space, where past events are

honored by present actions.”19 Oral testimony accompanied presentations of narrative

paintings, and it was through storytelling that artists conveyed the sequence of action,

described the location of events, and identified the figures.20

One exceptional early painting features spatial markers (fig. 2.6). In the

eighteenth century a Quapaw artist working near the Lower Mississippi River painted a

tanned hide with three village scenes. These vignettes line the inside of a pentagonal at the Smithsonian (Washington, DC: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2007); Greene, One Hundred Summers: A Kiowa Calendar Record (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 18 Gaylord Torrence, ed., Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2014), cat. 23, pp. 92–93; Castle McLaughlin, ed., Arts of Diplomacy: Lewis & Clark’s Indian Collection (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 2003). For more on early painted hides, see George Horse Capture, et al., Robes of Splendor: Native American Painted Buffalo Hides (New York: The New Press, 1993). 19 Maurer continues, “As exemplars of a social and personal ideal, the images have almost reached the realm of the mythic as they are repeated and celebrated in the stories told by continuing generations.” Maurer, “Visions of the People,” 40. 20 Janet Berlo, “A Kiowa’s Odyssey: Etahdleuh Doanmoe, Transcultural Perspectives, and the Art of Fort Marion,” in Earenfight, Kiowa’s Odyssey, 179.

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border, a shape that mirrors the outline of the hide and recalls the profile of a timber

frame house with a pitched roof. Three groups of domed Native houses span the bottom

section. Above the village rises a line of nine dancers. On the opposite border is a battle

scene, with Native-style houses clustered in a nearby corner. Four French buildings, some

with steeples, run along the lower left side of the hide (fig. 2.7). The painting balances

dance and warfare, and shows the movement of people between a Quapaw village and a

French outpost, likely along the Mississippi or a major tributary. Indeed, Quapaw peoples

interacted closely with French explorers, traders, and missionaries in the eighteenth

century. The French structures sit on the thick black line that forms a border around the

composition. By contrast, at bottom the three clusters of indigenous buildings cap a field

of a geometric abstraction, a short and wide design that occupies the space between the

border and the horizon. No figures inhabit the three villages at bottom. Yet a line extends

leftward from the village farthest at right. The two other villages interrupt this line before

it rounds a corner and flows to the French settlement, full of occupants. The line picks up

again on the other side of the French village, continuing up the left side of the border, and

turns to connect with the group of combatants at top left. The line traces the route to a

battlefield. By compiling discrete scenes, the artist provides the appropriate settings for

the narrative action. The contrast in architectural styles also helps to make

comprehensible a story to wide audiences that may not understand the language the artist

spoke (and, by extension, the oral testimony the artist typically presented to accompany a

painting). With its strong emphasis on architectural setting, the Quapaw robe marks a

visionary deviation from the conventions of Plains graphic art.

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Architectural subject matter rarely appeared in Plains narrative art before the

1870s. In the early- and mid-nineteenth century, though, stylistic change accompanied an

increase in cross-cultural contact on the Upper Missouri River. For instance, the Mandan

leader Mato Tope (also known as Four Bears) famously painted robes in the mid-1830s

that demonstrate a handling of the figure that is more naturalistic than earlier examples,

such as the Peabody painting (see fig. 2.5).21 In moving toward naturalism, however,

Mato Tope’s robe still hews to the convention of omitting landscape, buildings, and other

place markers. By contrast, almost all of Zotom’s drawings from the mid-1870s in the

Silberman collection show buildings set in a landscape.

Across multiple drawings Zotom chronicles his journey from the southern Plains

to Fort Marion. The sequence begins before the Native fighters surrender to Captain

Pratt. Zotom represents a group of Native peoples in council (fig. 2.8). Dozens of lodges

fill the bottom half of the page, and a great number of people assemble at a central tipi

21 John Ewers, “Early White Influence upon Plains Indian Painting: George Catlin and Carl Bodmer among the Mandan, 1832–34,” in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, v. 134 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1958). In this foundational study, John Ewers attributes this stylistic shift “to the example of the white artists George Catlin and Carl Bodmer, whose artistic methods Four Bears (Mato Tope) had observed closely” during their travels on the Missouri River in the early-1830s. Ewers pays special attention to changing treatments of the human figure, showing how Plains artists began to engage techniques of pictorial illusionism. Ewers, “Early White Influence,” 8. Between 1832 and 1834 George Catlin and Karl Bodmer visited Fort Clark on the Upper Missouri River. Ewers was perhaps unaware of Mato Tope’s robe now in Bern, and wrote about Mato Tope’s changing style by analyzing a “facsimile” drawing Bodmer made of Mato Tope’s painting. Bodmer’s drawing is consistent with the style of painting on the Bern robe, and Ewers’s analysis can generally apply to the Bern robe. See also Ron McCoy, “Of Forests and Trees: John C. Ewers’s ‘Early White Influence upon Plains Indian Painting,’” American Indian Art Magazine 27, no. 1 (Winter 2008), 63–71; Kristine Ronan, “Buffalo Dancer: The Biography of an Image,” (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan History of Art, 2016).

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with its cover partially open. Most structures are unadorned, though a few bear painted

covers. The painted tipi at right is the Sausage Picture Tipi, historically owned by the

Kiowa man Bonha-gyato and then descended to his son Dontomti. The painted tipi

farthest to the left, with white circles on a blue ground, is one of two Kiowa star tipis (for

more on Kiowa painted tipis, see chapter one).22 Subsequent drawings depict the

surrender to Captain Pratt, interment at Fort Sill in Indian Territory, and transport to Fort

Marion. After traveling by wagon to Leavenworth, Kansas, the prisoners boarded a train

to Saint Augustine. For nearly all the men, this journey amounted to their first experience

with rail travel, as well their first exposure to American cities such as Indianapolis and

Atlanta that expanded with the rail industry following the Civil War.

In Arrival at Indianapolis, Zotom compresses a mix of architectural styles and

building materials in the space behind the rail track (fig. 2.9). Structures close in on each

other, walls abut, and rooflines obstruct offices, churches, and houses farther away. Most

buildings appear frontally, some with detailed fenestration, cupolas, and belfries. In

general, the scene develops from stacked up blocks of color and pattern.23 The rail runs

along the bottom, belching a plume of smoke in front of buildings. The city appears

somewhat flat, like a curtain floating above a field of green. Still, the artist achieves a

slight sense of depth through his handling of two gable-roof buildings, as well as his 22 James Mooney’s commission included the Sausage Picture Tipi and the two Star Tips. See the catalog cards at the National Museum of Natural History for models of the Sausage Picture tipi, 245009, and the Star Picture tipis, 245016 and 245017. 23 In this way, Zotom’s drawing anticipates a later interest of American painters. The attention to the surface of buildings, play of geometric forms, and use of color fields are hallmarks of a 1920s painterly interest in skyscrapers, grain elevators, and other industrial environments in the work of American artists Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and George Ault.

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placement of an open lawn directly to the left of the train. As a crowd gathers in front of a

four-story red building, prisoners congregate in the windows of the approaching railcars.

Zotom’s use of building exteriors to denote location, and his treatment of cities as a

relatively flat grouping of quadrilateral and triangular forms, correspond to how the artist

saw urban spaces from the window of a passing train. Interior views do not factor

prominently until Zotom begins to depict scenes at Fort Marion.24 The artist seemingly

relished the challenge of how best to represent train stations and their immediate urban

environments. Many of his drawings portray rail lines intersecting cities, rendered as an

amalgamated mass of structures. Zotom astutely observed the links between growing US

cities and the rail industry. But he also recognized the power of buildings to denote place

for American viewers.

In almost all drawings, Zotom used landscape views or architectural subjects to

contextualize the action he depicted. In the Nashville picture the train emerges from a

large arch at the rail station (fig. 2.10). A few small buildings creep into the space of the

archway, suggesting the city beyond. To the right of the station, buildings crowd the rail

tracks and create a curtain effect similar to the artist’s drawing of Indianapolis. Open

ground and a short fence fill the page to the immediate left of the depot. A long shed

occupies the left background, obstructing a view of the horizon. The inscription “Leaving 24 In addition to the courtyard view in Prisoners on the Parapet Zotom represented the courtyard in a drawing of a dance staged for tourists. See Szabo Art from Fort Marion, 79, fig. 56). In two drawings he depicted other interior spaces at the Fort, an arched classroom and similar chapel. See Szabo Art from Fort Marion, 68, fig. 47 and 163, fig. 126, respectively. Szabo notes that the Silberman collection includes an illusionistic rendering of the curved interior spaces of Fort Marion, suggesting that Zotom asked a non-Native artist to demonstrate how to render the vaulted stone rooms on the drawing page.

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Lean Bear in Nashville,” indicates a significant event on the narrative sequence of

Zotom’s drawings. The Cheyenne Chief Lean Bear had attempted suicide before the train

arrived in Nashville. Pratt left Lean Bear in the city with guards.25 The drawing

represents Army soldiers attending to Lean Bear on the lawn outside of the station. That

lawn fills the bottom half of the drawing, with the buildings of Nashville situated in the

middle of the page on a sloping horizon. In drawings of Midwestern and Southern US

cities, Zotom treats the rail line similarly to the Quapaw artist who painted the robe. The

Quapaw artist used a thin line to connect multiple villages and tell a story. Zotom sets

each city on its own page, instead, connecting them at the margins and creating a

narrative sequence through the double line of rail.

Zotom’s drawings reflect the vision of a man with a keen sense of his place in

history. Art historian Joyce Szabo argues that, among Fort Marion artists, Zotom

possessed a unique ability to convey narrative. Zotom’s drawings incorporate not only

architectural and landscape subjects, but also written captions.26 Additionally, Zotom

includes icons reminiscent of those on Kiowa calendars, sometimes called pictographs.

For instance, in the drawing of prisoners on the parapet, Zotom simplified and

miniaturized the scene in a line drawing at top right (see fig. 2.4). This combination of 25 Pratt, 112-3. After arriving at Fort Marion Lean Bear finally died by starving himself. In his memoirs, Pratt acknowledged that despite his attempts to instill hope in the prisoners and gain their trust, conditions on the train remained bleak before reaching Saint Augustine. Walking through the train cabin with his young daughter, Pratt approached Grey Beard (Cheyenne). The prisoner told his captor that he left his own young daughter behind on the Plains. Grey Beard then confronted him, asking Pratt to imagine his grief. Pratt also recounted thwarting a Kiowa escape plan concocted soon after arriving at St. Augustine. Pratt, 147–153. 26 These were likely written by George Fox, interpreter at the prison. Berlo, Plains Indian Drawings, 118.

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elements works to orient viewers in a way previously unseen in Plains graphic art.

According to Szabo, Zotom sought to expand the Plains representational complex by

fusing oral and pictorial traditions.27 The use of pictographs and architectural settings

suggests that Zotom made sense of his new experiences for at least two distinct

audiences—Americans who collected drawing books and his fellow prisoners who were

accustomed to following a visual narrative through pared-down representational forms.

But it was not just by mixing representational approaches that Zotom sought to making

stories visually comprehensible. He also capitalized on the new subject matter of the built

environment to create distinguishable settings for events. As much as he illustrated a

story, Zotom made sense of disorienting new places through the act of drawing.

Frederick Alexcee, c. 1900

At the end of the nineteenth century, Native American artists continued to

respond to the changing look of buildings. Moving beyond the immediate built

environment, artists increasingly depicted historic buildings and villages. They often

relied on their memories to create these pictures, rather than working from direct

observation. On the West Coast at the turn of the twentieth century Frederick Alexcee

(1853–1940) painted his village in a series of naturalistic views.28 Alexcee lived and

worked in Lax Kw’alaams, a village in coastal British Columbia between the outlets of

27 Joyce Szabo, Art from Fort Marion, 70–78. Szabo describes the layering of representational devices in Zotom’s drawings, which include the narrative drawing itself, a calendar-style glyph, and a caption written in English. We might consider Zotom’s works as creating a mise en abyme, a representation that includes a small version of itself in itself. 28 Alternative spellings of the artist’s last name include Alexie, Alexee, and Alexsee.

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the Nass and Skeena Rivers near the present-day coastal border with Alaska. Alexcee’s

painting at the National Gallery of Canada shows the settlement from the water, running

along the coast below a steep hillside (fig. 2.11). The Hudson’s Bay trading fort—with its

high palisade, turrets, and complex of buildings indicated by protruding roofs and

chimneys—dominates the left side. From the area in front of the fort, a series of houses

extend along the beach, most raised on stilts. Houses at far right lack stilts and feature the

front doorway customary of Tsimshian dwellings (fig. 2.12). At the center of one house a

pole juts above the gable and provides entry through a circular hole at its base. Many of

the houses closer to the fort include glass windows and rectangular doors, adaptations

from settler architecture. Alexcee shows cultural change at Lax Kw’alaams through the

arrangement of buildings. Those closer to the fort—a site of trade and an agent of

change—tend to display a greater degree of architectural adaptation.

In 1831, the Hudson’s Bay Company founded Fort Simpson, a place known in the

Tsimshian language as Lax Kw’alaams. The Fort was part of a series of fur trading posts

in British Columbia. As with the founding of many forts in northern British Columbia,

local indigenous peoples (the Tsimshian) relocated near the new economic hub.29 After

1880, the town became known as Port Simpson. Alexcee was born to a Tsimshian mother

and a father of Haudenosaunee descent who had moved to the West Coast of Canada to

29 Susan Neylan, The Heavens Are Changing: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 133. See also, Douglas Cole and David Darling, “History of the Early Period,” in Handbook of the North American Indians 7, Northwest Coast, ed. Wayne Suttles (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1990), 125.

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work for Hudson’s Bay Company.30 Alexcee apprenticed to make ceremonial art forms

when he was younger, training as an attendant in the esoteric Halait society to create

naxnox masks of spiritual figures for Tsimshian dancers to wear in ceremonial

performances. As an adult he carved at least two headdress frontlets.31 He is known best,

though, for work he made for external markets, especially paintings of Lax Kw’alaams

and miniature carvings of houses and totem poles. Tsimshian art forms such as frontlets

would have accompanied formal storytelling in song, dance, and spoken form. Like

Zotom, Alexcee recognized that depicting buildings could help his pictures to tell a story,

an account of the changing past and present.

For nearly a century, writers have grappled with Alexcee’s paintings. Many

puzzle over how to classify his oeuvre, where to place his output in the broad histories of

art in North America. In 1927 Anthropologist Marius Barbeau included one of Alexcee’s

paintings in The Exhibition of West Coast Art Native and Modern, which mixed artworks

from mostly anonymous Indigenous artists (customary forms such as woven robes and

carved masks) with the work of named Euro-Canadian studio artists such as Emily Carr.

As an easel painter known by name yet identified as an Aboriginal man, Alexcee’s

paintings seemed to linger somewhere between the two channels of West Coast Canadian

30 As Marius Barbeau describes, “His clan is the Killler-Whale, and his native name—Great-Female Deer (Weeksem’wacn).” Marius Barbeau, “Frederick Alexie, A Primitive,” Canadian Review of Music and Art 43, nos. 11 & 12 (1944): 22. 31 Key elements of Tsimshian ceremonial regalia, dancers wear these small carvings on the forehead. Alexcee’s frontlets are at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, BC (accession numbers 18700 and 18129).

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art.32 Barbeau later reflected on the “strange quality” of Alexcee’s paintings that

“beckoned and puzzled me; [the paintings] remained outside the regular categories of

Indian and Canadian art.”33 Debates about where to place Alexcee’s work have continued

through the late twentieth- and early-twenty-first centuries. In 1991 Deirdre Simmons

argued the material is plainly unrelated to historical Tsmishian art.34 Simmons speculates

that Alexcee took inspiration from English-born painter Pym Nevins Compton (1838–

1879), who worked for Hudson’s Bay Company and visited Fort Simpson as early as

1859. A store at Fort Simpson displayed one of Compton’s paintings, and local artists 32 Ronald Hawker argues the exhibition set up an unfavorable comparison between Native and Euro-Canadian art forms, with Alexcee’s work operating as a primitivist bridge between the two. His paintings found resonance with so-called naïve paintings by European artists, such as work by Henri Rousseau, but his cultural identity brought the work into association with a racial discourse of primitivism. Ronald Hawker, “Frederick Alexie: Euro-Canadian Discussions of a First Nations’ Artist,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 11, no. 2 (1991): 242–43. As Charlotte Townsend-Gault notes, this juxtaposition decontextualized each history of art. Charlotte Townsend-Gault, “Impurity and Danger,” Current Anthropology 34, no. 1 (Feb. 1993): 93. See also Anne Whitelaw, “Placing Aboriginal Art at the National Gallery of Canada,” Canadian Journal of Communication 31, no. 1 (2006), accessed August 26, 2016, http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1775/1897#ababddfef. The formalist decontextualizing of Native art is now a now-familiar issue given the massive backlash to the 1984 exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art. See James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 189–214. 33 Barbeau. “Frederick Alexie,” 21. 34 Deirdre Simmons, “Frederick Alexcee, Indian Artist (c. 1857 to c. 1944),” Journal of Canadian Art History 14, no. 2 (1991): 83–93. Simmons writes, on page 84, “Although he was apprenticed according to the conventional native system of carvers, he broke with tradition to experiment with the techniques and media of the assimilating culture. His paintings described historical events and panoramic views of Fort Simpson and the surrounding area in a style considered native in European terms and they did not reflect his native heritage.” And, on page 90, “His painting are of the folk-art genre, quite removed from the complex two-dimensional graphic designs on wood of his Tsimshian forebears.” Simmons speculates that Alexcee used a straight-edge in depicting buildings, and that he learned European techniques of painting in Port Simpson, see page 86.

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copied the painting many times.35 This copying did not necessarily amount to the loss of

some traditional form of Tsimshian art, but rather generated a culturally and artistically

hybrid practice. Recognizing this hybridity—which is widely associated with Alexcee’s

paintings—helps scholars to move past the stark cultural dichotomies that undergird

much twentieth-century thinking, such as Barbeau’s puzzlement, on indigenous arts.

Building on Simmons’s claim that Alexcee stylistically mimicked Euro-Canadian

artists in Lax Kw’alaams, it is important to note that the artist also responded to the

changing built environment and drew from his own memories of the village. Like Cusick

and Zotom, Alexcee pictures settler architecture as an agent of change in the nineteenth

century. Recall that houses in Alexcee’s painting Fort Simpson appearing closer to the

fort display a greater degree of architectural adaptation than those at the village limit (see

fig. 2.11). Like other groups of Native peoples living in coastal northern British

Columbia and Southeast Alaska, Tsimshian peoples historically built and inhabited large

plank houses. These structures featured painted façades, carved and painted screens in the

back, and large pits in the center.36 Houses accommodated many inhabitants and formed

the primary unit of northern Northwest Coast society. In fact, when Claude Levi-Strauss

proposed the house-society as a new concept for kinship studies, he referred to the

architecture and social structure of the historic Northwest Coast as well as medieval

Europe.37 Similarly, historian Susan Neylan contends that the house (walp) is the most

35 Simmons, 87. 36 On northern Northwest Coast architecture, see Nabokov and Easton, Native American Architecture, 263–85. 37 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982 [original French 1975]). See also Janet Carsten and Stephen

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basic element of Tsimshian social organization.38 In Alexcee’s lifetime, customary

Tsimshian architecture changed dramatically.

In Tsimshian villages such as Lax Kw’alaams, colonial building practices and

styles first fused with, and then largely displaced, historic indigenous built forms. At first

house leaders placed windows on the front walls of buildings, spaces previously given

over to crest paintings. The use of windows and then hinged doors portended greater

change in Tsimshian architecture. Neylan provides some statistics:

Seventeen years after missionization, 72 per cent of Metlakatlans

[residents of the village New Metlakatla] still lived in lineage or

extended-family households. While the movement towards single-family

dwellings occurred more rapidly in neighboring Port Simpson (58 per

cent lived in ‘nuclear family units’ in 1881; 84 per cent in 1891), the

principal property-holding group remained the matrilineage not the

nuclear family.39

Hugh-Jones, “Introduction: About the House—Levi-Strauss and Beyond,” in About the House, ed. Carsten and Hugh-Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–46. 38 Neylan, 237. Neylan writes that “the same word for dwelling was also used to describe the group of lineage relations, their territory, and their wealth. . . The chief’s physical house was a communal asset of the lineage group, and reflected their wealth, prestige, and authority.” 39 Neylan, 238–39. Neylan continues, “Embracing new styles paradoxically made older forms rare and therefore potentially more valuable. For example, in the 1870s, the House of Grizzly Bear of Walps Midiiks (members of a raven clan group of the Ginax’angiik tribe of Coast Tsimshian) altered their longhouses by adding European architectural elements such as plank floors, a hinged wooden door, and windows. A potlatch was given in order to name the door, ‘the Wave Door,’ which was the same procedure by which the lineage predecessors had named and validated for display the painted house front, now ruined by the new windows. Announcing that there would be no more new paintings, the

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As Neylan’s note about the matrilineage indicates, alterations in building styles did not

necessarily correspond to wholesale social changes. Still, colonial space materialized in

missionary churches, trading forts, and domestic architecture increasingly through the

second half of the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, houses in a Euro-Canadian style had

largely replaced the customary architecture in Lax Kw’alaams and other settlements with

significant Tsimshian populations. When the German collector Adrian Jacobsen visited

Lax Kw’alaams in 1881, he noted that he “saw nothing but modern European-type houses

. . . carefully laid out streets and a Gothic-type church.”40 As communal plank houses

slowly receded from the village around the turn of the twentieth century, Alexcee focused

intently on depicting these buildings of the past.

Most paintings show the fort dominating the village. Yet Alexcee also devoted

individual compositions to Tsimshian buildings. In one painting, now at the Art Gallery

of Ontario (AGO), Alexcee focuses on a group of typically Tsimshian houses (fig. 2.13).

The artist devoted just one known canvas to a single structure, as opposed to his more

numerous paintings of villages. In Pole Raising at Port Simpson, which is in a private

collection, people congregate in front of a Tsimshian-style house to raise a totem pole

and witness the event (fig. 2.14). A leader steps out of the house proceeded by two men

who descend the stairs and display coppers, symbols of wealth among northern

Northwest Coast communities. Coppers and totem poles relate to a frenzy of ceremonial

house then enumerated all the house-fronts paintings that were or had been on display on lineage dwellings.” 40 Johan Adrian Jacobsen, Alaska Voyage 1881–1883: An Expedition to the Northwest Coast of America, trans. Erna Gunther (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 27–28.

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activity in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century, increased trade

brought new wealth to Native communities. Houses leaders vied for prominence and

patronized new forms of art, such as totem poles, as a way to publicly validate claims to

high rank in the community. This house and pole closely resemble the central house in

the AGO picture. Each house features a staircase descending from a circular doorway

high up the house front, just below the point of the gable. And in each painting the pole is

relatively unadorned, only featuring a group of two bear figures at bottom. The AGO

picture amounts essentially to a genre painting, a view of everyday life. Pole Raising at

Port Simpson, however, denotes a specific historical event.

When he worked around the turn of the twentieth century, then, Alexcee painted

the village and its buildings at least partly as he remembered them, rather than depicting

the village he observed at the time. A number of scholars have noted that Alexcee worked

from memory to create views of Lax Kw’alaams as it appeared during the artist’s youth.41

As Barbeau’s anecdote attests, people at Lax Kw’alaams communally viewed some of

Alexcee’s paintings of the past. In at least one case Alexcee created a history painting on

commission. A work at the Canadian Museum of History shows an historic battle

between the Haida and Tsimshian at the village. Alexcee completed this painting on

commission in 1896 for the client John Flewin, a government agent.42

Alexcee made fewer than a dozen known pictures, in oil or watercolor. In addition

to using opaque substrates, he painted a series of glass slides for projection. Architectural 41 See Kaitlin McCormick, ‘“Neither One, Nor the ‘Other’’: The Unique Oeuvre of Freddie Alexcee,” MA Thesis, Art History, Carleton University, Ottawa (2010), 51, 101, 105, and 106. 42 McCormick, 103.

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and historical subjects predominate here. The artist devoted many of the individual slides

to a view of a particular house. In some instances, he showed a house from a three-

quarters view to give a sense of perspective. Yet with others Alexcee completely filled an

individual slide with a painted house front. In one slide, the gabled roof cuts across the

top of the picture and the black circular entry hole punctuates the bottom center (fig.

2.15). The snouts of two animals, probably bears, meet above the hole. Alexcee rendered

the animals with elements of the formline design system—especially visible in the

animals’ ears—that is characteristic of nineteenth-century art on the northern Northwest

Coast. When projected, such paintings of buildings required an entire room to view.

Canadian anthropologist Marius Barbeau recalled encountering Alexcee’s work in the

winter of 1915, when he attended a projection of the painted glass slides at Port Simpson

church. Barbeau remembered that the missionary presented the slides with commentary,

and that the event “brought laughter to the mixed audiences,” of which the artist was a

member.43 The communal viewing of these slides evokes the twentieth-century practice

of taking photographic slides during travel and then projecting the pictures at home for

friends to view; a way of transporting and externalizing memory.

43 Barbeau, “Frederick Alexie,” 19–21. During this 1915 trip Barbeau acquired for the Canadian Museum of History a house model that Fred Dudoward made and Charles Dudoward painted, from around 1904. This is catalogue number VII-C-674. Alexcee also made at least two house models, which are in the collection of the Museum of Vancouver.

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Earnest Spybuck, 1910–1921

At the beginning of the twentieth century Native American artists continued,

independently of academic training, to appropriate Euro-American styles of drawing and

painting. Self-taught painters increasingly found patronage in commissioned work for

ethnologists. Artists such as Silver Horn (1860–1940, Kiowa), Carl Sweezy (1881–1953,

Southern Arapaho), Earnest Spybuck (1883–1949, Shawnee), and Jesse Cornplanter

(1889–1957, Seneca) collaborated with ethnologists on long-term projects in the early

twentieth century. These artists tended to adopt naturalistic styles to represent

contemporary religious life and hybrid architectural spaces. Jesse Cornplanter was well

known at the time for creating drawings for natural history museums and popular

publications. Cornplanter created the works in his first book, Iroquois Indian Games and

Dances (1903), for University of Chicago anthropologist Frederick Starr.44 These

published drawings present fifteen scenes from the Seneca ceremonial calendar including

false face dancers, the green corn dance, the doorkeepers’ dance, and others. Cornplanter

uses sparing detail to frame action with architectural details. In the drawing Green Corn

Dance, high windows mark the sides of the composition (fig. 2.16). A procession curves

around the room while two central figures straddle a bench and face each other, their

mouths open in song. Here Cornplanter shows not any nostalgic or mythical view.

Rather, dancers occupy the longhouses of the late-nineteenth century. His treatment of 44 William Fenton, “Frederick Starr, Jesse Cornplanter and the Cornplanter Medal for Iroquois Research,” New York History 61, no. 2 (April 1980): 186–199; Frederick Starr, “The Cornplanter Medal,” American Journal of Numismatics 40, no. 1 (July 1905): 10. Through sales of the book, Starr raised funds for the Cornplanter Medal in Iroquois Research. An East Asian specialist, Starr grew up in the Finger Lakes and maintained a lifelong interest in Haudenosaunee culture.

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the building evinces a light hand, with much more detail given to the figures. Still,

Cornplanter suggests how industrially produced materials—windows, floors of milled

timber—can help to realize the fundamental spatial principles of the longhouse.45

As a cultural broker, Cornplanter collaborated with a number of anthropologists,

including Starr and Arthur C. Parker. During the first decade of the twentieth century,

Parker edited the New York State Museum Bulletin and occasionally solicited drawings

from Cornplanter to illustrate the publication.46 Cornplanter’s drawings appeared later in

Arthur Parker’s books The Code of Handsome Lake (1913) and Legends of the

Longhouse (1938). Anthropologist Mark Raymond Harrington also corresponded with

the Seneca artist, exploring a potential collaboration in 1902. In a letter the artist wrote

Harrington to acknowledge receipt of drawing paper Harrington had sent and to express

his willingness to work together. Cornplanter assured Harrington, “when you want some

drawings just write to me and tell me what one you want.” Cornplanter promised he

would then, “draw with my might.” Cornplanter set his rate at twenty-five cents per work

because “that’s what Prof. Star gives for my drawings.” Cornplanter demonstrated the

quality of his draftsmanship by including two perspectives on a false face mask at the

bottom of the letter.47

45 Fenton, “From Longhouse.” 46 Harriet Maxwell Converse, “Myths and Legends of the New York State Iroquois,” ed. Arthur C. Parker, New York State Museum Bulletin 125 (1908). 47 Jesse Cornplanter (Lawton, NY) to Mark Harrington (n. p.), March 8, 1902, M. R. Harrington Papers, Series 6, Box 231 Folder 12, NMAI Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, MD. In regard to Cornplanter’s considerable correspondence, William Fenton writes, “Early on he [Jesse Cornplanter] learned that writing letters was a way of manipulating White people. Iroquois buffs would send money for letters

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This correspondence likely spurred Harrington to commission a series of graphic

works from another Native American artist. In 1910 Harrington arrived at the town of

Shawnee in Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma. At the time Harrington worked for George

Gustav Heye, the infamous collector who founded a museum in New York City in 1916

(galleries opened in 1922).48 Harrington began his employment with Heye shortly after

completing a Master’s degree in anthropology at Columbia University, around 1908, and

continued to work as a field collector for Heye until 1916.49 During his 1910 collecting

trip in Oklahoma Harrington and Spybuck met, introduced by Harrington’s assistant Bill

Skye, an Indigenous man of Peoria descent. Harrington later recalled that before meeting

Spybuck he had, “run across only one other [Indian artist], Jesse Cornplanter, the

Seneca.”50 Harrington described how, when he first spoke with Spybuck, the artist came

equipped with a portfolio of drawings. “The pictures were unsophisticated, but. . . the

detail of costume and equipment [was] unusually accurate.” Harrington writes in a 1938

article, “it occurred to me then and there that I might engage Spybuck to record in water-illustrated with drawings by the ‘best Seneca boy artist.’” Fenton, “‘Aboriginally Yours,’” 177–78. 48 Clara Sue Kidwell, “Every Last Dishcloth: The Prodigious Collecting of George Gustav Heye,” in Collecting Native America, 1870–1960, ed. Shepard Krech III and Barbara A. Hail (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), 232–258; Edmund Carpenter, Two Essays: Chief & Greed (North Andover, MA: Persimmon Press, 2005). Heye was involved with the museum at the University of Pennsylvania before establishing his New York museum. Today Heye’s collection forms the basis of the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian. 49 Cécile R. Ganteaume, “The Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian,” in Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian, ed. Ganteaume (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 276–77. 50 Mark Raymond Harrington, “Spybuck: The Shawnee Artist,” Indians at Work 5, no. 8 (1938): 13. In the eight years in Heye’s employ, Harrington acquired nearly 7,500 items—including woven baskets, wooden spoons, wool sashes and other articles of clothing adorned with glass beads—from Woodlands and Prairie groups.

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colors the ceremonies, games and customs of his own people and those of other tribes in

the vicinity.”51 Harrington noted that Spybuck expressed preference for painting pastoral

scenes. Likely with his own future books in mind, Harrington encouraged Spybuck to

depict ceremonial scenes. Harrington acquired at least one of Spybuck’s watercolor

drawings in 1910.52 The Spybuck commission continued even after 1916, when

Harrington moved on from Heye. It seems to have ended no later than 1921, on

publication of Harrington’s book Lenape Religion.

In the context of religious life, Spybuck embraced architectural themes. In

multiple watercolor drawings made between 1910 and 1921, Spybuck represents a range

of building styles. In at least twenty-five works commissioned by Harrington, the artist

depicted his own Shawnee nation as well as neighboring communities of Lenape

(Delaware), Kickapoo, Meskwaki (Fox), and Sauk peoples in central Oklahoma; in the

nineteenth century each group had been forced to travel long distances from homelands

in the East to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). In these drawings and paintings,

Spybuck places ceremonial performances inside of communal big houses, and presents

bustling scenes of food preparation and camp life that so often accompany large

assemblies. In the painting Dance at Sauk and Fox Sacred Bundle Feast, Spybuck

51 Harrington, “Spybuck,” 13. 52 An inventory listing Shawnee material that Harrington collected during his 1910 Oklahoma trip includes brooches, leggings, baskets, a German silver hair ornament, and from Spybuck, “a picture showing [a] procession on horseback before Shawnee war dance.” M. R. Harrington Papers, Series 5, Box 190, Folder 3, National Museum of the American Indian Archives, Suitland, MD. Spybuck’s drawing “Procession Before War Dance” is catalog number 25735 at the National Museum of the American Indian. The work appears on page 20 of Lee Callander and Ruth Slivka, Shawnee Home Life: The Paintings of Earnest Spybuck (New York: Museum of the American Indian, 1984).

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portrays a religious event as practiced in the early twentieth century (fig. 2.17). In the

painting, feast participants don cross-cultural finery; some wear jackets and collared

shirts while others wear dresses of tradecloth or pants fitted with beaded garters. The

buildings, clothing styles, and activities here indicate the continuity of Indigenous

practices. Yet Spybuck also highlights contemporaneous changes in material culture, as

with the industrially produced buggy that protrudes from behind the big house at right.

The artist revels in the cultural hybridity of early-twentieth century life in central

Oklahoma, setting a scene of ceremonial life in its contemporaneous architectural

environment. In Dance at Sauk and Fox Sacred Bundle Feast, Spybuck fills the page

with a big house, a ceremonial structure used by Algonquin peoples including the

Lenape, Meskwaki, and Fox. This was likely the big house constructed near the Little

Caney River in Oklahoma.53 Milled clapboard covers the gable and walls. Bark provides

the roof. At bottom left, canvas rolls up on another structure, a frame of saplings, to

reveal a number of kettles suspended above a smoky fire. Despite the material adaptation

of canvas, the structure evokes historic wigwam architecture of the Eastern Woodlands.

Nabokov and Easton argue that, “In its purest expression, woodland Indian architecture

53 Mark Harrington, “A Preliminary Sketch of Lenápe Culture,” American Anthropologist 15, no. 2 (1913): 218–19; Frank Speck notes that when Lenape peoples moved to Kansas they constructed a big house five miles east of Lawrence. After moving to Indian Territory they constructed a new big house near the Little Caney River. Speck’s Lenape collaborator named Witapano’xwe (or War Eagle) noted that the Little Caney big house had been moved three or four hundred yards northeast from its original location, that the Dawes Commission set aside one acre for the site, and that the big house “was remodeled by us after a deliberation in September 1913.” Frank Speck, A Study of the Delaware Indian Big House Ceremony (Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Historical Commission, 1931), 17–18.

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endures today far from its regional homeland.”54 Spybuck thus pictures the big house and

the wigwam as he likely experienced them, as materially adapted to the twentieth-

century.

In addition to showing adaptations in Native buildings, Spybuck also places a

Native building next to a settler-style structure. In the painting Singeing Dogs by Sauk

and Fox for Sacred Bundle Feast, two buildings dominate the top half of the composition

(fig. 2.18). At left is a two-story house with a central chimney, glass windows, and a

shingled roof. Two female figures stand on the front porch, blocking the front door. In

Spybuck’s depiction, the house evokes the concepts of personal property and the nuclear

family. At right is a ceremonial house with open windows and doorways and thatching on

the roof. The ceremonial house is full; on both ends the crowd inside spills outside.

Spybuck depicts dancing that typically takes place during the feast preparation.55

Regardless of any particular viewer’s knowledge of Sauk and Fox ceremonialism,

though, we can see that this house draws the community together. This is in strong

contrast with the adjacent two-story dwelling.

Spybuck also pictured his own small balloon-frame house with windows and a

chimney (fig. 2.19). Around the property are an outbuilding, well, carriage, wagon, and

three horses. Growing up in the 1880s and ‘90s, Spybuck witnessed a period of change

and he saw how Shawnee peoples and their neighbors carried forward key aspects of their

cultural identity. In 1890 the federal government allotted the reservation shared by

Shawnee and Potawatomi peoples. Through the allotment process the government 54 Nabokov and Easton, Native American Architecture, 72. 55 Callandar and Slivka, Shawnee Home Life, 27.

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divvied up communally held lands in parcels for individual ownership, then gave

“leftover” lands to non-Native settlers.56 At this time, Euro-American buildings spread

rapidly through territorial Oklahoma. Indigenous families across the Plains began to

occupy single-family houses. Occasionally the government constructed these houses—as

with those built for Kiowa families near the Meers Gap, as discussed in chapter one—to

persuade a more sedentary relation to the land, one that revolved around high-yield

farming of cash crops. Yet often Plains peoples built these houses for themselves, as with

Chief Plenty Coup’s house in Montana or Quanah Parker’s star house in Southwestern

Oklahoma, so-called because of the large stars Parker used to decorate his pitched roof.57

Spybuck’s home seems to correlate with this latter architectural movement.

Spybuck’s treatment of the built environment also reflects a longer,

intergenerational history of change and migration. In the middle of the nineteenth century

Spybuck’s forebears settled in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma, in a place that

now forms part of Pottawatomie and Cleveland counties east of Oklahoma City. Shawnee

peoples originated in the eastern Woodlands and only arrived in Indian Territory after

centuries-long series of migrations. The peripatetic history of the group includes a slow

movement westward from eastern Pennsylvania in the seventeenth century and multiple 56 Clara Sue Kidwell, "Allotment," Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, accessed June 17, 2016, www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entryname=ALLOTMENT. See also Delos Sacket Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973). In 1907 Oklahoma became a state, just three years before Spybuck and Harrington met. 57 On Chief Plenty Coups’s house, see Timothy McCleary, Thomas Carter, and Edward Chappel, Tipis and Square Houses: The Chief Plenty Coups Homestead and the Building of the Crow Indian Reservation in Central Montana, 1884–1910 (Helena: Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, 2005).

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periods of dispersal.58 Following the Revolutionary War, a group of Shawnee people

moved from the Ohio River Valley across the Mississippi River to settle, briefly, on a

Spanish land grant near Cape Girardeau in southeast Missouri. The group dispersed in the

early-nineteenth century. From the mid-1830s to the mid-1850s, it reassembled around

the Canadian River in present-day central Oklahoma. During this time the government

established a reservation in Kansas for the other two bands of Shawnee people.59 Those

Shawnee residing in Indian Territory when the government established the first

reservation in Kansas became known as the Absentee Shawnee. In 1872 the federal

government recognized the Absentee Shawnee land titles in Indian Territory on a shared

reservation with a group of Potawatomi peoples.60 So, what is the relationship of these

longer Shawnee migrations and Spybuck’s paintings? More to the point, how does

Spybuck make visible a history of migration through his paintings?

The Delaware, Sauk, Fox, and Shawnee historically lived in long wooden

structures, adopting the canvas tent during periods of movement and relocation. As the

anthropologist Ives Goddard notes, “When the Delawares captured a number of military

tents after Arthur St. Clair’s defeat in 1791 [in the Northwest Territory, present-day

Ohio], some families used these in preference to log cabins.”61 Similar canvas tents

appear frequently in Spybuck’s paintings for Harrington. For example, Spybuck 58 Charles Callender, “Shawnee,” in Handbook of the North American Indian, v. 15 Northeast, ed. Bruce Trigger (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 630–33. 59 The Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother the Prophet were part of these Shawnee bands. 60 Callender, “Shawnee,” 632. Berlin B. Chapman, “The Pottawatomie and Absentee Reservation,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 24, no. 3 (1946): 293–305. 61 Ives Goddard, “Delaware,” in Handbook of the North American Indians, v. 15: Northeast, ed. Bruce Trigger (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 230.

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surrounds the large ceremonial structure with canvas tents in the painting Delaware

Annual Ceremony in Oklahoma (fig. 2.20). Outside the tents, women converse and tend

to campfires. The village recedes to the horizon, as more tents appear through patchy

foliage. Today images of canvas tents en masse often call up associations with crises—

refugees fleeing the war in Syria, residents who saw their homes crumble during

earthquakes or wash away in a tsunami. No doubt the canvas tent has played a similar

role in the long history of displacement that Northeastern Indigenous groups experience.

But to see the canvas tent as simply a substitute, a poor replacement, for historic forms of

Indigenous homebuilding would be to misapprehend the value Native peoples have

attributed to it.

The work of Cornplanter and Spybuck moves between the categories of art and

ethnology. A number of anthropologists have reproduced Cornplanter’s and Spybuck’s

drawings to illustrate their texts. In 1921, Spybuck’s drawings appeared as reproductions

in Harrington’s Religion and Ceremonies of the Lenape, published through Heye’s

Museum of the American Indian.62 The frontispiece reproduces Spybuck’s painting

Conclusion of Lenape Annual Ceremony in Oklahoma, while two plates feature Lenape

Annual Ceremony in Progress and The Peyote Rite among the Lenape. Additionally, the

Heye Museum in New York displayed Spybuck’s paintings. The authoritative Handbook

of the North American Indians illustrates Spybuck’s painting Delaware Ceremony in

Oklahoma to accompany a description of Lenape (Delaware) ceremonies; Ruth Underhill

used Spybuck’s work in a book on Native American religion; and Peter Nabokov and 62 Mark R. Harrington, Religion and Ceremonies of the Lenape (New York: Museum of the American Indian, 1921).

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Robert Easton reproduce Spybuck’s painting of a Lenape big house alongside a quote

from Frank Speck on that architecture.63 Furthermore, in the past fifty years many

scholars have associated Spybuck’s work with ethnography rather than art. Jeanne

Snodgrass King describes his commission for Harrington as an “ethnographic series.”64

Rennard Strickland and Margaret Archuleta associate Spybuck with a group of early

narrative genre painters that created “important ethnographic documents.”65 And Rebecca

Dobkins classfies Spybuck’s work as “autoethnographic” painting.66

Beyond the anthropological characteristics of Spybuck’s work, Harrington

recognized their aesthetic value. In his article on Spybuck, Harrington writes that “Indian

artists were anything but numerous” in 1910 when he met Spybuck. Harrington clarifies

what he intends by using the term “Indian artist.” He wrote that refers, “of course, to

Indians who produced pictures with the white man’s materials and by his methods. There

were, and always have been, many Indian artists working in strictly native materials

along traditional lines.”67 Harrington defines the identity of “Indian artist” in seemingly

oppositional terms, as breaking with Indigenous conventions. Still, the “Indian artists” on

Harrington’s mind made pictures of Native life. For Harrington the relationship of the 63 Goddard, “Delaware,” 232, fig. 13; Ruth Underhill, Red Man’s Religion: Beliefs and Practices of the Indians of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Nabokov and Easton, 88. 64 Jeanne Snodgrass King, American Indian Painters: A Biographical Directory (New York: Museum of the American Indian, 1968), 179. 65 Rennard Strickland and Margaret Archuleta, “The Way People Were Meant to Live: The Shared Visions of Twentieth Century Native American Painters and Sculptors,” in Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century, ed by. Margaret Archuleta (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1991), 71. 66 Rebecca Dobkins, “Art and Autoethnography: Frank Day and the Uses of Anthropology,” Museum Anthropology 24, nos. 2/3 (September 2000): 23–24. 67 Harrington, “Spybuck.”

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Indian artist to his culture was not necessarily one of disconnection. It is noteworthy that

Harrington, the ethnographer, described Spybuck as an “Indian artist” and not a

draftsman or illustrator. In 1938 when Harrington reflected on the Spybuck commission

he was recalling an era when fine arts institutions—museums and schools—had not yet

fully recognized the aesthetic category of Native American art. Strickland and Archuleta

describe this period as “a time before Indian artists were limited to painting what was to

be defined by outsiders as ‘Indian.’”68 Harrington thus remembered an era preceding

Edgar Hewett’s 1918 commission of the San Ildefonso Pueblo painter Crescenio

Martinez (1879–1918) to create works for the School of American Research (now called

the School for Advanced Research) in Santa Fe and the related movement toward a flat

style of “Indian painting” across northern New Mexico (discussed later).69 These

Southwestern painters were widely seen as having developed a form of graphic

representation distinct from Euro-American styles—one that typically uses a blank

ground to isolate figures in action. Surely the success of these artists in establishing a

recognizable style of “Indian painting” in the 1920s has contributed to a post-WWII

appraisal of Spybuck’s work as a form of ethnography.

Like all artists, Spybuck drew on his immediate visual culture while developing

new ways to picture the world. There can be little doubt that in his use of perspective and

ground Spybuck took inspiration from photographs and graphic works by non-Native

68 Archuleta and Strickland, Shared Visions, 71. 69 J. J. Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900–1930 (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1997), 55–56; see also Dorothy Dunn, “The Development of Modern American Indian Painting in the Southwest and Plains Areas,” El Palacio 58, no. 11 (November 1951): 331–51.

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artists, just as Frederick Alexcee responded to the work of a Euro-Canadian artist. Little

explored in the histories of folk art or Native American art, though, is the way that self-

taught artists saw themselves as contributing to a genre. Cornplanter’s work would serve

as a model for younger Seneca artists, especially for Ernest Smith’s work with Arthur

Parker in the New Deal-era Seneca Arts Project.70 It is possible that Spybuck took

inspiration from older Native American artists who had not trained academically but

nonetheless worked professionally. Growing up in Indian Territory at the end of the

nineteenth century Spybuck perhaps knew about the famous Southern Plains prisoner-

artists of Fort Marion, many of whom returned to the territory in the 1880s. Before

meeting Harrington there is a chance Spybuck knew that anthropologists such as James

Mooney commissioned work from Native artists, including Silver Horn and Carl Sweezy,

in territorial Oklahoma. And self-taught Native artists followed Spybuck’s lead, even as

Kiowa artists worked to establish a school of painting sympathetic with, and roughly

concurrent to, the flat style of New Mexico painters in the 1920s.71

Pablita Velarde, 1939–1945

In 1920, the year before Spybuck’s drawings appeared in publication, a young girl named

Tse Tsan enrolled in St. Catherine’s Indian School in Santa Fe. Born at the Santa Clara 70 Arthur C. Parker, “Museum Motives Behind the New York Arts Project,” Indians at Work 2 (June 15, 1935): 10–12. 71 Like Cornplanter, Spybuck inspired other men from his Indigenous nation. The Shawnee painter Jake Parks (1890–1949) followed Spybuck most closely. Parks painted a Lenape Big House Ceremony with remarkable similarity to Spybuck’s style. Parks worked with ethnographer Frank Speck to produced a number of narrative paintings in a naturalistic style that chronicle Lenape history and culture. Thank you to Jim Rementer, Director of the Lenape Language Project, for bringing Jake Parks’s work to my attention.

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Pueblo in northern New Mexico, she received the Spanish name Pablita Velarde at

school.72 In 1929 she went on to the federal Santa Fe Indian School.73 Velarde was

among the first class of students when, in 1932, the school instituted a fine arts program:

the Studio School. After graduating in 1936, Pablita Velarde taught painting at the Santa

Clara Day School. Starting in 1939 she worked for New Deal agencies at Bandelier

National Monument, not far from Santa Clara Pueblo. At Bandelier Velarde chronicled

Pueblo life in over eighty casein paintings on masonite.74 Subjects include animals,

plants, and activities such as art making, food preparation, and religious worship. For

example, in a painting of the Harvest Dance Velarde sets dancers moving across a

groundless page (fig. 2.21). This nearly exclusive focus on figuration—where figures

occupy no particular place—typifies Pueblo painting of the 1920s and ‘30s. Only a few

exceptional works from this era place bodies in a surrounding environment.75 In the

72 Marcella J. Ruch, Pablita Velarde: Painting Her People (Santa Fe: New Mexico Magazine, 2001), 12. 73 For over a decade the federally administered school encouraged students to depict ceremonial dance scenes in easel paintings. Starting in 1918 students including Fred Kabotie practiced easel painting in Elizabeth DeHuff’s parlor. Dehuff’s husband worked as school superintendant. This encouragement marked a relative, though not total, departure from the federal curriculum focused on vocational training. For more on arts-based curriculum in federal boarding schools at the beginning of the twentieth century, see Elizabeth Hutchinson, “The White Man’s Indian Art: Teaching Aesthetics at the Indian Schools,” in The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 51–90. 74 Pablita Velarde, interview with Janice Wobbenhorst, August 8, 1977, number 110, transcript, Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico, 3. 75 J. J. Brody, Indian Painters and White Patrons (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971), 141. Brody notes that some early works by Fred Kabotie and, later, Gerald Nailor provide the exception to the tendency to omit pictorial ground. For other examples of Studio School paintings that depict architecture and employ perspective, see plates 5, 11, 31, 38, 47, 49, and 60 in Bruce Bernstein and Jackson Rushing, Modern by

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Bandelier pictures, though, Velarde systematically departs from the convention of

groundlessness.

In another picture of the Harvest Dance painted for Bandelier she added a setting

and extended the number of dancers, curving their line out of frame (fig. 2.22). Above the

dance ground, spectators stand on roofs or find shade under porticos and an arbor. The

artist aligns the buildings in a horizontal register in the top half of the page, leaving the

ground of the plaza unmarked. It is as if Velarde has painted two separate scenes, one on

above the next. A dance leader’s staff pierces the roofline, though, effectively tying the

zones together and suggesting pictorial depth. This union of dance and house is

instructive. It formally demonstrates an idea that emerges from Velarde’s Bandelier

works: a diversity of forms and media—including architecture, performance, and easel

painting—constitute the field of Pueblo art. While art historians have recognized how

institutional and commercial agendas shaped the category of Native art, Native artists

also had ideas about what the field should look like.

In Velarde’s lifetime leading up to the Bandelier commission, the local and

national visibility of Pueblo easel painting increased dramatically. A number of Pueblo

self-taught artists found growing institutional support for their watercolor drawings in the

years immediately before Velarde enrolled in St. Catherine’s. Paintings by Pueblo artists

appeared first in an institutional venue when, in 1919, the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa

Fe devoted an exhibition to the material. The next year the annual exhibit of the Society

of Independent Artists in New York City included Pueblo painting alongside works by Tradition: American Indian Painting in the Studio Style (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995).

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non-Native American artists. In the 1920s, a group of collectors and advocates acquired

Pueblo paintings through the Indian Arts Fund in New Mexico.76 And in 1931, the year

before the inaugural class of the Studio School in Santa Fe, Pueblo painting appeared at

art museums across the country in the touring Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts. At the

Studio School, Dorothy Dunn taught Velarde and other now well-known artists such as

Oscar Howe, Allan Houser, Gerald Nailor, and Joe Hilario Herrera. Building on a decade

of local activity around Pueblo easel painting, Dunn and her students helped to establish a

genre of Native art recognizable by a flat use of color, lack of ground and perspective,

and themes of ceremonial dancing. Reflecting on her pedagogy, Dunn wrote that she

strenuously worked to dislodge her students’ perceptions about the superiority of

naturalistic and representational pictures to Native American art.77 Dunn, then, defined

“Indian art” in opposition to art of the European academic tradition. Velarde and other

students rarely drew figural models from life. Instead, Dunn sought to link easel painting

with the long history of Native American art. To that end the teacher instructed students

look to other examples of Native American art such as the works of pottery in the

collection of the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe. With this training behind her,

Velarde later turned to the built environment as source material for her paintings.

At the Santa Fe School Velarde became acquainted with the San Ildefonso Pueblo

painter Tonita Peña, also known as Quah Ah (1893–1949). In 1932 and 1934, Peña 76 Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting, 7. 77 Dorothy Dunn, “Indian Children Carry Forward Oral Traditions,” School Arts 34 (March 1935), 428. When Dunn’s students began they often “engage[d] in a long performance of experimenting with tricks of naturalism such as light and shade, perspective, attempts at anatomical drawings, etc., before they realize[d] that those things have nothing to do with the fundamental qualities of Indian art.”

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joined a group of artists to visit the Santa Fe Indian School and paint murals.78 In early

childhood, Peña had studied at the federal Indian school at San Ildefonso where teacher

Esther Hoyt encouraged students to depict ceremonial dances in watercolor drawings.79

In 1905 Peña moved to Cochiti Pueblo to live with relatives, the famous potters Martina

Vigil and Florentino Montoya, where she continued to live through her life. Many writers

have linked the work of Peña and Velarde.80 Peña established a place for women painters

among a pioneering generation of self-taught Pueblo artists. Velarde, too, contributed

substantially to Native American art history of the twentieth century as one of the first

women to train academically. She also responded to the rapidly evolving history of

Native art by suggesting a view of what constitutes Pueblo art—one of its chapters.

In much of her work Velarde reflects on changes in Pueblo art and architecture.

As she saw an aesthetic category of Native Art take shape through the early years of her

life, Velarde used her position as an easel painter to reflect on the visibility of Pueblo art.

Across multiple scenes, Velarde represents women engaged in various tasks including the

making and selling of artwork. In a vertically oriented composition showing women’s

activities in vignettes—baking, carrying water—Velarde included in the bottom a scene

78 Sally Hyer, “Pablita Velarde: The Pueblo Artist as Cultural Broker,” in Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker, ed. Margaret Azasz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 278. 79 Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting, 3. Many of the San Ildefonso students—including Alfredo Montoya, Awa Tsireh, and Oqwa Pi—would continue in adulthood to practice watercolor drawing and other types of graphic art. 80 Dorothy Dunn, “Pablita Velarde: Painter of Pueblo Life,” El Palacio 59, no. 11 (November 1952): 335–341; Hyer, 279–280; Tryntje Van Ness Seymour, When the Rainbow Touches Down: The Artists and Stories behind the Apache, Navajo, Rio Grande Pueblo, and Hopi Paintings in the Van Ness Collection (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1988), 164.

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of a woman selling pottery and a scene of two women applying a fresh layer of plaster to

an exterior house wall (fig. 2.23). In other works from the era Velarde places art and

architecture in close proximity. This is evident with her mural for Maisel’s Trading Post

in Albuquerque (fig. 2.24). In 1939, the non-Native painter Olive Rush worked with

Velarde and other indigenous painters including Harrison Begay and Pop Chalee to paint

a series of murals on Maisel’s new building in downtown Albuquerque. The building was

designed by architect John Gaw Meem, a proponent of the Pueblo Revival style.81 The

building features a large T-shaped entry with extended plate glass windows, a design that

allows the store to display artwork in the round. On the frieze of this entry the Native

artists painted discrete scenes, with Rush painting three of the vignettes in a manner

imitative of the Studio style.

Velarde’s painting appears on the northeast side of the entry interior. In this work,

she details the riotous mix of patterned fabric on the women’s clothes. Behind the figures

Velarde depicted a row of vigas protruding from a Pueblo style building, which works to

identify the setting as a Pueblo village. An array of pottery fills the foreground. This is

Santa Clara blackware, a style manufactured continuously for centuries. In Velarde’s

Albuquerque mural, the Pueblo building frames the figures neatly, positioning the Santa

Clara artists between architecture and pottery. Significantly, Velarde maintains an overall

flatness that is characteristic of Studio-style painting while creating a sense of shallow

pictorial depth through the layering of pottery, figures, and building. She renders each of

these elements without recourse to shading, as if they were pinned on the wall. When

81 Seymour, Rainbow Touches Down, 164.

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viewed in situ, Velarde’s Pueblo structure contrasts with the architecture that viewers

occupy: the commercial space of an urban trading post. Still, the store windows allow

viewers to draw links between murals and merchandise. The trading post building

recedes in this perspective as Velarde’s mural frames Maisel’s merchandise. The

multifaceted engagement with pottery differs from previous painterly approaches to the

subject. Many of the self-taught easel painters from the 1920s, including Awa Tsireh,

transferred elements from pottery painting to the page. The general effect of this

transference was to demonstrate continuity from the ancient practice of ceramic painting

to the new medium of easel painting. Velarde introduces another art form into this inter-

media matrix: architecture.

Perhaps her work at Maisel’s led to Velarde’s next project, the six-year-long

Bandelier commission. With the Bandelier works Velarde moved from painting for the

market to painting for the federal government. Velarde’s pictures interpret Pueblo culture

for visitors to Bandelier National Monument, which marks a significant archaeological

site on the Pajarito Plateau.82 In the 1930s, crews with the New Deal-era Civilian

82 In 1916 President Wilson designated the site as a National Monument. Bandelier initially entered federal lands under the jurisdiction of the Santa Fe National Forest, though in 1932 President Hoover transferred the Monument to the Parks Service and the Department of the Interior. From 1906 to 1916, the executive branch of the federal government used the Antiquities Act to designate twelve southwestern archeological complexes as National Monuments. As Don Fowler enumerates, these twelve are, “Bandelier, Chaco Canyon, El Morro (Inscription Rock), Gila Cliff Dwellers, and Gran Quivira in New Mexico; Aztec Ruin was added in 1923 when the American Museum of Natural History turned it over to the National Park Service. In Arizona there was Casa Grande in 1892, as well as Montezuma’s Castle, Navajo (Betatakin, Kiet Siel, and Inscription House), Petrified Forest, and Tonto; Canyon de Chelly was added in 1931. In Colorado, there was Mesa Verde National Park and part of Hovenweep, added in 1923; in Utah there was Natural Bridges, and the rest of Hovenweep.” Don Fowler, A Laboratory

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Conservation Corps (CCC) constructed a number of buildings there in the Pueblo Revival

style, including a museum. Today select paintings from Velarde’s commission remain on

view in the visitors’ center at Bandelier (fig. 2.25). In the current installation the

paintings hang above Puebloan artworks in diverse media such as ceramics and articles of

clothing. When viewed at Bandelier National Monument, Velarde’s paintings appear to

be linked with other forms of Puebloan art. With a strong architectural theme, the works

also resonate with the surrounding built environment.

While in residence at Bandelier, Velarde worked near two major architectural

environments—the CCC complex of Pueblo Revival buildings as well as significant

Ancestral Puebloan settlements. One of the most famous Bandelier sites, the excavated

circular Tyuonyi ruins in Frijoles Canyon dates to the late fourteenth century (fig. 2.26).83

In 1880 the explorer and archeologist Adolf Bandelier visited Frijoles Canyon, motivated

for Anthropology: Science and Romanticism in the American Southwest, 1846–1930 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 306. 83 Linda S. Cordell, “Prehistory: Eastern Anasazi,” in Handbook of North American Indians v. 9 Southwest, ed. Alfonso Ortiz (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1979), 145. See also Robert P. Powers, ed., The Peopling of Bandelier: New Insights from the Archeology of the Pajarito Plateau (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2005); David E. Stuart, Pueblo Peoples on the Pajarito Plateau: Archeology and Efficiency (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010). Ancestral Puebloan peoples occupied the Bandelier area and built a number of settlements there between periods that archeologists call Pueblo II and Pueblo IV. From the twelfth century to the arrival of the Spanish in 1540, large settlements such as Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde in the Four Corners region Verde gradually lost their populations. Migrants settled Acoma, Hopi, and Zuni in the south and west and multiple villages closer to the Rio Grande in the east. Many who moved east occupied an area between the Jemez Mountains and Rio Grande called the Pajarito Plateau, the present location of Bandelier National Monument. Today many Puebloan peoples of the Rio Grande trace their lineages to the Pajarito Plateau.

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in part by stories of the place told by his collaborators from Cochiti Pueblo.84 In a 2005

interview Velarde expressed her reverence for Frijoles Canyon, claiming it “is part of our

beginning,” the home of her ancestors.85 Following Bandelier, a number of white

anthropologists and federal agents took interest in the architectural histories of Frijoles

Canyon. In 1908 and 1909 Edgar Lee Hewett operated a field school at Tyuonyi.86 In

1938 Hewett published his findings in Pajarito Plateau and Its Ancient People.87 Starting

in 1933 the CCC would have another major impact on the architecture of Frijoles

Canyon. From 1933 to 1941 CCC workers constructed a major settlement in the Canyon

for tourists and park employees (fig. 2.27). The development features thirty-one buildings

arranged around three sides of a wooded plaza, near the archeological site Tyuonyi.

Buildings use local stone and hewn vigas, hallmarks of the Pueblo Revival style.88 The

style developed in the early twentieth century, an era of regionalist architectural

movements (for more on the style, see chapter three of this dissertation). Structures

include a lodge with a dining room and cabins, service buildings, the museum and

attached administrative office, and employee residences.

The CCC complex stands as a twentieth-century reflection of the ancient city in

Frijoles Canyon. The architectural activity at Bandelier—an archeological excavation and

84 Fowler, Laboratory for Anthropology, 174. 85 Cecilia Shields, “A New Deal for Tse Tsan: Pablita Velarde at Bandelier,” The Tuff Times: Bandelier National Monument newsletter (Spring/Early Summer 2007): 1. 86 Fowler, Laboratory for Anthropology, 267 and 269. 87 Edgar L Hewett, Pajarito Plateau and Its Ancient People (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1938). 88 Laura Soullière Harrison, Randall Copeland, and Roger Buck, Bandelier National Monument New Mexico Historic Structure Report CCC Buildings (Denver: United States Department of the Interior National Park Service Denver Service Center, 1988), 20–21.

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subsequent construction of Pueblo Revival buildings—contributed to the general

transference of Pueblo architecture from the realm of everyday lived experience in the

built environment to the arenas of iconicity, reconstruction, and representation in visual

culture.89 Working between the excavation and the new revivalist building complex,

Velarde contributed to the popular imaging and imagining of Pueblo architecture. By

depicting Pueblo architecture Velarde reflected not only Puebloan attachments to the

land, but also a concurrent local interest in the topic among non-Native scholars and

tourists. For viewers at Bandelier National Monument, then, Velarde’s paintings of

Pueblo architecture appeared inside a Pueblo Revival building and nearby Ancestral

Puebloan settlements. This series of refracted views of Pueblo architecture would have

created a multifaceted reflection on building, culture, and form.

Late in 1939 Park Service employee Dale King recruited Velarde to paint pictures

for display at the new park museum. Velarde described first meeting King. She recalled a

uniformed man visiting Santa Clara and asking for her. “I was afraid because I thought I

was going to be arrested because I had left the Pueblo.” Velarde had recently returned to

Santa Clara from a trip of three months, wherein she provided childcare for the naturalist

and Boy Scout founder Ernest Thompson Seton during his lecture tour of the East Coast.

“But he just smiled and asked me if I was a painter,” Velarde said of King, “So he took

me to Bandelier and I did paintings for the museum.”90 Across multiple formats King

sought to improve public-oriented interpretation of Southwestern national parks and

89 See, for instance, Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). 90 Shields, “New Deal for Tse Tsan,” 1.

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monuments. In the late 1930s King helped to organize the Southwestern Monuments

Association to support the Park Service. The Association published books, releasing J.

W. Hendron’s Prehistory of El Rito de Los Frijoles, Bandelier National Monument in

1940 as the first title in its technical series.91 King’s work to improve park interpretation

at Southwestern Park Service sites likely contributed to his plan to commission a Pueblo

painter to create work for the new museum at Bandelier. In another interview Velarde

affirmed that painting at Bandelier required meticulous research. “I’d have to go home at

night and research after the kids were in bed so I could do the work like he [Dale King]

wanted. He was a man who wanted things just so. He planned the exhibits.”92 In the

course of the project Velarde and King evidently established a good working relationship.

After leaving the Park Service King opened a publishing business, which produced the

first edition of Pablita Velarde’s book Old Father Story Teller in 1960.93

A number of New Deal agencies underwrote Velarde’s work at Bandelier. In a

1977 interview Velarde recalled that the CCC and The Works Project Administration

(WPA) supported her painting project, while on one occasion “the Soil Conservation

people” cut the artist’s check.94 Velarde clarifies, “I was paid $5.00 a day—that was

equal to Lieutenants pay. I didn’t get paid for each painting, so I took my time and did

91 J. W. Hendron, Prehistory of El Rito de Los Frijoles, Bandelier National Monument (Coolidge, AZ: Southwestern Monuments Association, 1940). 92 Velarde interview with Wobbenhorst, 2. 93 Pablita Velarde, Old Father Story Teller (Globe, AZ: D. S. King, 1960). 94 Velarde interview with Wobbenhorst. In reference to the “soil conversation people,” in 1935 Congress passed legislation in response to the dust bowl of the previous three years. The bill supported crop reduction programs and initiatives that countered unemployment.

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good work, to make the money last until they ran out, then I’d have to quit.”95 For

extended periods between 1939 and 1945, Velarde took up residence at Bandelier while

she worked. When she had reached her allotted earnings for the period Velarde would

return to Santa Clara. The CCC initially funded Velarde’s work. Congress had passed the

Emergency Conservation Work Act in 1933, legislation that established the CCC. The

CCC organized work relief, primarily for young men, and sponsored projects that

generally improved management of natural resources, often in state and national parks.96

As the variety of Velarde’s funding sources suggests, New Deal agencies other

than the CCC sponsored work at Bandelier. In 1935 the Federal Art Project, a branch of

the WPA, employed the German-born artist Helmut Naumer to draw fourteen pastels of

Bandelier National Monument. And while the CCC employed her, Velarde likely worked

for a special division. In 1933 the newly appointed Director of the Bureau of Indian

Affairs John Collier organized the Civilian Conservation Corps-Indian Division (CCC-

ID) for Native workers. During the Great Depression, the Bureau of Indian Affairs

published the newssheet Indians at Work to chronicle efforts of New Deal work programs

for Native peoples. From 1933, the initial issue lists a range of projects across the country

such as creating truck trails, building telephone lines, controlling erosion, digging wells,

and constructing fire lookout towers. Like the main body of the CCC, the Indian Division

provided work to the unemployed and aimed to improve management of natural

95 Velarde notes that “The CCC boys worked for 50 cents a day.” Velarde interview with Wobbenhorst, 2. 96 For an overview and analysis of the New Deal, see Alan Lawson, A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

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resources. The CCC-ID also employed artists. In work camps family members studied

customary art practices such as hide tanning. Some employees of the CCC-ID worked on

archeological restorations at Chaco Canyon and Pueblo Bonito. And in Alaska the CCC-

ID sponsored totem pole restorations.97

Additionally, the Indian Division of the CCC encouraged families to travel

together to worksites. Velarde gave birth to her two children Helen and Herbert Hardin in

1943 and 1944, respectively. After this Velarde asked the park rangers to provide

childcare while she painted. 98 In A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal

Policy, 1933–1943, Jennifer McLerran describes how the CCC-ID was “less uniformly

and rigidly structured,” less regimental, than the CCC. McLerran argues that the Indian

Division “was seen as potentially instrumental in achieving Indian self-rule.” 99 Because

of this, the CCC-ID echoed the agenda of the Indian Reorganization Act (1934), one of

Collier’s key initiatives that sought to stop and reverse federal policies of land seizure

and cultural erasure. The CCC-ID was not the only New Deal agency to create a separate

branch for non-white workers; the Federal Theater Project developed a “negro unit,” for

example. Cultural historian Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff argues that civil rights progress of

the Roosevelt era can be seen in the ways “African American played an integral role in

97 Jennifer McLerran, A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 203–223; Aldona Jonaitis and Aaron Glass, The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 90–93; Emily Moore, ‘“For Future Generations’: Transculturation and the Totem Parks of the New Deal, 1938–1942,” (PhD dissertation, University of California-Berkeley History of Art, 2012). 98 “A nice lady from Cochiti,” Velarde said, “watched my kids during the day and that helped me out a lot.” Shields, “New Deal for Tse Tsan,” 1. 99 McLerran, New Deal for Native Art, 200.

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shaping the course of government-sponsored cultural programs and in negotiating their

own representation.”100 Instead of assuming that segregated New Deal programs simply

reflect segregationist policy, McLerran and Sklaroff suggest these initiatives helped to

amplify the voices of Native American and African American artists. This calls up the

discussion of cultural intimacy from the dissertation introduction, wherein a variety of

agents (including Native artists) negotiate existing structures to shape Native American

cultural identity in twentieth-century mass society.

With the Bandelier suite, Velarde moved stylistically away from the familiar

conventions of the Santa Fe “studio style” paintings to develop a more singular and

personal approach. In particular, Velarde’s Bandelier paintings often employ architecture

to establish a Pueblo sense of place. Most of Velarde’s paintings for Bandelier bring

figures away from the flat and isolated views typical of earlier Pueblo studio painting.

The painting Guard Turning Tourists Away, for example, details the setting of an

encounter (fig. 2.28). Outside a Pueblo village, a Native man hails a carload of tourists.

As with Velarde’s second view of the Harvest Dance, figures line the top of the buildings

and observe a dance in the plaza below. Yet here they turn their backs to viewers. With

this picture Velarde shows us everything except the dance, intervening adroitly in a

highly conventionalized genre of painting that places dancing figures on a horizon-less

ground. Walling off visitors from the dance, Velarde’s treatment of architecture

reinforces the central subject: the maintenance of cultural property.

100 Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 4.

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In one of the most spatially dynamic pictures from the series, Velarde depicts

clusters of drummers, dancers, and worshippers crowding an arbor in a plaza (fig. 2.29).

The frame of the arbor stands in the center of the composition and juts out toward the

space of the viewers. A twisting buffalo dancer blocks the bottom half of the front left

column, while the profile of an antelope dancer covers a portion of the front column at

right. At back of the arbor figures kneel at an altar with a crucifix. A Pueblo building and

a church flank each side of the arbor, reflecting the two major religious traditions of

northern New Mexico. The row of Pueblo dancers at bottom evokes the Pueblo

watercolor drawings popular in northern New Mexico during Velarde’s youth, yet

Velarde has placed the dancers in their architectural and religious contexts. Velarde thus

responds to the previous generations of Pueblo painters by establishing a

contemporaneous setting for timeless dance scenes and, in course, demonstrating her

mastery of pictorial space.

To earn additional money during the period she worked at Bandelier, Velarde

occasionally sold drawings and paintings at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe.101

The building had been the home of political rulers in Santa Fe including Spanish

governors from the early-seventeenth to the early-nineteenth centuries, Puebloan peoples

who occupied the building during a period of revolt from 1680 to 1692, Mexican leaders

in the first part of the nineteenth century, and American territorial governors from 1846

to the end of the nineteenth century. Following restoration of the Palace in 1913, the

101 Velarde explains that she married Herbert Hardin in February 1941, and that months after their marriage the US Army drafted her husband. Velarde learned to be independent when Herbert left for service. Ruch, Painting Her People, 52, 54.

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School for American Archaeology and the Museum of New Mexico (both directed by

Edgar Lee Hewett) began to operate in the building.102 Around this time Native artists

began selling works along the portico of the Palace of the Governors, as they continue to

do today. In at least one picture from the time, she represented this setting (fig. 2.30). The

painting represents the portico of the building, which faces the plaza to the south. A row

of Puebloan vigas runs directly above the swelling Spanish-style capitals to columns.

Native artists sit in front of the building and display their wares. Figures and buildings

appear to be stratified, as with the mural at Maisel’s. The displays of artwork in the

Palace of the Governors picture, however, occupy a narrow width between the seated

figures and the columns. The blackware pottery appears more volumetric than the human

figures or the building. Velarde may have sold this painting or one like it at the Palace of

the Governors. The artists in the painting offer pottery, drums, and works of silver, art

forms associated with tradition and the past. The lack of an easel painter raises

questions—does Velarde not see herself and her work as belonging to this context? What

does the painting suggest about Velarde’s relationship to other Pueblo artists? These

questions were pressing at the time, and Velarde’s work suggests that she saw various art

forms—building, painting, and pottery making—as part of a continuum.

Embracing architectural subject matter, Velarde considers how best to represent

the intercultural spaces and art movements that she navigated in New Mexico. Many

visitors to Bandelier surely have viewed Velarde’s paintings as valuable for the

102 “Palace of the Governors,” National Historic Landmark Nomination. https://npgallery.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NHLS/Text/66000489.pdf Accessed May 24, 2017.

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information they provide about Pueblo culture. But compounded with the ethnographic or

documentary value of the work is Velarde’s own view of Puebloan architecture as one

part of the field of Puebloan art. Working as a trained, professional easel painter, Velarde

developed a critical iconography of architecture. Yet for a century before Velarde painted

Pueblo buildings for the museum at Bandelier National Monument, Native artists had

rendered architectural space on the flat page. Looking at architectural themes across a

long period of time helps to cut across entrenched divisions and categories—self-taught

v. trained; ethnography v. art—that so often present stumbling blocks to the writing of

Native American art history. Taking the long view here also helps to show that Spybuck

and Velarde weren’t doing anything new by picturing buildings in the first half of the

twentieth century. Native artists have long transformed buildings into images. What

distinguishes Velarde and Spybuck is that they drew architectural imagery into

contemporaneous ideas about Native American art.

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Chapter Three

Built Environment: Framing Native Art at Hopi House

A photograph from 1940 focuses on Porter Timeche and Daggett Harvey (fig. 3.1). At

top left the craggy horizon gives way to clear skies and, at top right, a massive stone

structure fills the frame. This is Hopi House, a gift shop and gallery at the South Rim of

the Grand Canyon that sells Native American art. The men stand counterpoised, nearly

mirroring the each other’s pose. Each man has arrived at the scene through family

connections with the site. Harvey’s family owned Hopi House and a suite of businesses

that catered to tourists in the Southwest. Timeche’s family, from the village of

Shungopavi on the Second Hopi Mesa, worked at Hopi House and other Harvey shops at

the Grand Canyon. In 1924, Timeche (1903–1985) traveled from Shungopavi to Hopi

House to demonstrate weaving. Finding the job required sustained interaction with

tourists and afforded little time to complete a blanket or rug, he quickly switched

positions to work as a salesman at Hopi House and then advanced to become inventory

manager and in-house expert in Native American art.1 For decades in the mid-twentieth

1 In a 1947 bill of sale of rare baskets to Paul Seashore, Frank Spencer wrote about a Hopi basket, inventory number 3223, “Timeche advises that he hasn’t seen one of these for many years.” Billie Jane Baguley Library and Archives, Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ (hereafter cited as Heard), Fred Harvey Company Collection RC 39 (1B): 8. Timeche worked for Harvey at the canyon until 1970, when he returned to the Second Mesa and worked with Fred Kabotie at the Hopi Cultural Center. Kabotie wrote of Timeche’s work with visitors there, “Porter, with fifty years of experience—much of it with Fred Harvey at the Grand Canyon—may know more about Indian crafts than anyone in the business.” Fred Kabotie, Fred Kabotie, Hopi Indian Artist: An Autobiography Told with Bill Belknap (Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona, 1977), 113. For more on Timeche’s start at Hopi House, see Kathleen Howard and Diana Pardue, Inventing the Southwest:

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century Timeche worked at Hopi House and lived there with his family in an upper-story

apartment.2

Hopi House opened in 1905 at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, built to

resemble structures from the Hopi Third Mesa village of Oraibi (fig. 3.2). Located near

the rail depot (1901) and Hotel El Tovar (1904), Hopi House counts as one of the oldest

structures in the burgeoning tourist district called Grand Canyon Village.3 Architect Mary

Colter designed Hopi House as a Grand Canyon outpost for the Indian Department of the

Fred Harvey Co. (often simply called Harvey), the business once owned by Daggett

Harvey’s family. Along with its corporate partner the Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe

Railway (ATSF), Harvey helped to create the southwestern tourist industry in the early-

twentieth century by operating a series of hotels and restaurants along the ATSF route.4

In 1901, Harvey inaugurated its Indian Department to oversee the marketing of

southwestern cultures through gift shops. Through the first half of the twentieth century,

The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art (Flagstaff: Northland Press, 1996), 117. 2 Interview with Edith Longhoma, September 12, 1998, Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection Archive, Grand Canyon Village, AZ (hereafter cited as GRCA) catalog number 70891. Beginning in 1948 Joe and Alberta Ernst managed the site and lived on the third floor. Alberta Ernst said the Timeche’s “were just like one of the family, you know.” Interview of Joe and Alberta Ernst by Kathleen Howard, August 1, 1989. Heard RC 39 (5): 2/R, p. 42. 3 National Register of Historic Places. “Grand Canyon Village Historic District,” section 8, p, 3. GRCA 96618, folder 7. 4 From the late-nineteenth century to the 1950s, Harvey built hotels along the route of the Santa Fe Railway, sold concessions on the trains, and operated automobile tours to more remote sections of northern Arizona and New Mexico. The business of the two companies stretched from Chicago to California, though much activity focused on the Southwest. For a general overview, see Stephen Fried, Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West—One Meal at a Time (New York: Bantam, 2010).

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displays of art and demonstrations of artistic labor at Hopi House greatly influenced

American perceptions of Indigenous North American material culture. When it opened in

1905 Hopi House presented Native American art in a commercial setting decades before

many art museums in the United States began to collect the material. And through the

first half of the twentieth century, Native American artists played an active role in this

presentation.

Scholars in the 1990s persuasively implicated southwestern tourist sites, including

Hopi House, in a colonial politics of representation. This critique charges that Hopi

House—and the Fred Harvey Company, more generally—invented a salable version of

Native life that scarcely resembled contemporaneous indigenous experience. Harvey

isolated Hopi, Diné (Navajo), Havauspai artists, and artists from other southwestern

Native groups in tourist destinations that staged fanciful tableaux and blurred distinctions

between groups.5 In considering Native artists’ demonstration at Hopi House, for

instance, cultural historian Leah Dilworth writes, “This quaint spectacle of people

making what they needed reinforced the difference between now and then, us and them,

even as it inspired a longing for the immediacy and authenticity Indian labor

represented.”6 Dilworth and other critics thus contend Hopi House appealed to an

5 Throughout this chapter I interchange the terms Diné and Navajo. Diné is the term that the group uses to describe itself. 6 Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 148. For a generally critical description of Harvey’s various strategies of representation, see Marta Weigle and Barbara Babcock, eds., The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1996). For an early critical account of Nampeyo’s work at Hopi House, see Barbara Kramer, “Nampeyo, Hopi House, and the Chicago Land Show,” American Indian Art Magazine 14, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 46–53. See also,

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antimodern longing, a reaction to urban life that stirred in non-Native tourists. Escaping

the alienation of industrial modernity, this logic goes, Americans traveling with the Santa

Fe Rail had the chance to identify with the Indigenous other, people misrepresented as

living in a blissful and unmediated relationship with nature, community, and labor.

According to these critics Hopi House—and the tourism industry, more broadly—

flattened Indigenous cultures to contrive a picture of Native life. What this criticism

misses, I worry, is recognition of how Native artists navigated the intercultural space of

Hopi House, how artists created a sense of cultural intimacy at the site.

My analysis of the store as a site of contact and exchange takes a fresh position on

Hopi House by seeking rapprochement between its invented, romantic portrayal of Native

life and the active role of Native artists. The story of Hopi House is two stories. The first

and more familiar story focuses on a nexus of topics in the history of early twentieth-

century America: the Fred Harvey Company, sophisticated mass marketing, desire to flee

industrial cities, commodification of cultures, reach of the railroad, and the development

of a “tourist-industrial complex.” The second story concerns indigenous experience at

Hopi House. It is a story of living and working away from home, in a place made to look

Victoria Dye, All Aboard for Santa Fe: Railway Promotion of the Southwest, 1890s to 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). Much of this writing builds on Dean MacCannell’s analysis of tourism in The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 [orig. Schocken Books, 1976]). The figure of the tourist factors prominently in Hal Rothman’s edited volume The Culture of Tourism, the Tourism of Culture: Selling the Past to the Present in the American Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), as well as Rothman’s book, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).

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like home. It is a story where Native artists self-consciously perform a version of their

culture. Rather than pit the two narratives against each other, I seek to weave them. The

resulting description treats Hopi House not solely as a site of tourism and commerce, but

also as a site of interaction. This narrative treats the cultural history of Hopi House in

relational, rather than oppositional, terms. Adopting an intercultural method, I ask about

the productive outcomes of Hopi House for Native art. How did the site help promote

particular characteristics and lineages of twentieth-century Southwestern indigenous art?

Designing the Destination: Mary Colter

Hopi House was an early venture of the Harvey Indian Department. Established in 1901,

the department worked to immerse tourists in the landscapes and cultural history of the

American Southwest. Through guidebooks, advertisements, performances, tours, art

demonstrations, artworks, souvenirs, and architecture, the Indian Department packaged

and sold southwestern cultures for tourists to consume along the ATSF rail route. Buoyed

by a steady stream of travelers and a rising national market for Native American art,

especially basketry, the Indian Department grew its brand during the first decade of the

twentieth century.7 In 1902, the Harvey Indian Department established its new Indian

7 A “basketry craze” in the first decade of the twentieth century is often associated with the promotional efforts of Grace Nicholson, who lived in Pasadena, California. See Marvin Cohodas, Basket Weavers for the California Curio Trade: Elizabeth and Louis Hickox (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); Erika Marie Bsumek, “Exchanging Places: Virtual Tourism, Vicarious Travel, and the Consumption of Southwestern Indian Artifacts,” in Rothman, The Culture of Tourism, 118–139. See also, Jonathan Batkin, “Tourism is Overrated: Pueblo Pottery and the Early Curio Trade, 1880–1910,” in Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, ed. Ruth

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Building at its Albuquerque complex, which included the Hotel Alvarado and a train

depot. In 1904, the department received a grand prize for its display of “Aboriginal

Blanketry and Basketry” at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis.8 In 1905,

the department opened Hopi House. Departmental activity continued steadily through

ensuing decades, including the construction, staffing, and operation of two southwestern

Native villages at world’s fairs in San Diego and San Francisco in 1915.9 Principals in the

Indian Department included J. F. Huckel (1863–1936), who directed the department from

company headquarters in Kansas City, and Herman Schweizer (1871–1943), who worked

largely from Albuquerque to manage staffing, retail sales, and the Harvey reserve

collection of rare and historic works of Indigenous art.10 Architect Mary Colter (1869–

1958) also made substantial contributions to the department. Colter actively collected Phillips and Christopher Steiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 282–297. 8 This award is on file at the Museum of Northern Arizona, MNA.201.2.7a. Kathleen Howard writes that the winning display occupied room 111 of the Anthropology Building in Saint Louis and that Harvey “took advantage of this notoriety to herald the prized collections in advertising and other print media.” Kathleen Howard, “‘Remarkable Success’: Herman Schweizer and the Fred Harvey Indian Department,” in Weigle and Babcock, Great Southwest, 94. Nancy Parezo and Don Fowler mention the award in the context of the exposition commission on juries and awards, Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 362. 9 Jennifer McLerran, “The Other Spectacle: Navajo Weavers at Grand Canyon National Park,” in A Rendezvous of Grand Canyon Historians: Ideas, Arguments, and First-Person Accounts, ed. Richard Quartaroli (Flagstaff, AZ: Grand Canyon Historical Society, 2013), 79–86. 10 Huckel was married to Minnie Harvey, daughter of the company founder Fred Harvey. For more on the work of Huckel and Schweizer in the Indian Department, see Byron Harvey III, “The Fred Harvey Collection 1899–1963,” Plateau 36, no. 2 (1963): 33–53; Byron Harvey III, “The Fred Harvey Company Collects Indian Art, Selected Remarks,” in Weigle and Babcock, Great Southwest, 69–86; Kramer, “Chicago Land Show”; Howard, “Herman Schweizer”; Diana Pardue, “Native American Silversmiths in the Southwest,” American Indian Art Magazine 30, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 64.

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Native American art, especially southwestern jewelry, and was involved to some degree

in sourcing works for the Harvey museum collection.11 More significantly, she designed

and decorated Harvey hotels, restaurants, and attractions, many at the Grand Canyon.

Colter’s work on the Albuquerque Indian Room surely informed her approach to

Hopi House. In Albuquerque, the Indian Building extended from a long arcade that

connected the train station to the Alvarado Hotel.12 The Indian Building consisted of a

number of galleries featuring Native American works for sale as well as a demonstration

room where Native employees performed artistic labor for tourists. The Albuquerque

demonstration room staged an outdoor environment (fig. 3.3). The walls featured murals

of a desert landscape painted in a naturalistic style. Looms made of tree trunks—with

branches of pine at top—evoked the outdoor weaving equipment Diné women famously

fashion in bowers. In addition to Diné looms, the Demonstration Room included an

alcove that mimicked a Pueblo terrace, complete with vigas protruding from the roof, a 11 Colter donated her collection to Mesa Verde National Park, where items are now displayed at the Mesa Verde Visitor and Reseach Center. Colter also collected on behalf of the Harvey Company; in a letter from March 26, 1912, Huckel wrote to Schweizer about Colter’s involvement in acquiring a collection of baskets held privately, Heard RC 39 (1B): 2. Though discussions of the Indian Department tend to focus on Schweizer and Huckel, see Matilda McQuaid with Karen Bartlett, “Building an Image of the Southwest: Mary Colter, Fred Harvey Company Architect,” in Weigle and Babcock, Great Southwest, 24–35. As one of the first female professional architects in the United States, Colter has received monographic treatment. See Virginia Grattan, Mary Colter: Builder Upon the Red Earth (Grand Canyon, AZ: Grand Canyon Natural History Association, 1992 [orig. 1980]); Arnold Berke, Mary Colter, Architect of the Southwest (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002); Jeff Rennicke, “Mary Jane Colter,” National Parks 82, no. 2 (2008): 30–35; Claire Shepherd-Lanier, “Trading on Tradition: Mary Jane Colter and the Romantic Appeal of Harvey House Architecture,” Journal of the Southwest 38, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 163–195; Jennifer Lee, Mary Jane Colter: The Desert View, video, approx. 60 minutes, Catskill Film, 1996; Karen Bartlett, Mary Jane Colter: House Made of Dawn, video, approx. 90 minutes, Nemesis Productions, 1997. 12 Grattan, Marty Colter, 10–13.

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ceramic vessel repurposed in typical fashion as a chimney, and a ristra, or chain of dried

chilies (fig. 3.4). The room assembles a range of southwestern artistic forms. This pan-

Indian compilation calls up the encyclopedic impulses of world’s fairs displays, but

presents fluid designations between groups rather than teasing out cultural differences.

The Indian Building also featured a gallery of rare objects not for sale. This gallery was

known as the museum.13 Separate from the Indian Building was the storeroom and office

where Schweizer managed the flow of Indian Department material. This larger Alvarado

compound also included a Diné hogan and an adobe Pueblo-style building, where artists

lived and occasionally demonstrated (fig. 3.5).14 For instance, at the end of WWI the

Diné weaver Elle of Ganado occupied this Pueblo building with her silversmith husband

Tom and their grandson.15 Elle of Ganado, or Asdzaa Lichii (Red Woman) of the

Dibelizhini (Blacksheep) clan, worked at the Indian Building for thirty years. Like many

artists who worked long-term for Harvey Co., she periodically traveled to the Grand

Canyon to work at Hopi House. At the Grand Canyon Harvey also created a complex of

shops, museum, a Pueblo-style dwelling, and hogans (the latter no longer standing). For

the Hopi House commission, Colter was charged with bringing all the functions of the

13 For instance, see Writers’ Program of the WPA in the State of New Mexico, New Mexico; A Guide to the Colorful State (New York: Hastings House, 1940), 185. 14 Byron Harvey III writes that demonstrators were housed in Navajo hogans near the Albuquerque station as early as 1902. Byron Harvey III, “Company Collects,” 77. 15 Paul Willie, interview by Kathleen Howard, July 14, 1993, Teec Nos Pos, AZ. Heard RC 39 (5): 12. For considerations of Elle’s time at Albuquerque, see Kathleen L. Howard, “Weaving a Legend: Elle of Ganado Promotes the Indian Southwest,” New Mexico Historical Review 74, no. 2 (April 1999): 127–153; Laura Jane Moore, “Elle Meets the President: Weaving Navajo Culture and Commerce in the Southwest Tourist Industry,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22, no. 1 (2001): 21–44; McLerran, “Other Spectacle,” 84.

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Albuquerque compound under one roof. Not just housing for Native artists, the new

Pueblo-style building at the Grand Canyon would encompass the museum, merchandise

displays, and rooms for artistic demonstrations. In Albuquerque and at the Grand

Canyon, Colter furnished spaces for Harvey to sell Native American art and souvenirs,

and for Native artists to demonstrate their work. At both, the museum and marketplace

converged to create spaces that facilitated a new, primarily aesthetic presentation of

Native American art.

Colter based Hopi House on blocks of buildings in Oraibi, the Third Mesa Hopi

village. Not much is known about Colter’s process of designing Hopi House. There is a

chance she visited Oraibi to examine the architecture, though that may have been a tall

order given the volatile political situation there at the time.16 To research the architecture

of Oraibi, Colter almost certainly consulted Victor Mindeleff’s 1891 published account of

Hopi and Zuni architecture A Study of Pueblo Architecture in Tusayan and Cibola.

Mindeleff’s book includes detailed drawings of buildings and construction details in

Oraibi.17 She also likely studied photographs of the village. Colter then used flat

representations—photographs, written descriptions, and measured drawings—as models

when drafting blueprints for Hopi House. This process of modeling space entailed, first, 16In 1906, the village of Oraibi famously divided in two. Two factions fiercely debated how to relate to an increasing tide of outsiders, and one group withdrew from the village. Peter Whitely, Deliberate Acts: Changing Hopi Culture through the Oraibi Split (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988); Whitely, “The Orayvi Split: A Hopi Transformation,” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 87 (2008).17 Victor Mindeleff, A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola (1891; reprint, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989). Archival research and a literature review has not yet turned up any original plans for the building or indication of Colter traveling to Oraibi.

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the precise conversion of Hopi buildings to a series of pictorial and textual

representations and then the effective translation of those descriptions back to a built

form. Surely this process of compressing and reconstituting space distorted the material

dimensions and cultural associations of buildings in Oraibi. In addition to relying on

books and photographs, Colter drew information about Oraibi architecture from the

Mennonite missionary Henry R. Voth, who lived in the village since 1892. In August

1904, Huckel invited Voth to the Grand Canyon during the construction of Hopi House.18

Voth would continue to serve as a consultant on Hopi culture for Harvey’s Indian

Department, contributing his collection of Hopi material culture to the Hopi House

displays and creating Hopi altars at Harvey sites. The second floor features a room

accessible through a wooden eighteenth-century door. In this space Voth recreated altars

of two Hopi ceremonial societies—Hopi religion relies on esoteric knowledge and the

room has proved exceedingly controversial.19 Significantly, though, Indigenous labor

18 McQuaid with Bartlett, “Building an Image of the Southwest,” 26. McQuaid and Bartlett cite correspondence from Huckel to Voth on August 20, 1904 and a letter from Voth to Dorsey on February 3, 1905, both at the Field Museum. 19 George Wharton James describes these altars in detail, The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1910, 123–125). See also Byron Harvey III, “Company Collects,” 72. While living in Oraibi, Voth often forced his way into ceremonial meetings in Kivas. It seems he took studies of Hopi religion more seriously than his work proselytizing, for he recruited very few converts to the Mennonite faith. By 1913, Voth had created Hopi altars at two other Harvey sites, including the Indian Building at Albuquerque. The anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons reported that one of her contacts, Lucinda, cautioned her about what happened to the Hopi person who helped create the Albuquerque altars: “‘In two days he began to swell up. His tongue was swollen and hanging from his mouth.’” Elsie Clews Parsons, “Isleta, New Mexico,” Forty-seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930), 202. Joe Ernst mentioned that Huckel was “very proud of this Kiva,” though some guests were skeptical. Ernst described that during one visit Huckel was speaking to a guest, “in great detail all about this alter [sic], and so forth,

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contributed to the construction of Hopi House; Hopi workmen constructed the building,

overseen by a Hopi foreman named Cooyama.20 The crew mixed familiar materials of

stone and logs with newer things like blueprints, recycled telegraph poles, and glass

windows to build a house over a hundred miles from home. Hopi House is thus an

intercultural undertaking disguised as an actual Hopi House.

One of the most prolific American female architects of the early-twentieth

century, Colter played a key role in developing a number of regional architectural styles.

These styles respond to their immediate natural and cultural environments, as opposed to

the prevailing trends in European design. Colter worked in the Spanish Colonial Revival,

National Park Service Rustic, and Pueblo Revival styles.21 Pueblo Revival architecture

developed in the Southwest around the turn of the twentieth century and now constitutes

the municipally mandated style in northern New Mexico cities such as Santa Fe and

Taos. Hopi House counts among the earliest of Pueblo Revival structures, which are

characterized by Pueblo architectural elements—such as protruding log vigas, flat roofs, and this fellow looked at Mr. Huckle, and he said, ‘Well, who the hell ever seen a water sprinkler in a kiva.’” Ernst interview, Heard RC 39 (5): 2, p. 4. The Hopi House altars were de-sanctified around 2003. Interview at site with Hopi House manager Henry Karpinski, July 11, 2013. 20 Oswald White Bear Fredericks, sheet four of “Proposal for Conversion of Second Floor of Hopi House to Extension Museum,” GRCA 108308. 21 For a broad collection of writings on regionalism in architecture, see Vincent B. Canizaro, ed., Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007). Colter’s contributions at the Grand Canyon to the National Park Rustic architectural style include Lookout Studio (1914), which is perched on the rim at Grand Canyon Village, Hermit’s Rest (1914) near the trailhead of Hermit Trail, Phantom Ranch (1922) at the bottom of the Canyon, and Bright Angel Lodge (1935) in the heart of Grand Canyon Village. Colter also worked in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, including designs for La Fonda Hotel (1922) on the Santa Fe Plaza, El Navajo Hotel (1923) at the Gallup train station, and La Posada Hotel (1930) at the train station in Winslow, AZ.

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asymmetrical windows, and plaster walls—adapted to twentieth- and twenty-first-century

building practices.22 For instance, Hopi House features a number of ground-floor doors

though Hopi dwellings use ladders and roof openings to enter rooms on the ground floor.

Colter’s training likely contributed to her regionalist inclinations. In 1887, Colter

moved from Saint Paul, Minnesota, to San Francisco to attend the California School of

Design and apprentice for an architect; during this time architects in California began to

develop the Mission style, drawing elements from the colonial compounds that Spanish

Franciscan priests established a century earlier.23 In the early 1890s, Colter returned to

Saint Paul and lived there until 1902, when she moved to Albuquerque to decorate the

new Indian Room for Harvey (fig. 3.6). After completing the Albuquerque project Colter

tackled the Hopi House design. Her first commission for a full building, Hopi House

remains a signal contribution to Pueblo Revival architecture. In 1932, she designed

another major project in the Pueblo Revival style at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon:

Desert View Watchtower (fig. 3.7). The Watchtower is about twenty miles east of Grand

Canyon Village. Based on ruins of Ancestral Puebloan towers, the building juts above the

22 The name of the Pueblo Revival style is a misnomer, given Puebloan peoples’ active and ongoing architectural practice. Pueblo Imitation may be a more appropriate term. Architectural historian Marcus Whiffen notes that the Pueblo Revival style (writing in the 1960s, what he simply calls the “Pueblo Style”) likely began in California in the mid-1890s with a number of designs by the architect A. C. Schweinfurth. Whiffen, American Architecture Since 1780: A Guide to the Styles (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981 [orig. 1969]), 229–233. Studies of Pueblo Revival buildings include Lloyd C. and June-Marie Engelbrecht, Henry C. Trost: Architect of the Southwest (El Paso: El Paso Public Library Association, 1981); Carleen Lazzell, “From Red Brick to Pueblo Revival: Early Architecture at the University of New Mexico,” New Mexico Historical Review 64, no. 1 (1989): 1–23; Nicholas Markovich, et al., eds. Pueblo Style and Regional Architecture (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990); Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe. 23 Grattan, Mary Colter, 4–5.

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horizon. In designing Desert View, Colter conducted extensive research and visited many

archaeological sites. 24

Colter’s projects shape the ways countless people have perceived and encountered

Native American art. Many of the architect’s buildings feature Native American art as a

decorative element. In the 1930s, Colter began a partnership with Hopi artist Fred

Kabotie (1900–1986). For Desert View, Colter commissioned Kabotie to create a famous

series of paintings (Fig. 3.8).25 In 1948, Colter recruited Kabotie again to paint murals for

her remodeled design of Painted Desert Inn near Route 66 in Petrified Forest National

Park. And, in 1958, Kabotie painted the walls of a bar at Bright Angel Lodge, a 1935

Colter design in Grand Canyon Village. Murals by Indigenous artists play a significant

role in many of Colter’s projects, beginning with Hopi House. The walls of the original

stairwell contain a series of paintings that depict katsinam, or Hopi deities (fig. 3.9). No

known record documents the painting of these murals, but perhaps one of the Hopi

workman who helped construct the building in 1904 painted the katsinam at that time.26

24 Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, Manual for Drivers and Guides Descriptive of The Indian Watchtower at Desert View and Its Relation, Architecturally, to the Prehistoric Ruins of the Southwest (Grand Canyon Nation Park: Fred Harvey, 1933), Heard RC 39 (7): 2. 25 Jessica Welton, “The Watchtower Murals: 1930s Paintings by Fred Kabotie,” Plateau: The Land and People of the Colorado Plateau 2, no. 2 (2005–06): 42–51. 26 For a study of Hopi murals, see Watson Smith, Kiva Mural Decorations at Awatovi and Kawaika-a: With a Survey of Other Wall Paintings in the Pueblo Southwest (Cambridge: Peabody Museum Press, 2005 [orig. 1952]). A few years before Hopi House construction, Hopi artists began to paint katsinam figures for non-Hopi audiences. See Jesse Walter Fewkes “Hopi Katsinas Drawn by Native Artists,” in Twenty-First Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1899–1900 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 3–126. The original staircase was on the east side of the building, slightly south of the center. A second staircase, in the northwest corner of the building, was added in 1995 when the current owner reopened the second floor to visitors. During

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Colter incorporated Native works not only on walls but also on floors. Her 1939 design

for a restaurant at Los Angeles Union Station, for example, replicates the pattern from a

Diné textile in the tile floor (fig. 3.10). More than using Native imagery as adornment,

Colter designed places for the making and marketing of Native American art. Hopi House

and the Albuquerque Indian Room are the two best-known examples, though shops

specializing in Native art were key components of Desert View and the hotels she

designed.

Given that Americans’ views of Native material shifted from the arenas of artifact

and curiosity to the realm of fine art in the early twentieth century, Colter’s architectural

engagement with Native visual culture is significant. We might consider some of the

architect’s key designs, beginning with Hopi House, as spatial frames for an emerging

aesthetic category. If frames set paintings apart from the world of everyday lived

experience and delimit a space of aesthetic experience then Colter’s buildings performed

a similar function (albeit on a larger scale than a picture frame) in the first few decades of

the twentieth century. At Hopi House, this framing works on conceptual as well as

experiential levels. Colter designed Hopi House so that the terraced front of this wide and

massive structure quickly fills a visitor’s field of vision upon approach. To enter, visitors

first walk toward an east doorway nestled in a small courtyard between two protruding

single-story rooms and then step out of the bright Arizona sun to a dark antechamber.27

the 1995 renovation other sections of the building were decorated—a painter covered sections of the floor with designs from Diné textiles. Karpinski interview, July 11, 2013. 27 This is the west door, historically used as the main entrance. In more recent years, Hopi House managers have made available the use of the north door as well, which has a less-dramatic approach.

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Colter furnished this room with a corner fireplace, an element typical of Puebloan and

Pueblo Revival architecture. Other hallmarks of Hopi construction distinguish the

interior, such as ceiling made from vigas. A thicket of brush and branch on the ceiling,

latillas, heightens the illusionism of this Pueblo Revival building. This somewhat

distracts from the Western Union stamp on some of the old telegraph poles used for

ceiling joists (fig. 3.11). As I discuss later, a deliberate strategy of interior displays

factors into the dynamics of framing Native material as art at Hopi House.

Travelers at the Canyon

In many ways, Hopi House relates to the history of tourism at the Grand Canyon. The site

alternatively calls up the associations between travel, architecture, and the Grand Canyon

in Hopi culture. The Grand Canyon is a significant site for Hopi people. In the Hopi

origin story the first people climbed through a hole in the sky. They emerged from the

third world and spread across the earth surface—the present fourth world—in a series of

long clan migrations, many traveling through the Grand Canyon. Finally, they came to

dwell on three mesas in the Painted Desert in present-day northeastern Arizona. From this

world, the place of emergence appears as an opening to a salt cave in the Grand Canyon,

near the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado Rivers. Hopi people call this

place the sipapuni. The sipapuni and emergence stories remain present in everyday Hopi

life. The sunken or subterranean religious structures called kivas include a small hole in

the floor known as a sipapu, or “earth navel,” etymologically and metonymically linked

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to the sipapuni.28 In other ways Hopi architecture retains memory of that emergence. For

example, removable ladders provide access to the historic form of Hopi dwelling, the

kihu. Without doors on the ground floor openings in the roof terrace provide access to

rooms below.29 Using ladders to move between the world and the home requires

inhabitants to continuously climb and descend. These movements lead Hopi people to

perform daily the action of emergence.30 These rich associations between Hopi history,

architecture, and the Grand Canyon are likely lost on most tourists at Hopi House.

28 Numerous publications have relayed details of Hopi emergence narratives, though a fuller understanding of the story counts as Hopi esoteric knowledge. For example, see Henry Voth, “The Traditions of the Hopi,” Field Columbian Museum Publication 96, Anthropological Series 8 (1905), 1–26; Frank Hamilton Cushing, “Origin Myth from Oraibi,” The Journal of American Folklore 36, no. 140 (April-June, 1923): 163–170. In a book-length report documenting the significance of the Grand Canyon in Hopi culture, T. J. Ferguson offers a bibliographic review of the Hopi emergence, on p. 44 noting etymological links between the Sipapuni, sipapus, and the Hopi word for navel, sipna. Ferguson, Öngtupqa Niqw Pisisvayu (Salt Canyon and the Colorado River): The Hopi People and the Grand Canyon (Kykotsmovi, AZ: Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, 1998), 43–56. On the architecture of Hopi kivas, see Mindeleff, “Pueblo Architecture,” 111–137. 29 On the second story and above, Hopi buildings feature doors to access interiors from terraces outside. Mindeleff notes that builders at Hopi use ground-floor doors while building a room and then fill in these openings when finishing construction. Mindeleff qualifies this statement to acknowledge that buildings from the late nineteenth-century sometimes retain ground floor entries. For more on entryways in Hopi and Zuni buildings, see Mindeleff, “Pueblo Architecture,” 182–194. 30 Louis Hieb, “The Metaphors of Hopi Architectural Experience in Comparative Perspective,” in Markovich, Pueblo Style, 122–132. Hieb writes that the ki’hu, the Hopi dwelling, is “a microcosm of the Hopi world view whose principal tenet is the continuity of life in this world with life in the ‘interior’ or underworld. Life and death, day and night, summer and winter are seen not simply as opposed but as involved in a system of alternation and continuity, indeed a fundamental consubstantiality. The ki’hu is a symbol of this continuity, and the tall ladder that Hopis climbed to the second level of their homes were a reminder of their emergence,” 129. Hieb’s analysis helps advance scholarly understanding of ladders in Hopi architecture. Anthropologists have long explained the lack of ground-floor entries and the use of ladders as a strategy of defense against raiding enemies. The eminent nineteenth-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan perhaps

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Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has analyzed reciprocity between heritage and

tourist industries, contending that heritage sites produce a sense of difference that adds

value to places. If heritage sites convert locations to destinations, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

argues, then tourist industries provide the infrastructures that make destinations,

“economically viable as exhibits of themselves.”31 At the Grand Canyon, synergy

between the tourism and heritage industries is noteworthy. ATSF created the

infrastructure to move markets while Harvey added value to the canyon by building Hopi

House and employing Native artist-demonstrators. Tourists could encounter southwestern

Native culture at Hopi House and purchase a piece of it to take home. With a recreated

Hopi dwelling and Indigenous artists demonstrating their work, the site brought a

representation of southwestern culture to bear on the southwestern landscape.

If Hopi people can relate to the Grand Canyon as the site of ancestral emergence,

then tourists have largely come to see the canyon as pure nature, an exceptional feature of

the American landscape.32 For much of the nineteenth century, the Grand Canyon was

terra incognita in the American imagination. Following the Mexican-American War

(1846–48), the US acquired the Grand Canyon as part of the vast northern Mexican published this theory first, and many have followed. See Lewis H. Morgan, Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines (Charleston, S.C.: BiblioBazaar, 2006 [original 1881]), 155, ff. Morgan relied on accounts from Lt. Joseph Ives’s expedition to Hopi in 1858 and Matilda Coxe Stevenson’s notes from the 1879 Stevenson expedition. For more on Morgan, see chapter one of this dissertation. 31 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 151. 32 For critical analyses of the ways Americans perceive the Grand Canyon, see Barbara Morehouse, A Place Called Grand Canyon: Contested Geographies (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Stephen Pyne, How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History (New York: Viking, 1998); Mark Neumann, On the Rim: Looking for the Grand Canyon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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frontier. It was not until the mid-1870s that most Americans began to glimpse the Grand

Canyon. At that time, the popular press widely reproduced Thomas Moran’s 1874

painting Chasm of the Colorado (fig. 3.12). Moran based the painting on sketches he

created in 1872 while accompanying J. W. Powell on his exploration of the Colorado

River and Grand Canyon.33 In the early 1880s, the ATSF Railway began service to new

train depots south of the canyon at Holbrook, Flagstaff, and Williams. By 1884,

stagecoaches transported a few early tourists from these Northern Arizona towns to the

South Rim of the Grand Canyon.34 At that time a stretch of the South Rim accommodated

camps of mining prospectors and, by the late-nineteenth century, the small Bright Angel

Hotel (fig. 3.13).35 This area developed rapidly after the ATSF inaugurated passenger

service at the new Grand Canyon depot in September 1901.36 For the past 115 years,

33 Moran had accompanied Powell on his 1871 expedition of the Colorado River through the canyon and based the painting on his experience. For more on Powell, see chapter one of this dissertation. Powell published his findings in Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and its Tributaries: Explored in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872, under the Direction of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875). The national press widely reproduced Moran’s painting. William H. Truettner, ‘“Scenes of Majesty and Enduring Interest’: Thomas Moran Goes West,” The Art Bulletin 58, no. 2 (June 1976): 241–259. For consideration of Hillers’s work on the Colorado River expeditions see Don Fowler, ed., “Photographed All the Best Scenery”: Jack Hillers’s Diary of the Powell Expeditions, 1871–1875 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1972); Don Fowler, The Western Photographs of John K. Hillers: “Myself in the Water” (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989). 34 Gordon Chappell, “Railroad at the Rim: The Origin and Growth of Grand Canyon Village,” The Journal of Arizona History 17, no. 1 (1976): 90–91. 35 This was called Bright Angel Lodge, not to be confused with its namesake hotel that Harvey opened in 1935, and that Mary Colter designed. 36 T. C. McLuhan, Dream Tracks: The Railroad and the American Indian 1890–1930 (New York: Abrams, 1985). ATSF had purchased a copper mining railroad and began to use the tracks as a spur for passenger trains, running from the mainline at its depot in Williams, Arizona. In 1901, ATSF acquired from the federal government a grant of twenty acres at the South Rim. Building on an existing partnership, ATSF worked with

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then, a village at the South Rim has provided a major tourist destination. Situated on the

Coconino Plateau at its northernmost reach, Grand Canyon Village occupies a shallow

valley that slopes up gently to meet the South Rim. The village features hotels, bars,

restaurants, shops, interpretive centers, trails, and a promenade along the rim with

multiple observation points.37 More than a tourist setting, the village is home for park and

concessioner employees, so it also has featured a post office, school, grocery store,

stables, archives, and lodging for workers.

The arrival of rail in 1901 enabled large numbers of Americans to directly

encounter the grandeur Moran depicted. In the early-twentieth century, this increased

access led Americans to recognize the canyon as the most sublime natural site in the

country, effectively replacing Niagara Falls.38 In an early travel guide to the Grand

Canyon, for instance, journalist, historian, and activist Charles Fletcher Lummis praised

the chasm as “the greatest thing in the world.” Writing in 1902, Lummis assured readers

that no other region of similar size could include superlative features of “so many Harvey to transform this property to a tourist destination. Producing a heritage site was an essential component of this goal. Chappell, “Railroad at the Rim,” 94. 37 For a consideration of staged viewing areas in national parks, see Thomas Patin’s introduction in his edited volume Observation Points, The Visual Poetics of National Parks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), ix–xxvi. In the same book Mark Neumann focuses on efforts aimed at shaping how visitors saw the canyon, “Critical Vehicles Crash the Scene: Spectacular Nature and Popular Spectacle at the Grand Canyon,” 77–99. 38 This history of tourism and Indigenous visual production at the falls anticipated the twentieth-century dynamics of art, commerce, and culture at the canyon. At the falls, local Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) women sold beadwork to tourists through the nineteenth century. These women developed forms of art that provided income in the capitalist economy that eclipsed the Western New York fur trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For more on Niagara Falls tourism and Native American art history, see Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art form the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998).

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kinds—so many astounding sights, so many masterpieces of Nature’s handiwork, so vast

and conclusive an encyclopedia of the world-building processes, so impressive

monuments of prehistoric man, so many triumphs of man still in the tribal relation.”39 Yet

a village grew rapidly around the depot, threatening to blemish the wonder of the canyon.

Around the time Hopi House opened, the area around the rail depot burgeoned with

unregulated development. In a 1910 plan, Grand Canyon Forest Supervisor W. R.

Mattoon noted a number of problems with management of the Canyon Rim. Cans and

broken glass littered the area around the depot, livestock grazed at the most frequented

parts of the South Rim, and railroad employees put up unsightly shacks (fig. 3.14).40

Compounded with increased tourist traffic in the 1910s, these problems obliged federal

officials to manage future development in Grand Canyon Village. Through the decade, a

number of plans suggested zoning regulations for the town now recognized as a National

Historic District.41 In 1916, the government established the National Park Service, and

39 Charles Fletcher Lummis, “The Greatest Thing in the World,” in Titans of Chasms: The Grand Canyon of Arizona by C. A. Higgins, J. W. Powell, and C. F. Lummis (Chicago: The Santa Fe Passenger Department, 1902), 23–26. 40 Federal oversight of the canyon began in 1893, when the government designated the Grand Canyon as National Forest. The year Hopi House opened, 1905, the government transferred the National Forest Reserves from the Department of Interior to the Department of Agriculture. In the first document to address planning and development at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Forest Supervisor W. R. Mattoon proposes creating a series of streets and blocks, and identifies the need for building and landscaping regulations. Mattoon, “Townsite Plan for Grand Canyon National Monument,” (1910), 37. GRCA, 17460. 41 After Mattoon’s 1910 plan, the following Forest Supervisor Don P. Johnston worked with Aldo Leopold, Forest Examiner, to develop a new working plan with an explicit systems of zones designed to “allow visitors to avoid the less attractive services and industrial activities at the canyon.” “Grand Canyon Village Cultural Landscape Report,” (Grand Canyon National Park, AZ: January 2004), II-8.

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shortly thereafter transferred jurisdiction of the canyon from Forest Service in the

Department of Agriculture to the new service in the Department of Interior. Preparing for

the transfer, landscape architect Frank Albert Waugh compiled a development plan that

stressed naturalism in design and screened park infrastructure—locating employee

cabins, for example, in a block removed from the central tourist district.42

This plan and others sought to unite corporate and federal interests in developing

a coherent destination in the area around the rail depot. The legacy of this planning is

evident today in Grand Canyon Village. Though Harvey Co. no longer exists to run the

business, its corporate descendant Xanterra receives long-term concessioner contracts

from the National Parks Service.43 Today Xanterra continues to use Hopi House as a gift

shop focusing on Native art and souvenirs. The company is particularly interested in the

historical significance of the building, which is listed on the National Register. Multiple

signs interpret Hopi House as a historical site. For instance, the main business signboard

reads: “Historic Landmark/ Hopi House/ Native American Arts & Crafts/ Navaho Rugs”

(fig. 3.15). Created from a sandstone rock, a stylized cloud and sun painted in red and https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/grca/grca_nhl_clr.pdf accessed February 26, 2014. 42 Frank A. Waugh, A Plan for the Development of the Village of Grand Canyon, Arizona (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918); “Cultural Landscape Report,” II-8, II-11; Linda Flint McClelland, Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 81–82. 43 In 1968, the diversified Hawaii-based company Amfac purchased Harvey Co. and continued to use the Fred Harvey Co. brand. In 2002, Amfac changed its name to Xanterra, the company and brand currently operating Hopi House as well as lodging and food concessions at Grand Canyon Village. Though Xanterra does not use the Harvey brand at its facilities, the corporate website presents Xanterra as the direct corporate descendants of the Fred Harvey Company. See “Our Harvey Legacy” page http://www.xanterra.com/who-we-are/our-fred-harvey-legacy/ accessed October 21, 2015.

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turquoise adorn the sign. In 1995, a major renovation allowed Xanterra to reopen the

second floor as a fine art gallery, as Harvey used it in the first part of the twentieth

century. Cultural critics have also treated the site as it existed in its first decades. Less

laudatory than Xanterra, these tend to isolate Hopi House from the historical

development of Grand Canyon Village, the better to focus on the politics of

representation at the site. In contrast with a general focus on the early years of Hopi

House, in this chapter I seek to trace a longer and more varied history of the site. After

all, Hopi House has operated almost continuously since 1905. Displays and

merchandising at Hopi House have changed through the twentieth century along with

related shifts in the tourist industry and with developments in Native art. Millions of

tourists and countless Native people have experienced Hopi House, each bringing a

distinct perspective to, and taking their own memories from, the site. No longer can we

understand Hopi House simply in terms of early-twentieth century touristic desire or

Indigenous dislocation.

Architecture and cross-cultural perception

Before entering Hopi House, many visitors first view the shop from Hotel El Tovar, a

large Swiss-Chalet style structure conceived in the European resort tradition (fig. 3.16).

The regular and symmetrical balusters of the Tovar porch frame Hopi House, drawing

attention to its asymmetrical design and natural materials. With El Tovar and Hopi

House, Harvey planned a setting where northeastern and midwestern visitors could

perceive Native American architecture as fundamentally different from the built

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environments familiar to them. Harvey thus drew on a long history of defining

southwestern Native cultures through buildings. Since the first years of contact, non-

Native peoples have consistently conceived of architecture as uniting the multiplicity of

southwestern village dwellers. In the sixteenth century, Spanish explorers noted a

consistency of house construction and village design in northern New Mexico and

Arizona. They applied the term pueblo—their word for town—to peoples across a wide

geographic area who spoke a number of languages and participated in a range of social

formations. Americans, too, have remarked on Pueblo architecture as a distinguishing

characteristic. In 1881, anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan published the first systematic

account of Native American architecture, Houses and House-Life of the American

Aborigines. In it, he wrote that Puebloan architecture supported a form of “communism

in living” that distinguished its inhabitants as more socially advanced than Indigenous

groups living in other types of houses.44 Though twentieth-century anthropologists have

tended to focus on distinctions between Pueblo groups, Morgan’s study broadly affected

American thought in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, especially as J. W.

Powell used Morgan’s writing as a loose rubric to guide research at the Bureau of

American Ethnology. For more on this topic, see chapter one.

But if architecture shaped an experience of cultural difference for non-Native

visitors at Hopi House, then the building also affected how Indigenous workers saw the

site. To apprehend this aspect, consider a Harvey-made postcard of El Tovar that

44 Morgan, Houses and House-Life. In chapter 3, Morgan addressed the law of communism in living as it relates to architecture and in chapter 6, Morgan focuses on “the sedentary Indians of New Mexico.”

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reproduces a hand-colored photograph (fig. 3.17). Arriving in Americans’ mailboxes only

at the very end of the nineteenth century, postcards were key to the development of the

tourist industry. Their serial production helped to create mass audiences for landscapes of

remote destinations, while their use collapsed that very sense of remoteness.45 The

postcard of El Tovar features a scene taken from the top of Hopi House, based on a

photograph from the early 1920s in the collection of the Grand Canyon National Park

Museum Collection (fig. 3.18). In addition to adding color, the postcard alters the

photograph by removing the parked cars.46 In photograph and postcard Native employees

stand on the terraces and observe tourists. At the front of the lowest terrace a man holds 45 On May 19, 1898, Congress granted privately printed pictorial postcards privileges previously restricted to cards printed by the government. Frank Staff, The Picture Postcard & Its Origins (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1996), 61. This legislation followed similar proclamations in European countries. Germany was one of the first nations to allow for the exchange of postcards through the mail, and as a result its printing houses dominated the photographic postcard industry in the first decade of the twentieth century. Howard Woody, “International Postcards: Their History, Production, and Distribution (Circa 1895–1915),” in Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards, ed. Christraud M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 41. Richard Carline describes how the postcard stoked a cult of speed—a cult that helped foster perceptions of distance as diminished: “At the turn of the century people had to adjust themselves to the era of speed with dirigible balloons traversing the sky and the roads dangerous with the Singer safety bicycles, in which the new free-wheel enabled the cyclists—women as well as men—to speed down hill. People scurried for safety, and watched with astonishment, as the veils streamed in the wind from the motorists racing along at speeds which often exceeded twenty miles an hour. It was this hectic whirl for which the postcard was about to cater.” Richard Carline, Pictures in the Post: The Story of the Picture Postcard (Bedford, UK: Gordon Fraser, 1959), 33. 46 These touring cars appear to pre-date the famous Indian Detour Harveycars that, beginning in 1926, brought tourists to locales far from the route of the Santa Fe Rail. These car tours typically departed from Harvey Hotels, including La Fonda in Santa Fe, which still includes in its lobby a wooden plaque announcing: “Indian-detour Motor Cruises-Information Office in Courier Lounge.” On the Harvey automobile tours, see Marta Weigle, ‘“Insisted on Authenticity’: Harveycar Indian Detours, 1925–1931,” in Weigle and Babcock, Great Southwest, 47–59.

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up a textile and displays it for a group of tourists gathered below. In the postcard viewers

can quickly identify Native people by the garments they wear. The colorist has rendered

Native figures’ clothing with a vibrancy that contrasts with the nearby deep greens and

inert buff tones. The coloration of Hopi House employees matches the intensity only of

the façade of Tovar, which serves as the compositional focus point, and the striated

canyon walls in the top right.

This image may appear as another instance of Harvey marketing cultural

difference, and no doubt it fulfills that function. When the man displays the textile for

tourists he reinforces a marketing strategy of linking Hopi House merchandise with

Native artists, a strategy that relied heavily on demonstrations of artistic labor. When

considering how the postcard represents southwestern Native peoples it is also helpful to

consider how Hopi House employees navigated the building. Not all Native people who

worked at the site shared an intimate relationship with Puebloan buildings—many

employees came from Diné, Havasupai, and other southwestern nations. Still, many

Native employees may have approached Hopi House, in part, through Puebloan

understandings and uses of architecture.

In a Pueblo village terraced roofs typically provide platforms to view religious

performances in the plaza. The Santa Clara Pueblo architect and theorist Rina Swentzell

writes that plazas constitute the centers of multi-dimensional Pueblo worlds, what she

calls the multiverse.47 And like Swentzell, The Ohkay Owingeh (San Juan Pueblo)

47 Rina Swentzell, “Centers of the Pueblo World,” in The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland, ed. Virginia M. Fields and Victor Zamudio-Taylor (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001), 310–317.

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anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz describes the Puebloan conception of space as the basis for

a general Pueblo worldview. According to Ortiz, the Pueblo worldview conceives of

spaces in terms of boundaries and centers. In particular, space extends in the four cardinal

directions and three or four cosmic levels. Uniting these directions and levels, Puebloan

people classify space with a “well-elaborated conception and symbolization of the middle

or center of the cosmos, represented by a sipapu, an earth navel, or the entire village.”48

The horizontal and the vertical, symbolic and physical, quotidian and cosmological

dimensions of the world converge in the center. In its emptiness, the plaza contains the

world. And in danced ceremonies, unlike things meet in the plaza, joining to form a

unity.49

Multiple artists of Pueblo affiliation have depicted this important aspect of

cultural life. Indeed, representations of ceremonial dance were key subjects in early-

48 Alfonso Ortiz, “Ritual Drama and the Pueblo World View,” in New Perspectives on the Pueblos, ed. Alfonso Ortiz (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972), 142. See also Tsiporah Lipton, “Tewa Visions of Space: A Study of Settlement Patterns, Architecture, Pottery, and Dance,” in Markovich, Pueblo Style, 133–139. 49 Alfonso Ortiz has used Pueblo ceremonialism and senses of space to describe a worldview that unifies diverse Puebloan populations. In this endeavor, Ortiz is especially interested in burlesque and normative behavior. Many Pueblo burlesques and masquerades occur during changes of season (or personal status) and focus on the lives of other people or reverse Pueblo social roles. Much burlesque and masquerade refers to extreme states of formality and casualness. Ortiz writes, “This tendency to pass quickly from solemnity to mirth and back again is, of course, a characteristic of ritual drama generally, while the tendency to combine extreme opposites is a basic Pueblo world view theme. For the moment, let me just reiterate that extremes in dress are connected with changes in state or being.” Ortiz, “Ritual Drama,” 148. Ortiz contends that this tendency of ceremonialism allows Pueblo peoples not only an internal social function, as others previously argued, but also helps them to adjust to relations with nature and neighboring groups.

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twentieth century easel painting by Pueblo artists.50 Dances typically take place for large

audiences in the centers of Pueblo villages, though early paintings often isolate dancers

on a blank page. A few Puebloan painters included audiences and architectural settings in

paintings of ceremonial dances. For example, in 1936 the Okhay Owingeh painter Tonita

Lujan (1921–2015) painted a scene from the Taos San Geronimo Festival (fig. 3.19). A

row of terraced buildings runs along the top of the page, demarcating the space below as

the plaza ground. Groups of observers sit and stand on the terraces, watching ritual

clowns cavort in the plaza.51 Among other interpretations, scholars have speculated that

the recurring blank page in paintings of ceremonies makes visible the view from a pueblo

terrace.52 Perhaps Lujan achieves this idea more effectively by using the house block to

frame the ceremonial action. Placing the plaza scene between viewer and the audience at

50 For reproductions of Pueblo paintings featuring ceremonial scenes on blank backgrounds, see the catalogs of paintings in J. J. Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900–1930 (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1997); Lydia Wyckoff, ed., Visions & Voices: Native American Painting from the Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1996), 131–32, 134–35, 149, 174–76, 180–81, 203, 207–08, 212, 214–15, 226, 239–41, 245, 250–51, 279–82; Bruce Bernstein and Jackson Rushing, eds., Modern by Tradition: American Indian Painting in the Studio Style (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995), 28, pl. 52, pl. 10, pl. 17, pl. 23, pl. 73, pl. 75, pl. 77–78, pl. 82. 51 Louis Hieb, “Hopi Ritual Clown: Life As It Should Not Be,” (PhD dissertation, Princeton University Department of Anthropology, 1972). 52 Bruce Bernstein has argued that Pueblo painters used “their blank piece of paper as a dance plaza.” Bernstein, “Art for the Sake of Life,” in Bernstein and Rushing, Modern by Tradition, 17. Alternatively, Sascha Scott examines the blank spaces in Awa Tsireh’s paintings of ceremonial dances as a deliberate withholding of information. “By not picturing the full range of participants in the dances, by leaving out relevant sacred objects, and by omitting crucial features of context (that is, setting), the ceremonials depicted in Awa Tsireh’s paintings remain an abstraction. As such, his works do not provide a way for outsiders to reconstruct and consume the dances’ esoteric meanings.” Scott, “Awa Tsireh and the Art of Subtle Resistance,” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 4 (Jan. 2014): 604.

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back of the picture, Lujan has depicted the event from the vantage of terraces facing the

scene.

Ortiz notes that the Puebloan orientation allows for “many different centers” of

the world, as sacred space is infinite and the cosmic model is reproducible.53 Swentzell

also emphasizes the reproducibility and mobility of the center when she explicitly links

the Tewa nansipu (the “female opening of the earth” marked in the plaza by a half-buried

stone), the open plaza itself as demarcated by terraced buildings (the bupingeh), and the

void inside a clay pot. The plaza, then, forms a hook on which hang simultaneous levels

of existence. The space between Hopi House and El Tovar forms a type of plaza. An

aerial photograph shows a portion of Grand Canyon Village with Hopi House at center

and the Canyon Rim just above Tovar (fig. 3.20). This is not a plaza as such. It is not an

opening formed by buildings abutting at right angles. Nor is it the other common plaza

type, formed by a central corridor through a village.54 Rather, the sweeping façade of El

Tovar, with its many porches and rooms looking out to Hopi House, works to suggest an

enclosure. Here is a spatial void between settler culture and Native America that gets

filled and emptied daily. In this arrangement, the terraced front of Hopi House enabled

Pueblo employees to use the building in familiar ways, as the Harvey postcard

inadvertently indicates (see fig. 3.17). For employees, the architecture of Hopi House 53 Ortiz, “Ritual Drama,” 142. 54 The configurations of plazas vary considerably, with some villages enclosing the plaza on four sides as a type of courtyard (the “plaza type” pueblo), some creating a “street type” plaza where the widest street creates the dance ground, and some villages combining the two. Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton outline the various plaza types in Native American Architecture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 368–369, ff. The main plaza at Oraibi corresponds most closely with the “plaza type” pueblo.

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could serve as a platform to view the choreography of tourism: a procession of tourists

checking into El Tovar, then gazing in wonder at the canyon, and entering the shop to

spend money.

We can find additional evidence of Hopi ways of seeing in Grand Canyon

Village. As I mentioned earlier, a 1958 mural by Hopi painter Fred Kabotie fills the wall

of a cocktail lounge in the nearby Bright Angel Lodge, designed by Colter and

constructed in 1935 at the site of the former Bright Angel camp. In the painting, tourists

wander somewhat aimlessly around the Canyon Rim (fig. 3.21). Rather than interact with

each other, the tourists gaze intently at the overwhelming landscape. By depicting

disoriented and exhausted tourists in the act of observing an environment with which he

was intimately familiar, Kabotie represents the very act of cross-cultural perception.

Unlike white artists who painted scenes of the Grand Canyon—from Thomas Moran to

David Hockney—Kabotie did not directly depict the landscape. Rather, Kabotie’s mural

formalizes the visual experience of Indigenous laborers at the Grand Canyon. This

includes Kabotie’s own memories from working as a telescope operator and manager of

the Harvey gift shop at Lookout Studio in 1926.55 The mural evinces Native ways of

seeing in tourist settings. If the Grand Canyon and its cultural environment visually

overwhelmed visitors, then Native people saw tourists with studied clarity. In other

words, Kabotie shows what the Native people in the postcard saw.

55 Kabotie, Fred Kabotie, 43; Ronald McCoy, “Hopi Artist Fred Kabotie, 1900–1986,” American Indian Art Magazine 15, no. 4 (Autumn 1990): 42.

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Stepping Inside the Museum/Marketplace

Much of what the Indigenous employees at Hopi House saw was Native American art

and the people who bought it. Inside this Pueblo Revival building visitors and Native

employees encountered a range of Native American material. In the first half of the

twentieth century, sales of silver jewelry, Navajo weavings, Pueblo pottery, and kachina

figures sustained the business at Hopi House. Salons on the second floor displayed works

from the Harvey reserve collection, rare and historic objects out of reach for most

tourists. Displays at Hopi House consistently elevate fine art above souvenirs, creating a

spatial division between the aesthetic categories. Yet there is something deceptively

simple about the arrangement. On closer inspection, links between Harvey’s museum

activity and its engagement with tourists suggest a mutually beneficial relationship. A

recognizable brand and vast trade network made Harvey Company a reliable source for

museums seeking to collect Native fine art. Significantly, displays of priceless artifacts

amended the perceived quality of trade items for sale, guiding Americans to view their

souvenirs not just as mementos but also as works of Native American art. Harvey thus

presented objects made for the modern tourist market and those of an older vintage as

distinct components of a general display system.56 Factoring into a broad culture of

56 We might consider this symbiosis between the two display floors of Hopi House as a “formal ecology” of Native American art, wherein each component of the display affects the overall system. By using the term “formal ecology,” I draw on David Joselit’s writing on the eco-formalist method in Feedback: Television Against Democracy, which traces relationships between images. In addition to Joselit’s theorization of eco-formalism, we might consider the vitality of objects as helping to engender aesthetic perceptions of Native American material.

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consumption in the United States, this system presented Native American material culture

as art.

Historians of American art and culture have long acknowledged a set of

relationships between the marketplace and museums.57 More recently this understanding

has come to bear on the historiography of Native American art, helping to modify an art

historical narrative primarily concerned with institutions. Art historians have tended to

focus the post-WWI histories of museum collecting and display, along with art education,

as key factors for describing how Native American art developed as an aesthetic

category.58 In this section I take particular inspiration from Elizabeth Hutchinson’s work

on Indian corners, arrangements of assorted Native American material popular in

American homes before WWI. Hutchinson describes how in eastern and midwestern

cities Indian corners and department stores relate to the then-emerging culture of

consumption. Associating the private accumulation and display of Native material with

modern formations of personhood, Hutchinson argues that in the early-twentieth century

collectors could for the first time “value [Indian corners] for their aesthetic value

57 Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Harris, “The Divided House of the American Art Museum,” in “America’s Museums,” special issue, Daedalus 128, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 33–56; William Leach, Land of Desire (New York: Pantheon, 1993). 58 Janet Berlo, ed., The Early Years of Native American Art History: The Politics of Scholarship and Collecting (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992); W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Rushing and Bernstein, Modern by Tradition; Wyckoff, Visions & Voices; Janet Catherine Berlo and Jessica Horton, “Pueblo Painting in 1932: Folding Narratives of Native Art into American Art History,” in The Companion to American Art, ed. Jennifer Greenhill, John Davis, and Jason LaFountain (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 721–765.

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alone.”59 Following Hutchinson, in this section I discern how commercial and

institutional histories of Native American art converge at Hopi House. Here I examine

historical photographs of interior displays, archival correspondence on merchandising,

and literature about fine art collecting associated with Hopi House. By examining these

diverse sources, I demonstrate the historical fluidity between tourist and fine art markets.

Ultimately, I argue that at Hopi House contains some of the contradictions that

characterize changing perceptions of Native American art in the period before WWII.

Merchandise displays at Hopi House dramatized Native material. In general,

displays screened out Harvey Indian Department infrastructure and created an immersive

environment for consumers. Hopi House displays thus created new perceptions of Native

American material culture, helping Americans to see Native material as artwork. The

effects of this display system correspond with William Leach’s description of early-

twentieth century commercial displays. Looking at the period from 1895 to 1925, Leach

argues that innovations in show windows, merchandise interiors, and concealed lighting

contributed to strategies of displaying commodities to cultivate consumer desire.60 For

consumers, these displays momentarily suppressed exchange value and turned 59 Elizabeth Hutchinson, Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 15. 60 William Leach, “Strategies of Display and the Production of Desire,” in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920, ed. Simon Bronner (Winterthur, DE: Winterthur Museum, 1989), 99–132. Regarding interior displays in department stores, on page 120 Leach writes, “Displayment assembled commodities into ‘merchandise pictures’ or ensembles, placing the goods into aesthetically pleasing display pavilions, salon rooms, little arcade shops, ‘un-storelike’ special rooms, and especially model showrooms, which were first built during the late 1880s and 1890s and then reached the epic proportions by the outbreak of World War I.” Jean-Christophe Agnew provides another relevant discussion, “A House of Fiction: Domestic Interiors and the Commodity Aesthetic,” in Bronner, Consuming Visions, 133–155.

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commodities into something greater than themselves. To apprehend how displays

affected perceptions of Native material at Hopi House, consider a series of photographs

Harvey commissioned from the Detroit Photographic Company in 1905. One shows a

long view across the ground floor (fig. 3.22). The composition centers on woven items.

Textiles line the hall and baskets rest on the floor. Everything is for sale, yet this casual

arrangement suggests a domestic environment where perhaps a Hopi woman set down the

baskets during a chore. However, bare electric bulbs hang from above and illuminate

shelves full of pottery, commodities plainly stacked for consumption. In the early days of

Hopi House, at least, Harvey marketed objects expertly crafted for non-local buyers as if

they belong in the home of a Native family. This presentation did not necessarily deny

the commodity status of merchandise outright but rather helped to disassociated the

material from previous perceptions as curiosity.

Ascending to the second floor, viewers could see rare and antique works from the

Harvey reserve collection, also known as the museum collection. As the 1905

promotional photographs show, salons on the second floor included a blanket room with

rare and historic Diné weavings and a Mexican room with bultos, retablos, silver

candlesticks, and antique rifles. A wealth of material from the Northwest Coast filled

another show room, including masks carved in a nineteenth-century Makah or Nuu-chah-

nulth style, Haida argillite likely dating from the mid-nineteenth century, large model

poles (around four feet), an intricate Chilkat weaving, and feast dishes (fig. 3.23). A

basketry shade covered the fixture of electric light bulbs in the Northwest Coast room.

This shading concealed the electric bulbs and engineered a more subdued atmosphere

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than that created by the exposed light bulbs on the first floor. Throughout the twentieth

century, the second floor has tended to feature works of art. Closed to visitors after 1968

until a major building renovation in 1995, the second floor now features works of art—

weavings, jars by prominent Pueblo potters, paintings, and fine silver. A photograph from

2013 shows the eastern part of the gallery on the second floor (fig. 3.24). At left, a table

features contemporary black-on-black pottery. Moving rightward along the wall, cases

featured silver jewelry while plinths displayed sculpture and more pottery. Hanging on

the wall and the base of the casework are a number of two-dimensional works set in

frames. Another photograph shows a detail of the current second floor displays (fig.

3.25). Here a rustic cabinet presents eighteen works of contemporary pottery in a range of

forms. Many works are painted in the Sikyatki Revival style, which the potter Nampeyo

developed over a hundred years ago. Laminated placards name the artist and list the price

of each vessel. For example, on the left side of the bottom shelf a placard identifies a

wide-shouldered seed jar as the work of Koo Loo Nampeyo, the revivalist’s

granddaughter. The price is $6,000. In the case hidden lights stage a dramatic display, an

effect reminiscent of the basketry shade from 1905.

The distinction between merchandise displays on each floor thus continues today.

Harvey and subsequent Hopi House owners have consistently used the first floor to

display souvenirs. A November 1953 photograph, for instance, shows Queen Frederica of

Greece (1917–1981) on the first floor of Hopi House (fig. 3.26).61 Frederica stands next

61 During archival research in Arizona, I encountered many mid-century photographs of people at Hopi House, mostly outside. Data about the photograph frequently included names of famous non-Native visitors to the site, including President Eisenhower,

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to a display of toy drums, stacked as tall as her. The drums appear to be manufactured

industrially. Each drumhead features a profile painting of a man in a feathered bonnet.

Behind Frederica is a cabinet filled with kachina figures, baskets, and pottery. A group of

toy tipis rests on top. Today, the ground floor still displays more souvenir items than

pottery. In July 2013, I saw books, postcards, Navajo dye samplers, and dream catchers

on the first floor (fig. 3.27). In the north room of the ground floor, near a newer staircase,

hung a “Gallery upstairs” sign. Indicating that artwork can be found elsewhere, the sign

cast a souvenir status over objects on the first floor. By reopening the second-floor

gallery in 1995 the current corporate ownership re-inscribed key aspects of the original

Harvey display system. Today, however, the efficacy of this system is significantly

diminished. The original Hopi House display system has accomplished its goal. Art

museums have collected and displayed Native American material for almost a century

and universities have offered courses in Native American art for decades.

If Hopi House originally sought to present Native American material as saleable

art, then we might today acknowledge the drawbacks and successes of this project. One

of the primary ways the display system at Hopi House shaped consumer perceptions was

to pair old and rare works on the second floor with the dramatic displays on the first

floor. Yet seeing souvenir items linked to older forms of art, tourists may have

understood their purchases as expressions of some unsullied, pre-contact culture.

Contrary to such fanciful touristic perceptions, southwestern Native artists skillfully Burmese Prime Minister Unu, Indonesian President Sukarno, Pakistani Prime Minister Suhrawardy, and Albert Einstein. Native peoples in these photographs tend to be identified with generic appellations such as “Indian Silversmith” or “Hopi Hoop Dancer,” so attributions for individual Hopi House employees must often be reconstructed.

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negotiated market forces around the turn of the twentieth century. By working through

the system of trading posts established after the Civil War, especially, artists adapted

historic works and developed new forms. These trading posts stocked groceries and

sundries. To acquire these goods Native peoples exchanged artwork that they made or

raw material they supplied, including wool and piñon nuts. As historian Erika Bsumek

cautions, though, “trading relationships [in the early twentieth century] were complex

affairs, not easily reduced to economic formulas and principles.”62 For instance, traders

collaborated with weavers to develop works that would sell in the early twentieth-century

American marketplace. Traders encouraged artists to produce technically refined

weavings and adopt particular design motifs. This led to a series of new, regionally

specific innovations in a centuries-long history of Navajo weaving. Kate Peck Kent

describes how a regional style developed around a trading post in Crystal, New Mexico.

The trader J. B. Moore introduced to Navajo weavers patterns of rugs from Turkey and

62 Erika Marie Bsumek, Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868–1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 47. For an overview of the trading post system and historical analysis of the Hubbell Trading Post at Ganado, Arizona, see “Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site: Hubbell Trading Post Furnishings Report and Plan,” September 20, 2011. http://cala.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/projects/HUTR%20Furnishings%20Report%20Final.pdf accessed February 17, 2013. See also Frank McNitt, The Indian Traders (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962). For a consideration of the trading post system in the late-twentieth century, see Dexter Cirillo, “The New ‘Traders’ and Their Influence on Southwestern Indian Art,” in Changing Hands: Art without Reservation I: Contemporary Native American Art from the Southwest, ed. James McFadden and Ellen Taubman (New York: American Craft Museum, 2002), 56–67.

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Iran, textiles that urban Americans then found appealing. Weavers incorporated these

design elements to create works now associated with the Early Crystal style.63

Hopi House employees relied on the system of trading posts to source most of the

material for the tourist business. In July 1935, Harvey Indian Department executive

Herman Schweizer compiled a list of twenty-two trading posts that supplied work for the

Grand Canyon tourist trade. These included the noteworthy traders and stores of C. G.

Wallace of Zuni, New Mexico, Kirk Brothers of Gallup, New Mexico, C. G. Newcomb,

of Crystal, New Mexico, and Vaughn’s Indian Store, in Phoenix, Arizona.64 In the first

few decades of the twentieth century, Schweizer worked most closely with the Hubbell

family. John Lorenzo Hubbell (1853–1930, also known as Don Lorenzo Hubbell)

established a trading post in the 1870s at the settlement of Ganado in present-day

northeastern Arizona.65 This was soon after Diné people returned from a forced

relocation at Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico to the homeland called dinetah.

The Hubbell family would expand to operate an additional thirty-five stores across the

Southwest, with J.L. Hubbell’s son Lorenzo Hubbell (1883–1943) operating a major

outpost at Oraibi.66 Hubbell supplied the Harvey Indian Department with Navajo silver as

63 Kate Peck Kent, Navajo Weaving: Three Centuries of Change (Santa Fe, School of American Research Press, 2002 [orig. 1982]), 86, ff. 64 Schweizer (Albuquerque) to M.R. Tillotson (Grand Canyon), July 6, 1935, Heard RC 39 (1B): 6. 65 Harold Colton, “The Hubbell Trading Post at Ganado,” Plateau 30, no. 4 (April 1958): 85–88. 66 Finding Guide, “Hubbell Trading Records, 1882–1968,” pp. 1–3. University of Arizona Special Collections Library, Tucson, AZ (hereafter cited as AZ), 375.

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well as Hopi basketry and pottery.67 The largest business between Hubbell and Harvey,

though, regarded Navajo textiles.

With the textile trade, Schweizer wrote that he and J.L. Hubbell collaborated to

stabilize a market price. The arrangement guaranteed Hubbell a fixed purchase price for

all blankets and rugs that met “required specifications as to quality, design, etc.”68 These

specifications involved a high quality of production as well as classicism in

composition—considerations Schweizer and Hubbell saw as a corrective to late-

nineteenth century developments in weaving such as pictorialism and eye-dazzler designs

made with industrially dyed and spun yarns. In addition to working with traders to

influence modes of production, Schweizer collaborated directly with artists. Historians of

southwestern Native American silverwork generally credit Schweizer with helping to

develop a commercial market for the material in the first years of the twentieth century

by consulting with Diné smiths to develop lightweight jewelry that would appeal to the

influx of easterners traveling to the Southwest by train.69 Schweizer thus engaged traders

and artists to supply high-quality work that would meet consumer demand.

67 Fred Harvey (Kansas City) to Lorenzo Hubbell (Oraibi), August 12, 1925. AZ 375, Hubbell Papers, Box 37. J. L. Hubbell also provided a source of other material, including the original ladders used at Hopi House, as shown in a January 3, 1905, memo from Fred Harvey (Gallup, NM). In November 1914, Schweizer ordered from the Hubbells five ponies and 100 sheep to use in exhibitions at the San Diego world’s fair. Schweizer (Albuquerque) to J. L. Hubbell (Ganado), November 14, 1914. AZ 375, 37. 68 Schweizer (Albuquerque) to T. E. Purdy (Gallup, NM), December 4, 1930. AZ 375, 38. For a detailed description of Hubbell’s preferences in weaving, see Kent, Navajo Weaving, 86–87. 69 John Adair, The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944), 25.

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Schweizer simultaneously worked to instill in these tourists an awareness of how

their purchasing affected changes in centuries-long traditions. In September 1907,

Schweizer became alarmed when some Diné weavers replaced wool warp strands with

cotton. At that time he wrote a department memo describing this change.70 The use of

cotton warps saves time, Schweizer wrote, but creates a less durable product. He refused

to sell these weavings and urged company employees to share this information with

Harvey customers. Schweizer saw educating consumers as a way to obviate the use of

cotton warps and maintain the historic integrity of Navajo weaving.71 His pedagogical

efforts continued. Around 1910, a factory produced a blanket with Navajo designs and

sent samples to the Harvey Indian Department. Schweizer later recalled how, “We

accepted the samples and paid for them, and put one in each of our shops, with a large

label reading ‘imitation Navajo blanket,’ and called particular attention to it, with the

result that they never got started.”72 One of the primary ways Schweizer endeavored to

70 Schweizer, Letter to All Concerned, September 12, 1907. Heard RC 39 (1B): 1. 71 In this way, Schweizer anticipated the broad attempts to shape American taste through the “pedagogy of cultural consumption.” According to Joan Saab, the Museum of Modern Art developed this pedagogy during the Great Depression, “as a means of linking art and life to create democratic communities.” While Schweizer was not necessarily concerned with the health of American democracy, he shared the belief with Alfred Barr and Philip Johnson at MoMA that exhibitions could influence consumer habits. The education Schweizer imparted concerned the quality and production of Native American art. Joan Saab, For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 142. See, especially, “Chapter 3: Democracy in Design,” 84–128. 72 The letter continues, “We even called attention to the differences between native wool and Germantown yarn when the latter was first introduced, and our efforts virtually killed the demand for this product.” Schweizer (Albuquerque) to Tillotson (Grand Canyon), July 6, 1935, Heard RC 39 (1B): 6.

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create a market for Native American art, then, was to cultivate a self-reflexive sense of

consumer taste.

The Harvey reserve collection played a central role in shaping such consumer

perceptions of Native American art. Schweizer promoted the Harvey brand through sales

and displays of the reserve collection. Strong relationships with museums were especially

important for establishing a sterling reputation. Harvey employed museum specialists

such as George Dorsey, Franz Boas’s first student, who served as curator at the Field

Museum. Dorsey consulted for Harvey in 1903 and 1904.73 At this time, the Indian

Department sold portions of the reserve collection to Dorsey at the Field Museum. Before

WWI, it also sold works to the Carnegie Museum, Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde,

and others.74 In addition to using the reserve collection to supply museums, Schweizer

displayed portions of the collection to promote consumption of Native American art.

Rare and historic works accompanied Harvey merchandise in displays across the

Midwest, Great Plains, and Southwest. In urban centers, especially, Schweizer presented

works from the reserve collection as stand-alone advertisements for Harvey and the Santa

Fe Rail. For example, William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) began collecting Native

American art when he saw a promotional display of Diné textiles that Schweizer had

arranged in Chicago. Hearst asked to buy the display and Schweizer was reluctant to sell

these works. As Nancy Blomberg notes, Schweizer understood acquiescing to Hearst in

this instance would help to establish a longer and more fruitful relationship with the

73 Diana F. Pardue, “Marketing Ethnography: The Fred Harvey Indian Department and George A. Dorsey,” in Weigle and Babcock, Great Southwest, 102–109. 74 “Collections shipped,” Fred Harvey Company ledgers. Heard RC 39 (10): 13, 14.

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media magnate. Through the end of WWI, Hearst purchased hundreds of museum-quality

weavings from Harvey, and in 1942 he donated this collection to the Natural History

Museum of Los Angeles County.75

To develop the reserve collection Schweizer acquired older items directly from

private hands, including Indigenous and Spanish-American families.76 He often obtained

duplicates. This tactic freed Schweizer to stage similar displays at multiple Harvey

locations and to sell portions of the reserve collection without depleting its coverage. The

Indian Department occasionally developed fine art exhibitions for venues outside of the

Harvey empire. These included World’s Fairs—as with the prize-winning display of

“Aboriginal Blanketry and Basketry” at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition—and institutions

of art. In November 1916, for instance, Schweizer spent a week at the Fine Arts Institute 75 Nancy Blomberg, “William Randolph Hearst, Collector Extraordinaire,” in Weigle and Babcock, Great Southwest, 143–44; Nancy Blomberg, Navajo Textiles: The William Randolph Hearst Collection (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988). Hearst likely visited Hopi House, as he owned property at the Grand Canyon. Also, see MS 149 “Hearst-Grand Canyon Collection, 19261974,” at California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo. 76 Byron Harvey III, “Fred Harvey Collection,” 35–38. Byron Harvey III notes on p. 36 that in Albuquerque, “The company’s agents, present the year round, frequently were able to purchase items never offered to summer visitors. Winter brings hard times to the Indian or Spanish American farmer and consequently whole wagon loads of irreplaceable Santos and Indian arts were brought in for sale.” In addition to the corporate collection, members of the Harvey family created their own private collections of Native American art. Huckel was married to Minnie Harvey, daughter of Fred Harvey, the company founder, and the couple collected Navajo blankets and watercolors based on sandpaintings. Anthropologist Gladys Reichard used the watercolors as illustrations in a book on the subject, which she devoted to the memory of John Huckel. Reichard, Navajo Medicine Man (New York: Dover, 1977 [orig. New York: J. J. Augustin Publisher, 1939]). A member of the next Harvey generation, Katherine Harvey, was a major patron of the flat style of Indian painting in the 1920s and ‘30s. The paintings she collected are now in the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. Edwin Wade and Katerin Chase, “A Personal Passion and Profitable Pursuit: The Katherine Harvey Collection of Native American Fine Art,” in Weigle and Babcock, Great Southwest, 148–154.

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in Kansas City to prepare an exhibition of Native American art drawn from the Harvey

reserve collection. The display included some ancient material from Casa Grande—

jadeite beads and images, works of feather cloth—but focused on Diné weavings. Kansas

City newspapers covered the exhibition intently, even noting that a company of Native

American actors attended the exhibition preview.77 It is not wrong to see such

institutional exhibitions as promoting the Harvey business. As with displays of the

reserve collection on the second floor of Hopi House, everything on view at the Fine Arts

Institute of Kansas City counted as Harvey company merchandise. Yet more than

promoting an individual business interest, this commercial agenda helped to transforme

American perceptions of Native American material. As one Kansas City reviewer noted,

“We have taken the Indians for granted so long historically that we have never awakened

to them artistically. And here is an art which is so original and so well flavored of an

original civilization that it demands appropriation and adaptation in modern life.”78 The

exhibition succeeded in presenting Native American material culture as art, in an

institutional setting.

Schweizer stored the museum collection at the storeroom in Albuquerque, though

he consistently sent Hopi material to the Grand Canyon. In 1905, the showrooms on the

second floor of Hopi House featured an array of material, from the Southwest to the 77 The exhibition also featured oil paintings that copied the woven patterns. Huckel had commissioned these paintings for “posterity.” “An Exhibit of Indian Art: Fine Display Soon to Open at the Institute,” Kansas City Times, November 17, 1916; Heard RC 39 (11): 54.1. “History of Indians Shown in Handiwork: Interesting Exhibit Is on View at the Fine Arts Institute,” Kansas City Journal, November 17, 1916; Heard RC 39 (11): 54.2. 78 “News of the Fine Arts,” Kansas City Star, November 24, 1952; Heard RC 39 (11): 54.7.

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Northwest Coast to the Pacific Islands. In following decades, attention to Hopi material

culture at the Grand Canyon increased. This tension between cultural specificity and pan-

Indian displays animates the history of Hopi House. Company ledgers document that, in

December of 1904 when preparing for the site opening, the Indian Department shipped a

group of rare and historic Hopi material to Hopi House. This shipment may have

included works that trader Fred Volz obtained around 1887.79 On January 27, 1905,

another shipment from Albuquerque to the Grand Canyon included a group of 35 prayer

sticks collected by H. R. Voth, perhaps for his altar recreations.80 The same year that the

United States admitted Arizona into the Union, 1912, Hopi House acquired a large

collection of Hopi material from Voth. This collection came in two parts, with each part

presumably duplicating the other. At the time Voth described the collection in a book,

basically an itemized list accounting for Hopi uses of each object. Objects included

masks of the various katsinam, bridal robes, arrows, polishing stones and other tools, a

Spanish colonial bell passed down through generations, basketry trays used for domestic

purposes, prayer sticks, toys, cakes of pigment, ears of different corn varietals, piki bread,

staffs associated with various ceremonial societies, and other ceremonial regalia.81 From

the WWI era to the late 1960s, Hopi House displayed the Voth collection of historic Hopi 79 Volz’s trading post was at Canyon Diablo, Arizona. The attribution of this material to Volz is, “to judge from notes furnished by F. C. Spencer at Grand Canyon in 1947.” Undated, unsigned note on the origins and development of the Hopi Collections. Heard RC 39 (6): 4. 80 Heard RC 39 (10): 16, “Fred Harvey collections shipped Dec 29, 1904–May 19, 1915.” A number of pages (138, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154) document inventory “billed to Hopi BLDG 12/29/04.” Page 174 includes the register of 35 Hopi “bahoes,” or pahos (prayer sticks). 81 Byron Harvey III, ed., The Henry R. Voth Hopi Indian Collection at Grand Canyon, Arizona, 1967 [orig. 1912]. Heard RC 39 (6): 1.

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material. Unfortunately, it is unknown precisely where or how Harvey displayed the Voth

Collection since archival research has yet to uncover installation photographs or a

detailed written description of the collection on view at Hopi House. However, around

1912 the collection almost certainly replaced Northwest Coast or Mexican items in one of

the second-floor salons.

Perhaps the new Hopi House manager Frank Spencer installed the Voth collection

in 1915 as a way of promoting the two world’s fairs in California.82 That year, countless

tourists stopped over at the Grand Canyon en route to the San Diego Panama California

Exposition and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, in San Francsico.83 Harvey

developed large exhibitions for both fairs; at San Diego it created a massive living village

with the Painted Desert exhibit and in San Francisco it staged the Grand Canyon in

miniature.84 In 1918, Harvey sold Voth’s “Hopi Collection no. 1” to George Gustav

82 Harvey reassigned the original manager of Hopi House, D. E. Smith, to oversee the San Diego exhibit. D. E. Smith, letter, June 7, 1915, AZ 375, 37. Spencer’s first correspondence on record as manager of Hopi House is dated May 22, 1915, AZ 375, 37. Spencer served in the post until 1948. Spencer was often associated with the site in the interwar years, including a January 7, 1948, article “Mr. and Mrs. Frank Spencer Friendly Hosts at Grand Canyon: Indians, Distinguished Guests, Come Regularly at Hopi House,” The Christian Science Monitor. A two-page cartoon from the 1930s illustrates a typical visit to the Grand Canyon and features a caricature of Frank Spencer with a Kachina doll. AZ 326, Harvey Collection, Box 17, Folder 8. 83 The rise in attendance at the Grand Canyon in 1915 spurred increased federal efforts to zone Grand Canyon Village as a tourist destination. Ethan Carr, Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Parks Service (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 117. 84 For more on Native American architecture at these fairs, see the first chapter of this dissertation. At Hopi House, a recreation of Native American architecture similarly functioned as a dwelling for Native families as well as exhibition pieces for visitors. Hopi house and the Harvey displays at the 1915 California fairs resembled earlier living villages at world’s fairs, including those at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, the Omaha Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898, and the St.

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Heye. Heye collected voraciously and ran a private museum in New York City, the Heye

Foundation.85 The second part of Voth’s collection remained on view at Hopi House. In

1967, Voth’s “Hopi Collection no. 2” remained “virtually intact at Hopi House,”

according to Byron Harvey III, an anthropologist and the son of company president

Byron S. Harvey.86 By the late 1960s, the Hopi Collection no. 2 moved to the Heard

Museum in Phoenix. In 1968, the diversified Hawaii-based corporation Amfac acquired

Harvey and continued to use the Harvey brand name through mid-1990s. Following the

1968 sale the Harvey family donated the reserve collection to three southwestern

Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. While many organizers of world’s fairs saw the value of displaying full-size Native architecture as educational or entertaining, Harvey grafted onto this system a marketing agenda. McLerran addresses the history of Navajo weaving demonstration at the Grand Canyon, arguing that it “must be seen as continuous with wider late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Euro-American practices of visual representation that worked to commodify, fix, and delimit the Native craftworker as producer of authentic objects.” Jennifer McLerran, “The Other Spectacle,” 80. Yet Indigenous peoples undoubtedly developed their own perspectives in living villages. For example, see Patricia Afable, “Journeys from Bontoc to the Western Fairs, 1904–1915: The ‘Nikimalika’ and their Interpreters,” Philippine Studies 52, no. 4 (2004): 445–473; Nancy Parezo and John Troutman, “The ‘Shy’ Cocopa Go to the Fair,” in Selling the Indian: Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures, ed. Carter Jones Meyer (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001), 3–43. 85 Clara Sue Kidwell, “‘Every Last Dishcloth’: The Prodigious Collecting of George Gustav Heye,” in Collecting Native America, 1870–1960, ed. Shepard Krech III and Barbara Hail (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), 232–258. This museum published scholarship and employed anthropologists such as M. R. Harrington For more on Harrington and his work for Heye see chapter two of this dissertation. Eventually Heye’s collections became the foundation of the National Museum of the American Indian. 86 Final remarks by Byron Harvey III in Voth Hopi Indian Collection, 40. Joe Ernst, who managed Hopi House from 1948 to 1975, confirms that Hopi House displayed the Voth collection. Transcript of “Interview of Joe and Alberta Ernst,” by Kathleen Howard, August 1, 1989, p. 4. Heard RC 39 (5): 2.

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institutions.87 At this time, Amfac closed the second floor and began to use it as a

warehouse. In 1980, Amfac worked with the Heard to develop a plan of reinstalling the

Harvey reserve collection on the second floor. The idea was to renovate the second floor

with security systems and museum-quality lighting, and to employ a resident curator to

organize rotating displays of the collection that “stress the tradition of arts and crafts

excellence” of Harvey Co. and the Indigenous groups of Northern Arizona.88 The

proposal never moved forward, and the second floor remained closed until 1995.

Following the Heye sal,e collectors continued to purchase works from Hopi

House. On one occasion George Horace Lorimer (1867–1937), editor of the Saturday

Evening Post, purchased $10,000 worth of historic blankets from Hopi House.89 Yet the

87 The great majority of the Harvey museum collection can be found at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, while the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff and the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe care for a smaller number of objects from the collection. Cindy Davis, Report to the Board of the Fred Harvey Fine Arts Foundation, June 30, 1975. Heard RC 39 (4): 4. 88 Kenneth Bacher, “Proposal for Conversion of Second Floor of Hopi House to Extension Museum,” January 8, 1980. GRCA 108308. In 1969, the National Park Service signed a twenty-nine-year concessions contract with Amfac, operating under the “Fred Harvey, Inc.” brand name. The contract stipulated that Amfac receive NPS approval before altering the physical plant. “United State Department of the Interior National Park Service Contract No. 14-10-9-900-158,” GRCA 99899, folder 2. Correspondence from Grand Canyon National Park employees in 1981 lists a number of problems with the plan to convert the second floor. Jack O’Brien, Interpretation Chief, “Memorandum: Proposal to Exhibit Fred Harvey Collection at Grand Canyon,” 1981; Nelson Siler, Acting Safety Officer, “Memorandum: Hopi House Inspection,” February 19, 1981. GRCA 108408. 89 Joe Ernst mentioned Lorimer’s collecting in an interview with Kathleen Howard. Ernst managed Hopi House from 1948 to 1975, and described a conversation with his predecessor Frank Spencer, who began managing the site in 1915: “Spencer told me that one year they had George Horowitz [sic] Lorimer up there in the spring, he bought $10,000 worth of blankets at one time, the old antique blankets. And he come back that same year and bought $5,000 worth.” Heard RC 39 (5): 2, p. 12. Lorimer collected Diné textiles during the last thirty years of his life. Blomberg, Navajo Textiles, 66, 68, 71. Lorimer’s blanket collection remained in the family until a 1991 auction. The Lorimer

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1929 stock market crash affected the Harvey business almost immediately. On December

24, 1929, less than two months after the crash, Schweizer sent a dispirited letter to one of

his stalwart suppliers in the Hubbell family. “Referring to your recent letter regarding

pottery, blankets, etc., business is pretty bad but you might send us a couple of hundred

pieces,” Schweizer wrote. “Do the best you can as times are hard. Regarding blankets, we

have a pretty good stock and our December sales this year do not come anywhere near

last year.”90 To be sure, the Great Depression diminished the southwestern tourism

industry and art market. Though Harvey Indian Department sales performed poorly

through the 1930s, a major 1933 sale marks an exception. This sale helped to establish

the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, then called the William Rockhill Nelson

Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum.91 Schweizer had resisted the Nelson-Atkins sale. In

February of 1932 he argued that this key reserve existed with the goal of “establishing a

museum either at Grand Canyon or enlarging Albuquerque, plans of which were already

in the hands of contractors when the depression came.”92 The works sent to Kansas City

included pottery, silver, baskets, and textiles, valued at $30,750, equivalent to over half a

million dollars in 2015. Collection of Southwestern Weavings (New York: Sotheby’s, 1991). Also, see Matthew H. Robb and Jill D’Alessandro, Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art from the Weisel Family Collection (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 2014), plates 50 and 55. 90 Schweizer (ABQ) to Lorenzo Hubbell (Oraibi, AZ), December 24, 1929. AZ 375, 38. 91 Huckel lived in Kansas City where he worked at Harvey headquarters. Dating to the 1916 exhibition at the Institute of Fine Arts, Huckel had promoted the exhibition of Native American art in Kansas City. An obituary for John Huckel in the Kansas City Times ran on March 28, 1936. Heard RC 39 (11): 105. 92 Schweizer, quoted in Byron Harvey III “Company Collects,” 83–84. For more on conversations within Harvey Indian Department around the Nelson-Atkins sale, see the folder “Indian Dept. Corresponcence, 1929–34,” Heard RC 39 (2): 1.

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By the end of the 1930s, the corporation fully turned to its reserve collection as a

financial resource. In June 1939, company president Byron S. Harvey directed Schweizer

to sell as much of the reserve collection as possible. The plan was to move most reserve

works from the storeroom in Albuquerque, where business dwindled, and send it to Hopi

House at the Grand Canyon. Through the 1920s, car travel increased. By 1927, it

outpaced rail travel at the Canyon.93 In his 1939 letter Byron S. Harvey noted that new

ATSF train schedules allowed less time for passengers to explore the Alvarado Indian

Building. At the same time, Harvey experienced “an unusually heavy business at the

Canyon” and at La Fonda hotel, which opened in Santa Fe in 1932. Byron S. Harvey

advised Schweizer to “take advantage of these crowds at the Canyon and La Fonda,

particularly the Canyon, to try and dispose of some of these higher priced items.”94

Schweizer promptly replied with a concise message, lamenting that, “People just simply

are not looking for anything except modern products and mostly cheaper things. We are

handling a tremendous volume of cheap stock now, and I doubt if anything very much

can be done while the heavy summer traffic is on.” Schweizer also clarified that “for the

past several years” of the Great Depression, he had greatly reduced prices for the

significant holdings of historic Navajo weavings while encouraging Hopi House manager

Frank Spencer to take any opportunity to sell those portions of the reserve collection on

93 “Cultural Landscape Report,” II-24. 94 Byron S. Harvey (Chicago) to Schweizer (Albuquerque), June 30, 1939. Heard RC 39 (1B): 7.

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hand at Hopi House.95 Despite Schweizer’s concerns, Spencer sold portions of the reserve

collection.

Following the pattern established by Hearst, buyers from the 1940s donated these

objects to museums. For instance, in 1942, the Los Angeles collector Fred Kimpton

Hinchman visited Hopi House on a buying trip and had his photograph made with Porter

Timeche near the north entrance to the building (fig. 3.28). In 1945, Hinchman

bequeathed his collection to the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles.96 After Schweizer

passed away in 1943, Harvey appointed J.A. McDonough to manage the Indian

Department.97 McDonough worked to sell “any decoration or old stock” from

Albuquerque, with “every effort to sell Alaskan, Aleutian and South Sea Island

merchandise, as it really does not belong in our Indian business.”98 In July 1947, Frank

Spencer sold a group of twenty historic weavings from the reserve collection—including

a Nez Perce cornhusk bag—to Paul T. Seashore, of Houma, Louisiana (fig.3. 29).99

Seashore added the Hopi House material to his existing collection of Native American

weaving and then, in 1951, donated his entire collection to the Texas Memorial Museum

in Austin. The collection catalog omits individual object provenance, yet photographs 95 Schweizer (Albuquerque) to Byron S. Harvey (Chicago), June 1, 1939. Heard RC 39 (1B): 7. 96 Kathleen Whitaker, Southwest Textiles (Los Angeles: Southwest Museum, 2002), 20–21. Founded by Charles Fletcher Lummis, the Southwest Museum is now part of the Autry Museum of the American West. 97 Memo from Byron Harvey, Jr. (Chicago), November 23, 1943. Heard RC 39 (1B): 8. 98 McDonough to Boyd, January 8, 1944. Heard RC 39 (1B): 8. 99 Receipts of the Seashore sale from July 28, 1947, feature an image of Hopi House at top, along with the store name. Heard RC 39 (1B): 8. In 1944, Harvey Indian Dept. Manager J. A. McDonough took over after Schweizer passed away, pursuing liquidation of “any decoration or old stock.” McDonough to Boyd, January 8, 1944. Heard RC 39 (1B): 8.

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match written descriptions from Harvey sales receipts, as with the Nez Perce bag.100 In

the twenty-first century, private collectors continue donating to museums works they

originally purchased from Hopi House.101 The afterlives of such sales indicate the

efficacy of the Hopi House display system. At Hopi House Harvey displayed souvenirs

and fine art in an uneasy union of museum and marketplace. This presentation

endeavored to inform consumer taste for Native American art in the early twentieth

century. The Seashore and Hinchman museum donations indicate that the Hopi House

agenda has succeeded, outlasting significant changes in the markets for, and perceptions

of, Native American art.

The economic hardships of the 1930s broadly affected Native American art. Many

of these changes involved federal regulation. In 1919, the government designated the

Grand Canyon National Monument one of the first national parks. Park superintendents

100 A Harvey receipt for “Old Nez Pearce plunder bag ‘8983” explains that “the material is wild hemp and corn husks. The embroidery work on the basket is of old Germantown yarn.” The Seashore catalog illustrates a Nez Perce cornhusk bag on p. 63, noting, “Nearly all of the surface on both sides is covered with a form of embroidery known as false embroidery. The background is usually the natural tan of cornhusk, and on this are placed brightly colored geometric designs in dyed cornhusk and wool yarn.” Glen L. Evans and T. N. Campbell, Indian Baskets: The Paul T. Seashore Collection (Austin: Texas Memorial Museum, 1952), 63. 101 Hopi House played a key role in the genesis of Helen Cox Kersting’s 800-work collection of jewelry by Native American artists. In 1962, the opera singer Kersting (b. 1935) visited the Grand Canyon for her birthday. Kersting received as a gift a brooch made by acclaimed Zuni artist Leo Poblano (1905–1959), which her husband had purchased at Hopi House. This inspired her to collect southwestern Native American art more widely. In 2009, Kersting donated her collection to the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, an institution known for its prestigious biannual fellowship and exhibition of contemporary Native American art. Diana Pardue, “A Symphony of Silver and Stone: The Helen Kersting Collection of Jewelry,” in Generations: The Helen Cox Kersting Collection of Southwestern Cultural Arts, ed. James Nottage (Indianapolis: Eiteljorg Museum, 2010), 95.

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soon thereafter began to exercise control over Hopi House merchandising. Since the

1930s, especially, superintendents have expressed concerned about the authenticity of

merchandise sold at Hopi House. As the national market for Native art developed in the

early-twentieth century, an accompanying set of anxieties arose about the commercial

exploitation of Indigenous cultures. In the 1920s, Anglo women in the Southwest

expressed concern for the effects of mass-produced souvenirs in the tourist market, and

advocated on a national stage.102 Schweizer largely shared the concerns that such material

undersold work by Native artists. Recognizing a link between cultural production and

financial stability was a crucial component in federal efforts to reorganize Indian policy

during the Depression, led by John Collier, the New Deal-era Director of the Bureau of

Indian Affairs. In the 1930s, the Congress passed the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, which

established an Indian Arts and Crafts Board. The Board imposes penalties for

misrepresenting saleable goods as made by a Native American.103 During the summer of

1935 park superintendent M.R. Tillotson requested that Harvey authenticate Hopi House

merchandise marketed as Native-made. Schweizer replied to Tillotson’s request for a

vendor list, writing to the superintendent, “your letter also intimates ‘kind of Indian

goods,’” though Hopi House and the Harvey Indian Department have always featured

102 Margaret Jacobs, “Women and the Indian Arts and Crafts Movement,” in Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879–1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 149–179. 103 In the mid-1920s, the US Senate commissioned a report on Indian policy, the Meriam Report, which identified significant problems with Indian relations in term of governance, healthcare, and education. The report also identified the sale of art as an important financial resource. Jennifer McLerran, “The Development of a New Federal Indian Policy,” in A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933–1943 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 65–101.

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the, “real and best products of the Indians of the Southwest.” From the beginning there

has been one exception, Schweizer explains. Harvey was unable to sell Native-produced

moccasins at a “moderate price,” so instead it carried a line of manufactured moccasins

and displays these goods, “with a large tag plainly reading ‘Not Made by Indians.’”104 By

inquiring about the sources of Hopi House material, Tillotson was thinking along the

terms of the 1935 Indian Arts and Crafts Act. Perhaps he anticipated an investigation

from the Board, a new division in the ranks of Secretary Harold Ickes’s Department of

Interior.

After the Depression, Grand Canyon National Park Superintendents continued to

monitor Hopi House merchandising. In June of 1956, park superintendent John

McLaughlin sent a memo to all concessioners, including Harvey and other companies

contracted to sell goods and services at the park: Babbitt Brothers, Kolbs, Verkamps, and

Utah Parks Co. The Director of the Park Service had issued a brief on souvenirs, which

McLaughlin quoted at length. The federal brief instructed park superintendents to

periodically evaluate souvenirs, ensuring “sales counters or display cases are not

unreasonably flooded with items that are obviously cheap, gaudy, or of questionable

taste.” The policy also required that concessioners segregated displays of Native-made

material “by replacing all genuine Indian hand-made merchandise in one counter or

display case, or in one section of the sales room, or in one room of the building.” The

104 Schweizer goes on to note, “Of course, we also handle a line of novelties, such as manufactured dolls, burnt leather, etc., in some of our news stands and shops and regarding which there can obviously be no misunderstanding,” of its commercial manufacture. Schweizer (Albuquerque) to Tillotson, (Grand Canyon), July 6, 1935. Heard RC 39 (1B): 6

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policy further dictated that concessioners should identify such material as “‘Genuine

Indian hand-made jewelry,’ etc. depending on the merchandise carried.” Finally, the

policy prohibited sales of machine-made objects that “copy, in design, hand-made

jewelry and other hand-crafted items normally considered by the Indians as symbolic,

traditional, or decorative.” The brief singles out machine-made Kachina dolls and

Alaskan totem poles, though it allows machine-made objects “considered by the Indians

as strictly utilitarian,” such as “salt and pepper shakers made in the shape of a tepee.”105

As recently as 1995, when Amfac prepared to reopen the second floor galleries,

merchandising schemes provoked conflict between park supervisors and Hopi House

concessioners.106 Like the Hopi House displays before WWI, beginning in 1935 the

federal government has endeavored to bolster markets for Native-made goods. Both

efforts have worked to regulate consumer demand. The Department of the Interior and

Harvey have thus intervened in American systems of consumption to shape perceptions

of Native American art.

105 John S. McLaughlin, “Superintendent’s Memorandum No. 10 To All Concessioners-GCNP,” June 13, 1956. GRCA 75845. 106 The flashpoint was a plan Amfac devised to mix non-Native items with Native-made goods on the first floor of Hopi House. Park superintendent Robert L. Arnberger wrote to Amfac retail director Steve Lynam, “These types of items do not have a place in the new Hopi House merchandising theme. There is ample opportunity for you to provide replica items in your gift shops at Maswik and Yavapai.” Arnberger (Grand Canyon) to Lynam (Grand Canyon), March 31, 1995. A letter from Arnberger to Lynam the next week expresses disappointment that Amfac had disregarded specific requests about merchandising. Arnberger (Grand Canyon) to Lynam (Grand Canyon), April 7, 1995. GRCA 99899, Folder 1.

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Beyond Demonstration: The Work of Native Artists

Lived experiences at Hopi House were as instructive for Native American artists as they

were for American consumers. And these two sets of experiences are closely linked.

Essentially, work at the site afforded Native artists a degree of intimacy with American

consumers. In this section I move from systems of consumption to consider modes of

production. Here I inquire about the ways Native artists capitalized on work at Hopi

House. What attracted these artists to the site? How might we recognize their experiences

at Hopi House as affecting their later work? Scholars have long recognized that two of

the most famous southwestern Native artists demonstrated their art-making practice at

Hopi House during the first months of 1905, yet scores of artists have followed. In

January 1905, the Hopi-Tewa potter Nampeyo (c. 1860–1942) famously traveled from

the First Mesa Village of Hano to live and work at Hopi House for four months. In

February, the Diné weaver Elle of Ganado also worked there.107 She returned

intermittently for the next two decades, as a photograph from around 1920 in the

collection of the Heard Museum Archives shows Elle working “near the South Rim of the

Grand Canyon,” perhaps at Hopi House (fig. 3.30). Whereas Nampeyo was well known

before working at Hopi House, the Harvey promotional apparatus stoked Elle’s fame. By

demonstrating and posing for photographs, the women experimented with public roles for

Native artists in the twentieth century. If Native people performed cultural identities at

107 February 14, 1905 Schweizer (Albuquerque) to Hubbell (Ganado); April 6, 1905 Schweizer (ABQ) to Hubbell (Ganado); June 26, 1905 Schweizer (Albuquerque) to Hubbell (Ganado); AZ 375, 36.

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Hopi House that differed from lived experiences in local communities, then we might

recognize how such performances constituted lived experiences of their own.

Even when mediated by corporate interests, demonstrating art practice and posing

for photographs allowed Native artists to engage their market and enhance their status as

professional artists in American society. So, how might an awareness of interpersonal

exchanges between Native artists and white tourists modify the critique of Harvey

stagecraft? And how might we understand these meetings from other perspectives?

Moving past person-to-person contact, how might Native artists have seen value in

posing for promotional photography? I ask these questions partly to prompt recognition

of Native agency at Hopi House, and more generally to help restore Indigenous humanity

to the history of southwestern tourism. In many cases, cross-cultural experiences at Hopi

House enabled Native artists to develop a range of strategies for navigating and

controlling the art market. Art historian Jonathan Batkin has suggested a similar

argument regarding silversmithing and performance in New Mexico. Batkin singles out a

former Harvey employee—Joshua Hermeyesva, from Hopi Second Mesa—as “probably

the first independent Native smith to live permanently in an urban setting in the

Southwest.” Though he demonstrated silverwork for Harvey at the San Diego Fair in

1915, Hermeyesva was self-employed in Albuquerque form 1924 to 1933.108 In

108 Jonathan Batkin, The Native American Curio Trade in New Mexico (Santa Fe: Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 2008), 116–18. Though Batkin recognizes the influence of Harvey in the New Mexico Native art market, he is generally unsympathetic to the company. Batkin argues, “the common preoccupation with the Harvey Company as a paradigm for the curio trade is misguided. The company had an enormous influence on tourism and dealt heavily in curios, but it entered the trade in New Mexico more than twenty years after the first curio dealers opened shops there, and it

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establishing an independent practice, Hermeyesva undoubtedly drew on his experiences

demonstrating for Harvey.

Work at Hopi House surely provided similar inspiration for a number of Hopi

people who pursued independent, professional careers as artists. For instance, Bruce

Timeche (1923–1987) worked for Harvey at the canyon before taking up easel painting

as a profession. Timeche grew up making artwork in the kivas at Second Mesa, before

attending boarding school in Phoenix. Through his twenties, Timeche worked at

Harvey’s shop in Bright Angel Lodge at the canyon. In 1958, he returned to school in

Phoenix, enrolling at the Kachina School of Art with a tuition scholarship from Eleanor

Saerle Whitney. In the 1960s and late 1950s, Timeche actively participated in the

institutional world of Native American art, exhibiting at the Heard Museum in Phoenix

and the Philbrook in Tulsa.109 More than feeding into an existing system, Timeche’s work

helped enliven a flat style of “Indian painting” that had calcified into orthodoxy. Consider

his 1959 painting Bi-La-Qwai Kachina (Red Eage Runner) (fig. 3.31). While the

acquired almost all of its inventory from other curio dealers and from traders on the Navajo reservation,” viii. Later, Batkin credits the 1902 silversmithing demonstrations at the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque as the first in New Mexico, and goes on to note some of the problems Harvey had with demonstrators. He summarizes that “The presence of Indians was essential to the Harvey Company’s business mission, but the company insisted on controlling their appearance and behavior,” 115. 109 Tryntje Van Ness Seymour, When the Rainbow Touches Down: The Artists and Stories Behind the Apache, Navajo, Rio Grande Pueblo and Hopi Paintings in the William and Leslie Van Ness Denman Collection (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1988), 253–54. Also, see Gregory Schaaf, “Bruce Timeche,” in St. James Guide to Native American Artists, ed. Roger Matuz (Detroit: St. James Press, 1998), 573–74; Jean Snodgrass King, American Indian Painters: A Biographical Directory (New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1968), 191; Dorothy Dunn, American Indian Painting of the Southwest and Plains Areas (Norman: University of New Mexico Press, 1968), 335.

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compositional isolation and use of Hopi deities as subject are consistent with the

conventions of Pueblo painting, Timeche drew on the history of European painting to

model human figures more naturalistically than many previous Hopi watercolorists.110

Significantly, Timeche’s signature on the painting, “Bruce Timeche ‘Hopi,’” betrays his

understanding of the power of the Hopi label in southwestern Native art marketing.

Hopi House also promoted genealogies of classicism.111 Here I am considering of

Schweizer’s involvement in weaving production. But more to the point, I believe Hopi

House played a crucial role in Nampeyo’s legacy. In the early-1890s, Nampeyo began

quoting in her work patterns and forms from four-hundred-year-old-sherds of Sikyatki

pottery. At this time she become familiar with tourists at First Mesa and Keam’s Trading

Post there. In 1898 a tourist guide introduced Nampeyo to Americans and told of her

110 In July 1959, Timeche sold this painting with two others to Helen Margaret Greene at the Hopi craftsman exhibit at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. On his innovations, Timeche has said, “Most Indian artists stick to one style, and I don’t want to be that way. I thought, if other people do that [three-dimensional, European Style], why can’t I? Just like Leonardo da Vinci said if a bird can fly, why can’t man fly?” Quoted in Seymour, Rainbow Touches Down, 253. 111 Hopi House nurtured some related lineages of Hopi art in the twentieth century. Here I draw on Lévi-Strauss’s concept of “house societies.” With the concept, Lévi-Strauss proposed treating the house as the fundamental unit of kinship. This understanding helps scholars to evade the rigidity of traditional kinship structures. Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982 [orig. French 1975]). Lévi-Strauss’s concept has inspired a critical anthropology of the house. For instance, see Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones, eds., About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Rosemary Joyce and Susan Gillespie, eds., Beyond Kinship: Social and Material Reproduction in House Societies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Applying the concept to Native American art history, we might consider how Hopi House has given rise to multiple mid-century movements in Hopi art.

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revival.112 Harvey sold 42,000 copies of this guide by 1902, transforming Nampeyo

herself into an icon of Hopi pottery. In 1905, her residency at Hopi House provided the

first public showing of her work. A photograph from this time shows Nampeyo’s group

in one of the first-floor rooms at Hopi House (fig. 3.32). Left of the fireplace one man

smokes while another works at a loom. To the right of the fireplace the artist sits, holding

a bowl. Undoubtedly of her own making, she tilts the bowl to show the interior

polychrome painting of the Sikyatki Revival. In the photograph children flank Nampeyo.

These are likely her son Wesley Lesso (1899–1985) and her daughter Fannie (1900–

1987). Fannie grew up to become a well-known potter, working in the revivalist style that

her mother launched, and many of Fannie’s own children also carried the revival forward.

As Fannie’s daughter Tonita Hamilton Nampeyo (b. 1934) has said, “I want to continue

the traditional methods and designs. . . and hand it down to the young ones. That’s the

most important thing, to keep tradition alive.”113 Surely Nampeyo’s success in marketing

112 Walter Hough, The Moki Snake Dance (Chicago: Passenger Dept., Santa Fe Route, 1898). Thanks to Lea McChesney for bringing my attention to Nampeyo’s involvement with tourists at First Mesa in the late-nineteenth century. See Edwin Wade and Lea McChesney, Historic Hopi Ceramics: The Thomas V. Keam Collection of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University (Cambridge: Peabody Museum Press, 1981). For more on Nampeyo’s revival, see Edmund Nequtewa, “Nampeyo, Famous Hopi Potter,” Plateau 15, no. 3 (1943): 40–42; Mary and Harold Colton, “An Appreciation of the Art of Nampeyo and Her Influence on Hopi Pottery,” Plateau 15, no. 3 (1943): 43–45; Barbara Kramer, Nampeyo and Her Pottery (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press), 1996; Mary Ellen Blair and Laurence Blair, The Legacy of a Master Potter: Nampeyo and Her Descendants (Tucson: Treasure Chest Books, 1999); Joseph Traugott, “Fewkes and Nempeyo: Clarifying a Myth-Understanding,” in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories, ed. W. Jackson Rushing III (New York: Routledge, 1999), 7–20; Diane Dittemore, “The Nampeyo Legacy,” Southwest Art 31, no. 3 (August 2001): 175–180. 113 Rick Dillingham, Fourteen Families in Pueblo Pottery (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994).

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her work has partially motivated her family to continue her revival. As I previously

mentioned, today Hopi House sells work by Nampeyo’s descendants. In fact, the second-

floor gallery devotes a freestanding case to the work of Nampeyo’s family. As with

Timeche and his signature, Nampeyo’s descendants tie their work to their personal and

cultural identities. Yet Nampeyo’s descendants link their work and identity in a more

formal manner, by using the vocabulary of the Sikyatki Revival.

Following Nampeyo and her family, a number of Indigenous artists and art

experts occupied the Hopi House apartments, up until the 1960s.114 Next to Hopi House

Harvey created additional lodging for visiting artists with a series of hogans, the

customary Navajo architecture. These hogans were located between Hopi House and

Verkamp’s store, a business separate from Harvey that in fact predates Hopi House in the

Grand Canyon tourist market. Like Hopi House, the hogans hosted a number of resident

artists. The hogans occupy the center of a photograph, which was taken from the roof of

Verkamp’s in the mid-1930s (fig. 3.33). Visible in the bottom left corner are the roof trim

and a floodlight at Verkamp’s, while Tovar looms behind Hopi House and the hogans,

and at top the North Rim of the Canyon forms the horizon. Though no record exists to

document the construction of these hogans, perhaps they were built at the same time as

Hopi House. If so, the weaver Elle of Ganado and her husband Tom may have been some

of the first inhabitants. Another photograph shows one of the hogans as a site of

demonstration (fig. 3.34). Likely taken around WWI, the photograph shows an

unidentified silversmith sitting on a Pendeleton-style blanket and working in front of a

114 Karpinski interview, July 11, 2013.

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hogan. The shallow depth of focus blurs his face, while capturing in detail his hands and

tools. Hopi House featured many Native artists as demonstrators, yet silversmiths proved

to be a particular boon to business.115 Other retailers selling southwestern Native art such

as Vaughn’s emulated this model, sometimes hiring employees directly after they had

worked for Harvey.116 Some of the Diné weavers and smiths who worked at the canyon

include Porcupine Belly, Yashi Tsoni, Tene Tzosi, Capitan Begay, Knockispay, and

Charlie, who was perhaps also known as Charlie Ganado. Almost all of these artists

traveled to the Canyon from 1905 to 1915.

Before the 1920s, few Native employees stayed at the canyon longer than a

couple of months. Family concerns as well as agricultural responsibilities often

compelled Native artists to return home, and it was difficult for Harvey and Hubbell to

anticipate travel needs. Transportation was particularly difficult in the first decade. At

times Hubbell and Harvey struggled to coordinate travel from artists’ homes to the rail

depot in Gallup, then from Gallup to the Grand Canyon. Since Harvey relied on the

Hubbell family to hire artists for the Grand Canyon and Albuquerque businesses, the

Hubbell Papers at the University of Arizona include correspondence about early staffing

at Hopi House (including the aforementioned names). From the Harvey perspective,

staffing problems plagued Hopi House in the early years. The letters from Harvey are

often paternalistic in tone, dismissive of the artists’ perspective. For example, on

February 4, 1907, Schweizer wrote to J.L. Hubbell that Hopi House manager D.E. Smith, 115 Huckel to Hubbell (Ganado), July 20, 1905. AZ 375, 36. 116 In writing a history of Native silversmith demonstrating at Arizona shops—Vaughn’s in Phoenix, the White Hogan in Townsend, Babbitt Brothers in Flagstaff—Diana Pardue begins with Hopi House. Pardue, “Native Silversmiths,” 63.

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“doesn’t want Bert the silver smith now,” as it is not in Harvey’s interest to employ a

demonstrator who “turn[s] out a lot of work steadily as Bert did.” Schweizer goes on to

describe that Bert’s work “was too crude and he only worked to turn out as much weight

as he could in order to make all the money possible.”117 Other correspondence notifies

Hubbell that a silversmith named Charlie will be leaving the Canyon, as he attempted to

sell his work directly to tourists. It is easy to identify the one-dimensional politics of

colonial control in this correspondence. Indeed, many scholars have. Yet a closer

engagement with the letters helps to show that in staffing Hopi House, Harvey responded

to the ongoing commitment that kept Native artists engaged in their communities. In

staffing Hopi House the company also contended with the BIA and its pre-Depression-era

assimilationist policies. In particular, Hopi artists often traveled to the Grand Canyon

with their families, a practice that helped parents avoid sending their children to boarding

schools.118

The much-cited correspondence provides few clues about how the staffing

situation changed after WWI. At this time, Harvey began to employ Native peoples on

longer terms at Grand Canyon Village, and in a wide range of positions. The rise of car

travel in the 1920s and the opening of the Navahopi Highway in 1933—which connects

Grand Canyon National Park to Cameron in the Painted Desert, and now part of Arizona

State Route 64—ameliorated staffing problems. Recall that Fred Kabotie managed the

gift shop at Lookout Studio in 1926 and that Bruce Timeche worked at the Bright Angel 117 Schweizer (Albuquerque) to Hubbell, February 4, 1907. AZ 375, 37. 118 Correspondence from November and December 1905 involved strategizing how to transport the children of Hopi artists to the canyon without alerting the Hopi BIA superintendent Theodore Lemmon. AZ 375.

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Gift Shop in the 1940s and ‘50s. In 1916, employee Sam Pemahinye (Hopi, c. 1876–

1971, also spelled Pemauhye) began a forty-four year career at Hopi House (fig. 3.35). In

addition to painting Kachina figures at the site, he posed for many pictures, told stories,

and participated in nightly dance performances.119 During the interwar years, then,

Harvey “capitalized on hiring Hopis,” according to Sam Vaughn, son of the Phoenix

Indian Store owner. “They clerked at the stores. . . . They were salespeople and

greeters.”120 For Native people, working in a range of positions in the heritage industry

proved fruitful. Some Native workers there began lifelong careers, such as Pemihinye.

Some met spouses, as Bruce Timeche and Catherine Poly met at the canyon and married

in 1948. Some employees raised families, and sent their children to the integrated school

at Grand Canyon Village.121

By the 1930s, a workforce of Hopi, Diné, and Havasupai peoples had largely

stabilized at Grand Canyon Village. Anthropologist Richard Clemmer describes that

during this time, “the core of Hopis at ‘Hopi House’ was a cluster of affinally-related

families from Shipaulovi, Mishongnovi, and Shungopavi,” villages on the Second

Mesa.122 Hopi people from Second Mesa who worked for Harvey at the Grand Canyon

included Porter Timeche, his son Bruce, Paul Saufkie, Fred Kabotie, and Edith 119 “Hopi Sam Retires,” GRCA 108308. Pemahinye is associated with the Hopi Second Mesa village of Shungopavi, though he lived in a Navajo hogan at Grand Canyon Village. For an image of Pemahinye at his Grand Canyon home, see NAU.PH95.48.1473. 120 Sam Vaughn, quoted in Pardue, “Native Silversmiths,” 64. Batkin has demonstrated how demonstration work in New Mexico curio shops provided a good alternative to other forms of labor during the Depression. Batkin, Curio Trade, 116–18. 121 Homer Yoyetewa interview, August 12, 1998, by Phyllis Yoyetewa, GRCA 70893, p. 1; Eleanor “Pinky” Moore Oesdean interview, November 4, 1978, GRCA 36200, p. 15. 122 Richard Clemmer, Roads in the Sky: The Hopi Indians in a Century of Change (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 137.

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Longhoma (whose uncle was Porter Timeche). From the 1930s through the 1950s, Porter

Timeche was one of Harvey’s most valued employees at Grand Canyon Village. More

than a clerk or greeter, Timeche provided expertise in Hopi material culture (fig. 3.36).

During this time, Porter Timeche and Myra Joshua (Diné) occupied the second-floor

apartment at Hopi House, raising three children there.123 In the 1930s, Bruce Timeche,

the oldest child, attended boarding school in Phoenix; he may have lived at Hopi House

during the 1940s when he worked at Bright Angel. Native people in general, and Hopis in

particular, made themselves at home in Grand Canyon Village by creating communities

there, but also through their own cosmological connections with the canyon as site of

emergence. Hopi House is not isolated from Hopi—as some critics charge—but rather

counts as one more place Hopi people called home in the twentieth century as they

expanded the Hopi world.

Work at Grand Canyon Village undoubtedly affected the goals Native peoples

pursued when they left the canyon. The story of a postcard shows how Native people may

have conceived of demonstration work at the Grand Canyon as a way to perform

professional identities as artists (fig. 3.37). In the postcard, which Porter Timeche

colored, a Paul Saufkie (1903–1998, Hopi) demonstrates silverwork in a hogan. Saufkie

arrived at the Canyon in 1935, as Harvey prepared to open the Colter-designed Bright

Angel Lodge. Harvey had hired and trained a number of Hopi employees to work as

bellhops at the new Lodge, including Saufkie. In addition to his assignment to move

luggage, at the canyon Saufkie served as a textile expert and conservator (fig. 3.38). He 123 Edith Longhoma interview, September 12, 1998, by Phyllis Yoyetewa, GRCA 70891, p. 2.

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also modeled for promotional photography with his family. Though Harvey had not hired

Saufkie as a silver demonstrator, he knew the art and was ready with a set of tools when

the Indian Department needed to take a photograph for the silversmithing postcard.

In a sense, Saufkie was seizing on the opportunity to perform as a Native artist.

He perhaps modeled this decision on the strategies of Elle and Nampeyo, which Saufkie

would have recognized in the 1930s as successful. After working for Harvey at the

Canyon, Paul Saufkie began demonstrating silverwork at Vaughn’s in Phoneix. In the

1940s, he went on to work as a teacher with Fred Kabotie at Hopi High School. There,

Saufkie actualized this photographic performance as he developed a style of silver

overlay that is distinct from Zuni and Diné silverwork (fig. 3.39). Public demonstrations

and photographic performances thus allowed Native artists early opportunities to become

intimate with the market for Native art, laying the groundwork for more sophisticated

strategies for controlling and marketing Native art later in the twentieth century.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, understanding the visual work of colonialism was key in

recognizing the political dimensions of art. Attending to the politics of the early

Southwest tourist trade has enriched our understanding of cross-cultural representation.

While valuable for fostering discourses of self-determination, this writing has done little

to advance a view of the art or sense of the artists at Hopi House. Criticisms of Hopi

House reinforce the one-sided politics of colonialism by failing to account for historical

Indigenous perspectives. To be sure, Native peoples at the Canyon bring their own

personal experiences and perspectives to the tourist encounter. I hope, then, that we can

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begin to move beyond the critical, if familiar, deconstructions and instead engage with a

longer, more varied history of Hopi House as a site of encounter and exchange.

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Chapter Four

Photography: Will Wilson’s Animate Dwellings

Auto Immune Response, an ongoing multimedia project by Diné (Navajo) artist Will

Wilson, begins with a photograph of a flooded field (fig. 4.1). The horizon cuts across the

picture. Watery ground mirrors the sky. A fence brings geometric order to the scene.

Seen in profile at right, the protagonist of the series takes in the view. This is Wilson

himself, playing an unnamed character. Behind the fence his spectral double stands,

pinching pollen.1 A mushroom cloud billows on the horizon, conjuring a history of

environmental disaster on Navajo land. In 1979 in Church Rock, New Mexico, a dam

burst at a uranium mine and spewed over ninety million gallons of contaminated water in

Dinétah, the homeland of the Diné people.2 It remains the largest radioactive accident in

the United States. Through much of the twentieth century the land dispersed radiation as

miners trudged home uranium dust on their clothes and skin.3 Runoff from mines

contaminated drinking water. Some Diné people built homes out of rocks discarded from

the mines, unaware of the dangers of radiation poisoning. In floods and trickles through 1 Diné peoples have many ritual uses for corn pollen. With links to a number of origin stories, the substance is used in prayer, sand painting, and to mark hogans during house blessing ceremonies. Thomas M. Raitt, “The Ritual Meaning of Corn Pollen among the Navajo Indians,” Religious Studies 23, no. 4 (Dec. 1987): 523–530. 2 Dinétah is a vast stretch of land between four sacred, animate mountains: Dookʼoʼsłííd (San Francisco Peaks in northern Arizona), Dibé Ntsaa (Hesperus Mountain in southwestern Colorado), Sisnaajiní (Blanca Peak in south central Colorado), and Tsoodził (Mount Taylor in northwestern New Mexico). 3 Peter Eichstaedt, If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native Americans (Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 1994); Doug Brugge, Timothy Benally, and Esther Yazzie-Lewis, eds., The Navajo People and Uranium Mining (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007).

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the twentieth century, nuclear waste polluted a place where people trace their genealogy

to the very earth.4 This environmental degradation followed a difficult nineteenth

century; in 1864, fewer than two decades after the United State acquired the southwest

territories, the Army marched Navajo peoples hundreds of miles from their homeland to

internment camps in an event known as the Long Walk. In the photograph water floods

the field. Radioactive seepage and haunting memories of disasters in Dinétah—disease,

the long walk, imprisonment, boarding schools—wash over the land as Wilson’s

character bears witness.

In Auto Immune Response Wilson develops a picture of the Diné world after the

end. While many viewers may fear some future apocalypse, the catastrophe in Auto

Immune Response has already occurred. In the third photograph of the narrative series,

Wilson’s character encounters an abandoned hogan—a circular, one room Navajo

house—and takes refuge (fig. 4.2). A corbelled roof fills the top of the picture. The

photograph, which Wilson made by digitally overlapping individual photographs, curves

at the ends to mimic the circular space of the hogan. In the center of the photograph the

character reclines on a cot woven from plastic tubing, positioned against the far wall.

Light issues from below, suggesting a futuristic technology. Active machines fill the

picture: the glowing cot, the computer operating nearby, the camera at left that stands and

peers back at viewers. Though it may appear inert—an edifice made from logs and

packed earth—the hogan belongs on this list of agents. Diné religious thought recognizes 4 The Navajo believe that living beings called yé’ii, or Talking Gods, inhabit the mountains so that earth surface people (the Diné) can communicate with the Holy People. John R. Farella, The Main Stalk: A Synthesis of Navajo Philosophy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984), 72–3.

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the animacy of hogans. Since individual hogans are bound to the first dwelling made by

the Holy People, the hogan form relates to the origin of humanity. Accordingly, the acts

of building and blessing a hogan amount to a remaking of the world. Wilson’s treatment

of architectural space in Auto Immune Response—the agency he gives hogans in the

story—underscores Diné beliefs about the animacy of house forms.

In this chapter I examine Wilson’s vision of a regenerative Diné architecture. I

contend that Wilson’s photographic treatment of the hogan marks a significant

intervention into the history of architectural photography, where buildings have generally

appeared to be more passive. I begin by describing how the narrative of Auto Immune

Response employs Diné conceptions (religious and historical) about the hogan. Then, to

better apprehend how Wilson contributes to an iconography of architecture, I place Auto

Immune Response in context with earlier photographs of indigenous North American

dwellings. Edward Curtis’s architectural photography features significantly here. From

1904 to 1930, Curtis traveled extensively through Western North America to photograph

Native communities for his book and folio project The North American Indian, published

in twenty volumes between 1907 and 1930. Curtis photographed what he believed were

the last traces of Native cultures in order to create an archive, a compendium of authentic

indigenous life ways. Though he is known best for representing indigenous people, Curtis

also photographed buildings.5 Curtis’s photographs seem to transform Native dwellings

into memorials for supposedly vanishing peoples. Curtis and Wilson thus both use

5 The lone publication devoted to Curtis’s architectural photography is primarily an illustrated volume: Don Solomon and Mary Solomon, eds., Sites and Structures: The Architectural Photographs of Edward S. Curtis (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000).

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architectural photography to tell a story about the catastrophic effects of contact on

Native peoples in the twentieth century. I conclude by looking at the most recent works in

Auto Immune Response, where Wilson actualizes the religious metaphor of living,

regenerative hogans. Unlike Curtis, Wilson harnesses the transformative power of hogans

in his photographic vision of a reanimated Dinétah. Comparing architectural subject

matter in Wilson’s and Curtis’s works suggests some ways that photography may work

both to chronicle past changes in the built environment and to build future Native worlds.

Diné Architecture: History and Thought

One of the first written and photographic accounts of Diné housing appeared in 1895.

The annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) included an article on

hogans by Cosmos Mindeleff. Since 1882, Mindeleff had worked as a surveyor and

model maker at the BAE and the National Museum (two nineteenth-century branches of

the Smithsonian Institution). Mindeleff spent considerable time in the Southwest in the

1880s, where he measured and mapped western Pueblos villages as well as Ancestral

Puebloan sites. In the 1895 article Mindeleff describes the history of hogans and recent

changes in Navajo building styles. He illustrates a hogan, and describes how to build this

type of house (fig. 4.3). The forked ends of three timbers conjoin to form the pinnacle of

the hogan, an engineering not dissimilar from the three-pole tipis discussed in chapter

one. Rising over a shallow dugout floor, these roughly dressed piñon logs mark the north,

west, and south sides of the building. Two slanting timbers rest on the tripod to form an

east-facing vestibule. This is completed with two vertical posts marking the entryway and

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a small, flat roof. Around the main structure smaller limbs and branches, typically piñon

and cedar, fill in the walls. A layer of cedar bark covers the hogan, which is finished by

packing earth around the exterior wall.6 An opening in the center of the roof allows

smoke to escape. Diné peoples refer to this as the “male” forked-pole hogan. This is

distinguished from another, “female,” style of hogan, the type that Wilson’s character

finds in Auto Immune Response # 3 (see fig. 4.2). Like the male hogan, a female hogan

consists of a single room. These typically follow a hexagonal or circular floor plan with

walls perpendicular to the ground (rather than angled walls) and a dramatically corbeled

“whirling” log ceiling.

Mindeleff noted, as have many subsequent writers, that Diné peoples historically

ascribed to hogans complex religious meanings relating to forces of life and death. If a

person dies inside of a hogan, its remaining occupants typically abandon the dwelling.

They either remove the deceased through a hole chopped in the north wall or, in the

winter when frozen ground prohibits burial, the family seals off all hogan openings.7 This

is known as a “dead building,” and is generally avoided.8

Hogans additionally relate to life-giving forces. In Diné creation stories, the first

people ascended through three underworlds to reach the surface of the earth. When they

arrived at the surface, according to Mindeleff’s telling, the god of the South and East

“imparted to each group of mankind an appropriate architecture—to the tribes of the 6 Cosmos Mindeleff, “Navaho Houses,” Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898), 489–493. 7 Stephen C. Jett and Virginia E. Spencer, Navajo Architecture: Forms, History, Distributions (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981), 28. 8 Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton, Native American Architecture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), 330.

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plains, skin lodges; to the Pueblos, stone houses; and to the Navajo, huts of wood and

earth and summer shelters.”9 In her study of Diné cosmology, Trudy Griffin-Pierce notes

this religious significance.

Some Navajos conceive of the earth’s surface as being covered by an enormous

transparent hogan of the older, conical, forked-poled style, with the Sacred

Mountains as its cornerposts…The hogan is a living entity, with the smokehole as

its breathing hole; this is where prayers emerge and rise to the heavens.10

The hogan is the place where the world began and the place where all things begin. To

understand the cosmological significance of the hogan, ethnographer John R. Farella

argues, is to understand Navajo thought. Farella characterizes the hogan as a “master

encoding.”11 Through ceremony and material, hogans bind the lives of their inhabitants

with the origin of the world.

House blessing ceremonies allow families to transfigure their homes into

legendary hogans where the Holy People planned the creation of human being. During

the rites each house becomes the first dwelling. The hogans of the mythical Holy People

are made of sunbeams, jewel posts, sacred minerals such as shell and turquoise, and

wrapped in rainbows. To link actual hogans metonymically to the original, mythic

dwellings, some Diné homeowners place pieces of turquoise or shell beneath the door. To

bless the hogan, the household head builds a fire, marks corn pollen on the house posts in

9 Mindeleff, “Navajo Houses,” 488–89. 10 Trudy Griffin-Pierce, Earth is My Mother, Sky is My Father: Space, Time, and Navajo Sandpainting (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992). 11 Farella, Main Stalk, 87.

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cardinal directions, and recites a prayer.12 These rituals mimic actions the Holy People

performed when they built the first hogan.13 Each house is a sacred domestic space, tied

ritually and materially to legendary hogans and the worlds under and above the surface of

the earth. Small shells and prayers mend tears in the fabric of time and space. For Diné

peoples, then, hogans enable the perpetual remaking of the world. In other words, hogans

facilitate reanimation and they are themselves animate.14 In part because of this

connection to the origin of humanity, as well as a belief in general animism in the world,

Diné people often treat hogans as living beings that require feeding and purification.

Through centuries of change and adaptation in regional building styles, Diné

peoples have come to see hogans as a reflection of themselves in the landscape. When

they migrated to the Southwest from western Canada, about a millennium ago,

Athapaskan-speaking people brought with them the basic structure of what would

become the forked-pole hogan.15 Anthropologist David Brugge contends that in the mid-

eighteenth century Navajo peoples began to understand the hogan as a sign of self-

distinction.16 Starting around 1750 the Diné consciously distinguished themselves from

12 The Blessingway is part of a large body of songs and prayers. The House Blessing Ceremony has received significant scholarly attention. Charlotte J. Frisbie, “Ritual Drama in the Navajo House Blessing Ceremony,” in Southwestern Indian Ritual Drama, ed. Charlotte J. Frisbie (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980), 161–198; David P. McAllester, trans., Hogans: Navajo Houses and House Songs (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1980). 13 Frisbie, “Ritual Drama,” 171. 14 Nabokov and Easton, Native American Architecture, 326. 15 Nabokov and Easton, Native American Architecture, 325. In the late-nineteenth century Athapaskan peoples in Canada made similar structures. 16 David M. Brugge, “Pueblo Influence on Navajo Architecture” El Palacio 75, no. 3 (Autumn 1968): 14–20. See also Stephen C. Jett, “Cultural Fusion in Native-American

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Pueblo peoples, who had taken refuge in Dinétah following the Spanish reconquest of

New Mexico in the 1690s.17 From their neighbors, the Navajo peoples took a range of

spiritual beliefs, agricultural techniques, foods, and art forms.18 Pueblo architecture, and

its perceived animacy, also influenced Diné culture. When sheltering Pueblo refugees,

Diné builders began excavating their hogan floors and using masonry and adobe in

addition to the standard material of wooden logs.19 After this period of intensive cultural

exchange, so the anthropological argument goes, Diné peoples began to understand the

hogan as a prime example of the difference between themselves and their closest

neighbors. After all, permanent Pueblo villages of abutting, massive apartment blocks

scarcely resemble dispersed camps of round hogans with distinctive conical roofs.

During the 1880s, Diné building practices began to reflect increased interaction

between Diné peoples and the US government and economy. In 1848, the United States

acquired the southwestern territories, which included Dinétah, from Mexico. Then,

beginning in 1864, the US Army deported Diné peoples from their homeland in northern

Arizona to Fort Sumner and the adjacent Bosque Redondo Reservation in Eastern New

Mexico. This arduous journey, the Long Walk, resulted in hundreds of deaths. Internment

lasted until 1868. On the Navajo Reservation in the 1870s, Indian agents tried convincing

Architecture: The Navajo Hogan,” in A Cultural Geography of North American Indians, ed. Thomas E. Ross and Tyrel G. Moore (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), 243–56. 17 Garrick Alan Bailey and Roberta Glenn Bailey, A History of the Navajos: The Reservation Years (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1986), 14. In 1680, Puebloan peoples organized a revolt, driving Spanish colonizers from their lands for about a dozen years. 18 Jett and Spencer, Navajo Architecture, 4. 19 Nabokov and Easton, Native American Architecture, 330.

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Diné peoples to build settler-style houses and to reside in them year-round.20 Diné

families typically tended flocks of sheep so they split their time between two homes: a

summer hogan in mountain pastures and a winter hogan on the arid steppes of Dinétah.

Around this time American and Canadian governments spurred other indigenous peoples

on reservations to build non-traditional, permanent structures. Targeting culturally

specific building practices was one part of broad federal initiatives to wholly reform, and

thus eradicate, Native cultures. In the evolutionist thinking of the time, housing was

understood to indicate the cultural status of its inhabitants and dwelling permanently in

one place was supposed to represent a more advanced social stage.

In the 1880s, a slump in the wool market and the introduction of the railroad

catalyzed intercultural exchange.21 Diné buildings increasingly incorporated industrially

produced materials such as ax-cut wood and, later, milled lumber. By 1882, the federal

Indian agency at the Navajo Reservation constructed a sawmill near a stand of trees for

Diné people to use in building permanent, multi-room houses.22 In 1884, the new BIA

agent, John H. Bowman, reported an increase in construction projects. In his annual

report the agent estimated about twenty-five construction sites active on the reservation,

and noted that “I have given all of those who were ready to build the necessary window

20 Jett and Spencer, Navajo Architecture, 107. Scott Ashley Bruton, “The American Dream in Indian Country: Housing, Property, and Assimilation on the Navajo Reservation and Beyond,” PhD diss., Rutgers University, History, 2016. 21 Erika Marie Bsumek, Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868–1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). 22 Bruton, “The American Dream in Indian Country,” 80, 98.

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and door casings.”23 In his 1895 article Mindeleff describes how Navajo buildings

changed stylistically in the previous quarter century—the period immediately following

the long walk and internment at Bosque Redondo—with an increase in permanent

dwellings.24 Distinguished from an older pattern of dispersed buildings and seasonal

movement, non-Native dwellings and entire villages appeared across the Reservation.

This trend in Navajo building continued in the twentieth century. By the 1930s, some

Navajo peoples constructed large, multi-room homes.

The new structures were rectangular in form with pitched roofs. Made of masonry

or cribbed logs, they typically consisted of one or two rooms. Mindeleff illustrated such a

house, a large rectangular structure (fig. 4.4). The stone building features two doors and

two windows, with a pitched roof and gable end. A chimney reaches up from a corner of

the building and not, as with a hogan, from the center. A Diné man, Bitcai, owned the

house.25 In the photograph the occupants sit in a row outside of their home and face the

camera. They wear velvet dresses, calico shirts, denim jeans, and jewelry of silver and

turquoise. This intercultural style of dress became popular on the Navajo Reservation at

the time. The velvet dresses largely replaced wool dresses that women previously wove

for themselves. By mixing materials and forms from diverse sources, this cosmopolitan

dress style broadly paralleled changes in the built environment. By the 1970s, a visitor to

the Navajo Reservation could find trailers next to hogans and log houses in family camps.

In many cases, however, families have used houses as storage facilities while continuing 23 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the year 1884 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1984), 135. 24 Mindeleff, “Navaho Houses,” 469–517. 25 Mindeleff, “Navaho Houses,” 504.

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to live in nearby hogans.26 Navajo peoples have incorporated American building styles,

like so many foreign influences, selectively and on their own terms. Today, many Diné

people build and use hogans as part of architecturally diverse family compounds.

Building A Hogan, Breaking the Frame

In the narrative of Auto Immune Response, the figure encounters a hogan, takes refuge,

and then sets out again. Auto Immune Response #4 shows the dark hogan interior (fig.

4.5). The sun has risen. Light blasts in from the chimney aperture, open door, and

windows. Raking light rays strike the corbeled ceiling, creating a dramatic range in tone

from brightly highlighted planes to solid black crevices. Below, the cot lies empty. The

figure has departed the shelter. The next two photographs, numbers five and six in the

series, show the figure wearing a gas mask as he surveys the post-apocalyptic landscape.

In the sixth photograph, he stands at the edge of a flooded field (fig. 4.6). The landscape

of the sixth photograph resembles that of the first (see fig. 4.1), yet now the atmosphere

has swept away the mushroom cloud. Standing at left in Auto Immune Response #6, the

figure wears a gasmask and—unlike Auto Immune Response #1—he looks back at the

viewer. In Auto Immune Response #6 the swirling clouds overhead recall the corbeled

roof of the female-type hogan from Auto Immune Response #4. In the fourth and sixth

photographs, a vertical element (a chimney pipe in one photograph, a fence post in the

other) rises up in the center to meet an opening. The sky in Auto Immune Response #6

thus evokes the “enormous transparent hogan” that covers Dinétah.

26 Jett and Spencer, Navajo Architecture, 111–13.

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In the Auto Immune Response series, a Diné person occupies the polluted

landscape. This may appear to be a rather straight-forward claim to the land; no doubt the

photograph advances this territorial contention. In Auto Immune Response, though,

Wilson engages with the schemas of post-apocalyptic narratives. This allows viewers to

glimpse the previous world but not to experience it.27 Wilson thus recognizes the

impossibility of any nostalgic return to the Diné world that existed before the Church

Rock Spill, boarding schools, and the Long Walk. This setting, this flooded landscape,

requires not only reoccupation but also reanimation. In Auto Immune Response the figure

engages with the past while avoiding the melancholic longings of nostalgia: the desire for

an impossible return.

In Auto Immune Response #7, the character withdraws to an industrial space

where he begins to construct a new hogan from metal parts (fig. 4.7). Again, the character

appears doubled. The two figures wear gas masks and review plans. One leans toward a

computer. His arm extends in a way that brings his ketoh, a type of wrist band popular

among Diné silver workers, in close proximity with the glowing screen. The other figure

sits on the cot and studies sheet of paper—blueprints, perhaps. A partially constructed

metal hogan fills the industrial space at back and at right. Though this metal-frame hogan

may appear to provide the character with much-needed shelter, the permeability of its

walls suggests another possibility. This post-apocalyptic hogan is a place where the world

27 The emotional tenor of the 2002 post-apocalyptic zombie film 28 Days Later, for example, is established when the protagonist, Jim, returns to the house of his dead parents and views a home movie taken just days before the end. For Jim, quotidian acts in the footage, such as his mother unpacking groceries, provoke an intense melancholy punctuated by the realization that he will never return to that world.

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after the end—with all its hauntings and irretrievable memories—coincides with the

Navajo world at the beginning of time. Here, a return to origins is not entirely possible

because a survivor can relate to the former world through its wreckage alone. Only

“leftovers” from that world, which include remnants from post-industrial global society,

endure for Wilson’s character to repurpose. When Wilson’s character builds a new

hogan, presumably reworking flotsam, he simultaneously begins to rebuild and

regenerate the world. This reanimation hinges on the power of hogans in Diné religious

thought.

This hogan is made of what appear to be modular components, enabling Wilson to

transport the structure. Wilson has used the structure in a variety of photographic and

spatial contexts. Wilson made the first seven photographs in Auto Immune Response in

2005. He displayed the work that year along with his metal-frame hogan at the Heard

Museum in Phoenix (fig. 4.8). The next year, he installed Auto Immune Response at the

National Museum of the American Indian-Heye Center in New York City. In these

installations, the metal hogan appeared on the gallery floor and large-scale photographic

prints hung on the walls. Viewers thus encountered the hogan at the same time they saw

its photographic image in Auto Immune Response #7. This installation links the hogan in

the gallery space, then, with the narrative setting of the photographs.28 In addition to this

28 As Jennifer Vigil describes it, “Placing the hogan and bed in the gallery brings the scenes to life and enhances the viewer’s connection with the images and to Wilson’s message. The viewer of the installation then enters Wilson’s world both visually through the photographs and physically through the props. Because of the scale of the photographs, it is difficult to objectify or distance oneself from these images or their context.” Jennifer Vigil, “Will Wilson: Fellowship Artist,” in Diversity and Dialogue: The Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, ed. James Nottage (Indianapolis:

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perceptual connection between structure and image, the photographs and the metal hogan

share a similar technique of production—each is made from compiling numerous

component parts. The many blocks of the hogan enable countless configurations. The

compiled pictures form irregularly shaped compositions that expose their own process of

making, their stitched-togetherness. Creating perceptual and conceptual pathways

between the gallery and space of the picture, Wilson breaks the frame of the photographic

print.

But how, in the first place, does photography frame the built environment? How

does it affect perceptions of architecture? Photographs flatten buildings. Photographs cut

structures from their environments, transposing geographically situated constructions into

images that migrate. A person can walk around, enter, and touch a structure. A camera

can only meet its walls from a distance to record the look of its surfaces. Photographs

present less than half the surface area of most buildings, an incomplete rendering. We

might call this the flattening effect, the partial conversion of lived and embodied spaces

into graphic artworks. As a translation of forms, photography allows viewers to reflect on

spatial constructions, to review familiar built environments, and to imagine far-flung

places. Photographers have alternately embraced this flattening effect and sought to

overcome it. By marshaling the agency of the hogan in the narrative of Auto Immune

Response, and displaying the metal hogan in the gallery next to the photographs, Wilson

seeks to push against the flattening effects of photography. This installation advances a Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 2007), 100. Two of Wilson’s earlier gallery installations fused architectural and photographic elements. These include his 1993 “Sacred Space” installation at Oberlin College and his 1997 installation “Ki yaa aanii Nishli,” at ARC gallery in Albuquerque.

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particular understanding of how photography relates to the world, of how photography

not only cuts images from the world but also shapes human experience in the world.

I claim that we can see Wilson’s work in Auto Immune Response as contending

with the historical photography. Wilson’s photographic engagement with the animacy of

Diné hogans marks a significant intervention in architectural photography. Scholars have

recognized how Wilson’s work relates to Navajo ecologies and built environments.29

Those topics come into play here. Yet we still need to examine the artist’s significant

contribution to the genre of architectural photography. To start, Wilson has described his

landscape photographs in Auto Immune Response as relating to photography from

geologic and ethnographic surveys that followed the Civil War.30 As I describe in the

next section, federally sponsored surveys aimed to map the dramatic terrain and account

for the diverse populations in the far western and southwestern territories. The resulting

archive would then aid map makers, geologists, museum curators, government officials,

and the like. These surveys produced some of the first comprehensive photographs of

Native American architecture, pictures which mostly show villages in relation to their

surrounding natural sites. Survey photographers typically approached buildings as fixed

and stable, as objects for scientific documentation. 29 Vigil, “Will Wilson”; Janet Berlo and Jessica Horton, “Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and ‘New Materialisms’ in Contemporary Art,” Third Text 27, no. 1 (January 2013): 25–26. For a consideration of how another Diné artist, Alberta Thomas, created beauty in a polluted world, see Janet Catherine Berlo, “Alberta Thomas, Navajo Pictorial Arts, and Ecocrisis in Dinétah,” in A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, ed. Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 237–253. 30 “Discussion with Will Wilson and Amy Scott, Chief Curator at the Autry Museum of the West,” Vimeo video, 9:46, filmed from a public conversation in Santa Fe on January 13, 2017, posted by “Peters Projects,” April 4, 2017. https://vimeo.com/211534495

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Survey Photography

So far, I have attempted to relate the function of the hogan in Auto Immune Response to

Diné ideas about architecture, the history of the built environment in Dinétah, and

Wilson’s vision of catastrophe in the Navajo homeland. Wilson draws the transformative

power of hogans into his photographic series, upending the traditional relationship

between cameras and buildings. I would like now to consider this history of architectural

photography. Buildings have long attracted photographers, since the earliest years of

photographic technologies. In 1839, the French government acknowledged Jacque

Daguerre for inventing photography. At that time, the politician François Arago

recognized the value of photography for scholarship, in particular the copying of

hieroglyphs from Egyptian monuments—buildings in a distant land.31 The first project to

photograph significant architectural sites inspired the French album Excursions

daguerriennes: vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe (1841–1842). This

album featured bound lithographic prints of European cathedrals and monuments of

classical antiquity. Lithographers based their work on some of the earliest photographs of

places like the Acropolis, St. Mark’s cathedral in Venice, and the Alhambra. This

appeared for a popular readership, as opposed to a technical archive.32

31 Dominique Fronçois Arago, “Report,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 17. Of course, the origins of photography are more complex than a single inventor’s breakthrough. As Daguerre developed his photographic process, Henry Fox Talbot simultaneously developed another process for chemically fixing images. Both men contributed to a global search for ways to produce images chemically. Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). 32 Joan M. Schwartz, “The Geography Lesson: Photographs and the Construction of Imaginative Geographies,” Journal of Historical Geography 22, no. 1 (1996): 16–45.

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The number of architectural surveys soon multiplied, with photography playing a

key role.33 In 1851, the French government sponsored La Mission Héliographique, a

survey of French buildings and monuments, mostly medieval. The government hoped to

create an archive of French architecture to establish a record of the past, a baseline for

future efforts to preserve the national patrimony. Around this time ideas about

architectural preservation and restoration changed in France. As the modern French

nation state took shape, administrators, artists, and historians took new interest in the

remaining medieval structures. These nineteenth-century photographic surveys thus

helped to reformulate and buttress national identities.

The work of La Mission Héliographique encapsulates the tension between the

documentary power of photography and the artistic will of photographers. Take, for

example, a picture Édouard Baldus made of the Cloister of Saint Trophîme in Arles for

La Mission Héliographique (fig. 4.9). The photograph provides technical information

about the scale of the north gallery of the Cloister, the condition of its statuary, and the

construction of its barrel vault. To create such a wide view, Baldus exposed ten negatives

and later pieced them together. In the darkroom he also deepened the tone of the

33 Writing about Excursions daguerriennes, M. Christine Boyer contends that daguerreotypy allowed for modes of picturing the past. Boyer writes, “In the pages of an illustrated book, between the text and the image, the imagination took flight, giving substance to legends from the Qur’an to the Bible, rendering knowledge about architecture and places not only collectible but palpable and visible. The book, the encyclopaedia, the archive, had met its ultimate ally—the daguerrotype, which could retain for all to see the entire historical setting in which a monument stood, forging a new way of writing and visualizing history.” M. Christine Boyer, “La Mission Héliographique: Architectural Photography, Collective Memory, and the Patrimony of France, 1851,” in Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, ed. Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan (London: I. B. Taurus, 2003), 36.

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shadows, imbuing the scene with a romantic sense of the past.34 Art historian Christine

Boyer argues La Mission Héliographique was, “destined for the work of classification,

storage, and preservation, and simultaneously the opposite, constructing an imaginative

geography, a mental map of time, places, and events.”35 Photographers working for La

Mission Héliographique sought to capture the spirit of the ruins by darkening shadows or

joining multiple negatives to create desired views. These photographs affect, as Boyer

argues, the view among French citizens that their local monuments related to a broader

national history.

National survey movements proliferated globally as the nineteenth century

continued.36 Beginning in the late 1880s, for instance, photographic surveys took place

across the U.K. Amateur photographers working in photographic societies and camera

clubs recorded significant national sites and landscapes, aiming to generate a

photographic archive of British history. The overriding goal was to record significant

traces of the past during a time of large-scale changes in infrastructure, architecture, and

the patterns of daily life. As industry continued to alter British cities and landscapes,

remnants of the medieval past accrued greater symbolic meaning. The photographs vary

widely in style. Most photographs captured views of the built environment, though a

section of the project focused on folk life. The village and the parish church assumed

34 Malcolm Daniel, The Photographs of Édouard Baldus (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994), 21–22. 35 Boyer, “La Mission Héliographique,” 53–54. 36 K. E. Foote, “Relics of London: Photographs of a Changing Victorian City,” History of Photography 11, no. 2 (1987): 133–53; Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

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particular significance as sites of memory. Anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards emphasizes

the complex relation between the survey photographs and the contemporaneous British

historical imagination: the photographic surveys at once engaged with the British past

and future. On the one hand, photographers made romantic and nostalgic pictures of

ruined structures. Edwards claims these photographs add value to the built environment

by creating “fertile allegories and metaphors for the past.”37 For instance, many

photographs treat churches as symbols of a rural community—the space where the

collective joins—and its endurance through centuries. On the other hand, surveys sought

to scientifically record the places of English history through a mechanical image-making

process: photography. The audience intended to view these pictorial records did not yet

exist, since photographers imagined their works as providing a baseline, a condition

report, on significant sites in order to aide future study and preservation.

The US federal government sponsored a number of surveys to explore, map, and

report on the newly acquired western territories. These surveys—which in many ways

preceded the BAE expeditions that employed Mindeleff—often included photographers.

For example, Timothy O’Sullivan accompanied Clarence King’s exploration of the

fortieth parallel and then worked on the Wheeler Survey.38 Surveys gave rise to early

photographs of indigenous dwellings in the West, including images of Ancestral

Puebloan ruins that William Henry Jackson made in 1875 and exhibited the next year,

37 Edwards, Camera as Historian, 176. 38 Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

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along with small-scale models of the ruins, at the 1876 world’s fair in Philadelphia.39

Photographer John K. Hillers also presented views of the American West at Philadelphia

in 1876. Hillers made his first western photographs when he accompanied John Wesley

Powell on his famous 1871 Colorado River trip. Over the following decade he

photographed western landscapes, peoples, and villages on multiple projects for Powell.

Hillers exhibited in Philadelphia, among other photographs, a picture of the Hopi village

Walpi that he had taken earlier that year (fig. 4.10).40 At the center of the image, the first

Hopi Mesa juts dramatically into the distance. Walpi rises above the horizon and perches

on the precipice. The ground takes up the bottom two thirds of the photograph, providing

a detailed view of the rocky environment and the steep grade on the side of the mesa.

In 1879, Hillers participated in the first United States Geological Survey (USGS).

This federally sponsored venture was linked to John Wesley Powell and his nascent BAE

(for more on the formation of the BAE, see chapter one of this dissertation). In the course

of the initial USGS expedition in 1879, Hillers made one of the first systematic attempts

to record Native dwellings photographically. His photograph of Jemez Pueblo is

representative of his work that year (fig. 4.11). He pictures the village as a horizontal

band running across the center of the image. This broad and distant view omits figures.

He gives the bottom half of the picture over to rocky, sloping ground. The Jemez

Mountains in the distance anchor the scene in an identifiable geography. This

39 Don D. Fowler, A Laboratory for Anthropology: Science and Romanticism in the American Southwest, 1846–1930 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 89. 40 Don D. Fowler, The Western Photographs of John K. Hillers: Myself in the Water (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 77, 109.

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composition indicates the location of the Pueblo and, with the rocky ground, includes a

geological detail of the area. Taken from a position slightly higher than the village, the

photograph shows how Jemez Pueblo relates spatially to its surrounding environment.

The margins of the picture furnish invaluable information for distant mapmakers,

ethnographers, and the like. On the 1879 trip, Hillers accompanied ethnologists Matilda

Coxe Stevenson, James Stevenson, and Frank Hamilton Cushing to Pueblo towns in the

Southwest. From 1879 to 1882 Hillers traversed territorial New Mexico and Arizona on

USGS and BAE projects. Hillers worked closely with James Stevenson. Together they

visited, photographed, and collected objects from nearly every Pueblo, ranging from Hopi

in the west to the Rio Grande Valley villages in the east.41 When Hillers made

architectural photographs, he frequently placed a Pueblo village in the middle ground and

left wide margins to capture the surrounding landscape. Like the survey projects in

general, Hillers’s photographs of Native dwellings sought to make sense of newly

acquired territories for American audiences. This involved cataloging not just the

geography and geology but the Native peoples occupying the lands, as well.

As with the British photographs intended for future audiences, American survey

photography provides a basis for measuring architectural change through later

photography and direct observation. Photographs and maps made in the course of surveys

provide some of the strongest records of Pueblo architectural history. In the years after

the 1880s, photography became more accessible to non-specialists. Ethnologists, tourists,

and missionaries could operate their own cameras, and photographs of Native buildings

41 Fowler, Western Photographs, 81–5.

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proliferated during this time. Today, scholars continue to use the range of historical

photography to describe historical building styles as well as histories of architectural

change. Historians Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton illustrate North American

Architecture, a standard reference volume, with hundreds of photographs from the late-

nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The book includes some photographs from the

western surveys, and many that anthropologists made in the following decades. The

archaeologist Catherine Cameron has similarly used historical photographs. Cameron

assembled an archive of historical documentation to study the relationship between

architectural change, cross-cultural contact, and population decrease at the Hopi Village

of Oriabi. Cameron notes that Hillers’s photographs furnish “the earliest extensive

photographic record of Orayvi.”42 Subsequent photographers, mostly tourists viewing the

Snake Dance, tended to focus on the same areas of Oraibi. These views, repeated over the

course of years, help Cameron to determine when specific features appeared in, and

receded from, the architecture of Oraibi.

In the late-twentieth century scholars used photography to write histories of

Native American architecture. In the nineteenth century, ethnologists and historians

similarly relied on photographic evidence to describe architectural change. To use a

photograph as a source of information, of course, requires a writer to take at face value,

to believe in the documentary power of photography. Take, for instance, Mindeleff’s

42 Catherine M. Cameron, Hopi Dwellings: Architecture at Orayvi (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 44. Not just relying on photographic evidence, Cameron describes Victor Mindeleff’s map of Oraibi (also spelled Orayvi), published in 1891 in his book A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola, as the “initial baseline” for measuring architectural change in the village. Cameron, 39.

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picture of Bitcai’s house (see fig. 4.4). “There is practically nothing aboriginal about it,”

Mindeleff wrote of the house, “except a part of its interior furniture and its inhabitants.”43

By contrasting the American-style dwelling with its Aboriginal inhabitants in his writing,

Mindeleff positioned architectural change and adaptation as antithetical to so-called

traditional forms of culture. Mindeleff included the photograph in hopes of documenting

this change, capitalizing on the supposedly objective view of photographic technologies

to make plain a difference that he perceived between Diné peoples and the types of

housing they began to build after Bosque Redondo. Today we can approach photographs

with a bit of skepticism about their evidentiary value. To pursue a deconstructive reading

of Mindeleff’s interpretation, it is not the photograph that shows change. The

photographer, in making images of Diné housing and including them in a narrative,

projects a story of cultural evolution onto the dynamic built environment of Dinétah. This

criticism recognizes the constructed nature of photographs, the way that highly

manipulated images claim to show the world as it is.

The North American Indian: People and Buildings

At least one photographer continued the legacy of the nineteenth-century surveys in the

first decades of the twentieth century. In the summer of 1904, Edward Curtis traveled

from his home in Seattle to New Mexico. Visiting the southwestern Athapaskan-speaking

peoples—Diné and Apache—he took the first pictures for his twenty-volume opus The

North American Indian. With the aid of ethnographers, photographic technicians, and

43 Mindeleff, “Navaho Houses,” 504.

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indigenous collaborators, Curtis photographed the peoples and environs of more than

eighty ethnic groups residing west of the Mississippi River. He traveled the continent and

traversed the boundaries of art and science for the following twenty-six years.

Photographing what he believed were the last traces of Native cultures, Curtis intended to

create a compendium of authentic indigenous life-ways. Each volume consists of a bound

book with pages of text and photographs as well as a folio of loose photogravures, a

technique for printing photographs. This epic work contains over four thousand pages of

ethnographic writing, fifteen hundred bound images, and seven hundred-twenty folio

sheets. Between 1907 and 1930, Curtis produced about two hundred thirty copies of the

book.44

In many ways, Curtis’s work for The North American Indian relates to the great

western surveys of the 1870s and ‘80s. Curtis focused just on western Native cultures,

while largely overlooking the geological information to which early surveyors attended.

Still, the scale of his project and his intention to create an authoritative record correspond

closely with earlier efforts. Architectural photography was a hallmark of nineteenth-

century surveys and Curtis included many views of the built environment in his published

work. Considering just the folio sheets, and leaving aside the photographs bound in

books, Curtis featured eighty-four images of the built environment. In other words, just

under twelve percent of all folio pictures show architectural subjects. Buildings

occasionally served as a setting for depicting human subjects, though more frequently

Curtis photographed people in outdoor settings or against a neutral backdrop in his tent-44 He sold subscriptions to libraries and wealthy individuals, including Hiram Watson Sibley, who donated a complete edition to the University of Rochester.

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studio. When the photographer focused on buildings, he often depicted building exteriors

without a human presence in the scene. In these cases, as I explore later, buildings appear

as memorials that stand in for absent peoples.

A full accounting of Curtis’s architectural photographs is needed, though that task

falls outside the scope of this chapter. Instead, here I engage with Cutis’s photographs of

Native buildings to provide a robust comparison for Wilson’s inventive approach to

architectural photography. Relatively little has been said about Curtis’s architectural

photographs.45 His portraits, in contrast, have inspired considerable debate about the

constructed nature of photographic images, the role of photography in mediating

interpersonal encounters, and the value of historical photographs to present-day Native

audiences. Because they relate to fundamental questions about the legacy of colonial

photography, a field in which Wilson intervenes, these criticism and recuperations are

worth considering before looking closely at a few of Curtis’s architectural photographs.

For decades, The North American Indian has attracted criticism. One of Curtis’s

most contentious practices was his proclivity for manipulating glass plates. Numerous

prints bear faint traces of items that Curtis removed—alarm clocks, wagons, and other

things that might betray the cosmopolitan entanglements of Native cultures. This removal

affected a romantic view of the past. The picture “In a Piegan Lodge,” features two

Blackfeet men reclining in a tipi (fig. 4.12). In this rare double portrait set in a domestic 45 Art historian Mick Gidley has provided a rare scholarly assessment of Curtis’s architectural photographs. Gidley argues that, on the one hand, the portraits show humanity in spite of social change. On the other hand, Curtis’s photographs of the built environment seem to indicate the inevitability of cultural decline. Mick Gidley, ed., Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian Project in the Field (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 147.

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environment, Little Plume and his son Yellow Kidney pose with some of their most

prized possessions. Here Curtis retouched the photograph to scrub out an alarm clock. A

light area marks the spot to the left of Little Plume and directly above the pipe. In the

lodge, Curtis encountered the hybridity of Native culture. Later, the artist took

extraordinary steps to manipulate the plate and make the picture fit his vision of Native

life.

Late-twentieth century critics also point to Curtis’s practices of dressing up sitters

in generic regalia, instructing them to reenact gatherings of defunct warrior societies, and

staging them in pastoral landscapes. These practices of photographic manipulation seem

to support the argument Curtis constructed a version of Native life that scarcely

resembled contemporaneous indigenous experiences. One deep problem with this

invented vision is that it seems to hardly afford Curtis’s Native collaborators any

meaningful sense of agency.46 These criticisms largely aim to deconstruct Curtis’s

photography, puncturing the purity of his invented vision and highlighting the politics

behind his work. From this viewpoint, indigenous peoples assume a doubly passive status

first as victims of historical displacement and traumas, and then of Curtis’s lens. Curtis

thus practiced what anthropologist Renato Rosaldo calls “imperialist nostalgia.” Rosaldo

defines this concept as a type of mourning for the supposed loss of Indigenous cultures,

when expressed by the people who brought change to those communities. Imperialist

nostalgia occurs when “agents of colonialism long for the very forms of life they 46 Christopher Lyman, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982); Jill Sweet, ed., Staging the Indian: The Politics of Representation (Saratoga Springs, NY: Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, 2001).

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intentionally altered or destroyed,” according to Rosaldo.47 Paradoxically, it was Curtis’s

camera, an instrument bound to modernity, which generated this prelapsarian longing in

The North American Indian.

More recently, scholars and curators have pursued a recuperative reading of

Curtis’s photographs. To engage this interpretation, we might ask which new meanings

surface when we bracket Curtis’s faulty vision. Shamoon Zamir argues that an educated

Apsáalooke (Crow) man, Alexander Upshaw, approached Curtis’s lens with an intimate

understanding of the dynamics between photographer, sitter, and audience.48 Aaron Glass

describes the way Kwakwaka'wakw people took advantage of the opportunity to work

with Curtis to perform dances and rituals that were otherwise banned.49 And Joe Horse

Capture reflects on the continuing significance of the photograph Curtis made of his

great-great-grandfather.50 Freed from debates about intention, authenticity, and deception,

we can find indigenous agency by viewing the photographs as historically embedded

performances. To be sure, Curtis’s photographic subjects and local guides brought with

them their own motivations and understandings when they participated in the production

of The North American Indian. Before working with or sitting for Curtis, these

47 Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 107–08. For more on the concept of nostalgia, see Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 48 Shamoon Zamir, “Upshaw and Upshaw—Apsaroke,” in The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 49 Aaron Glass, “A Cannibal in the Archive: Performance, Materiality, and (In)Visibility in Unpublished Edward Curtis Photographs of the Kwakwaka’wakw Hamat’sa,” Visual Anthropology Review 25, no. 2 (2009): 128–49. 50 Joseph Horse Capture, “A Personal Legacy,” in Sacred Legacy, ed. Christopher Cardozo (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 27.

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indigenous collaborators often had already developed their own appreciations for the

power of photography.

Today Native artists respond to Curtis. Some incorporate the critique of Curtis

into their work.51 Others revisit his practice to examine the dynamics between

photographer and sitter. Wilson himself has contributed to this rethinking.52 In an

ongoing project started in 2012, Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX),

Wilson photographs Native and non-Native people in studio portraits using the wet-plate

collodion process. After exposing, developing, and fixing a plate, Wilson gives the

tintype to the sitter. Trading the photograph itself for permission to use a digital image

scanned from it, the artist folds a nineteenth-century technique into current imaging

practices. Interpretation of CIPX has focused on its relation to Curtis’s The North

American Indian. If Curtis used photography to construct a cultural mythology about

Native America, to invent a picture of “Indianness,” then Wilson engages the process to

develop a contemporary vision of Native America from a Native perspective. In museum

exhibitions Wilson has displayed prints of digital files, since he trades the tintype for a

51 Marcus Amerman (b. 1959, Choctaw) restages some of Curtis’s most iconic photographs, replacing the woven basket in Curtis’s Before the White Man Came—Palm Cañon (1924) with an Igloo brand cooler in his After the White Man Came (2001). Amerman comically reveals a truth behind Curtis’s constructed image: that Native peoples have engaged with industrial modernity in the same ways as other Americans, despite Curtis’s belief that “authentic” Native cultures live without the contaminating traces of settler populations. If Amerman’s playful subversion maintains focus on Curtis, then Wilson’s attention to photography as a collaborative process helps us to recognize the historical agency of Curtis’s subjects. For more, see Janet Berlo, “Will Wilson’s Cultural Alchemy: CIPX in Oklahoma Territory,” in Photo/Synthesis, ed. heather ahtone (Norman, OK: Fred Jones Museum of Art, 2016), 26, note 21. 52 For another look at how artists have contributed to art discourse, see chapter two of this dissertation, especially the sections on Earnest Spybuck and Pablita Velarde.

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scan and permission to use it. These digital prints record an exchange between the

photographer and the people he meets through residencies and workshops. The prints

capture what the artist describes as the “many layers of the intimate” that accrue in the

process of making a portrait.53 Wilson’s prints express an interpersonal encounter partly

to intervene, then, in historical representations of Native Americans.

These multiple reevaluations indicate the instability of Curtis’s archive, what

Elizabeth Edwards calls the rawness of historical photographs. The term rawness helps to

describe the fundamental openness and instability of photographs, as well as their

frequent painfulness for students of colonial histories.54 Posing in the regalia of warrior

societies and performing ceremonies, Native peoples displayed themselves for Curtis’s

lens. These performances can be seen today as politically engaged movements toward

self-representation, conscious displays of cultural affiliation. During the late-nineteenth

and early-twentieth centuries, federal agents and missionaries sought to reform and thus

to eradicate Native cultures. Indigenous collaborators occasionally performed banned

dances or, in other ways, maintained connections with the past in front of Curtis’s lens.

When people performed for Curtis’s camera they drew on memories and, often equipped

with an understanding of the photographic process, delineated the contours of future

memories. What is enacted in these photographs is not necessarily some imperialist

fantasy but, instead or in addition, the desires of indigenous peoples to maintain a diverse

set of relationships with the past. This maintenance harnesses the generative power, the

53 Will Wilson, interview by author, email, November 4, 2013. 54 Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology, and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001).

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agency, of photographs. In other words, the scholarly and artistic reevaluations of

Curtis’s work suggest that photographs can shape human experience (and build future

worlds), rather than merely reflecting the past.

How do Curtis’s architectural subjects relate, then, to the cultural and political dynamics

in his portraits? When Curtis turned his lens to iconic tipis and pueblos—and away from

the wooden frame houses, log cabins, and stone structures where many of his subjects

dwelt—did he practice imperialist nostalgia? As mentioned earlier, many of Curtis’s

architectural photographs lack a human presence. Here historic-style buildings linger in

the landscape presumably after people have gone. These works assume a melancholic

tone, expressing the spirit of Rosaldo’s concept. In 1914, Curtis published the tenth

volume of The North American Indian. In this installment, he focused on the

Kwakwaka’wakw peoples who live on the central coast of British Columbia.55 The folio

includes multiple scenes of Kwakwaka’wakw villages, carved posts, and dancers in

architectural settings. In one photogravure, Curtis steps inside a house frame (fig. 4.13).

Massive timbers extend back from the upper corners of the photograph, coming to rest on

a vertical pole in the center. In the center of the right and left sides, massive wooden

constructions mark the footprint of the house. Lacking side paneling and a roof, the house

frames a view of the water, forests, and mountains beyond. Grass grows tall underfoot. At

55 Brad Evans and Aaron Glass, Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014). Curtis’s work for volume ten would be some of his most productive; in addition to publishing an entire volume on Kwakwaka’wakw culture, Curtis also created a film called In the Land of the Head Hunters.

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the bottom in center a tensing wooden post catches the light. A carved figure, just beyond

the house, looks out to the world and stands witness. The photograph communicates the

structure and form of the building. Yet a strong linear composition, high tonal contrast,

and attention to atmospheric light push the picture beyond any documentary function and

into the realm of affect, feeling, and emotion.

With The North American Indian, Curtis extended the legacy of the nineteenth-

century surveys. He also incorporated newer ideas about photography. In the decades

around 1900, an international movement sought to win recognition of photography as a

form of fine art. Pictorialist photographers emphasized the emotional and aesthetic

dimensions of photography over scientific or popular uses. Likeminded photographers

formed associations across the Atlantic, such as the Linked Ring in the U.K., the Photo-

Club de Paris, and the Photo-Secession in New York. Early in his career Curtis was

loosely associated with pictorialism. In 1900, Curtis published a series of articles in

Western Trail magazine that channeled the rhetoric of pictorialism and encouraged

photographers to imbue their work with a sense of individuality.56 And in 1905, Alfred

Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, leading Pictorialist photographers in the United States,

included Curtis’s work in the photographic display at the 1905 Lewis and Clark

Exposition in Portland, Oregon.57 Pictorialists often looked to painters for inspiration, and

56 Edward S. Curtis, “The Amateur Photographer,” Western Trail 1, no. 4 (1900): 272–74; 1, no. 5 (1900): 379–80; 1, no. 6 (1900): 468–69. Edward S. Curtis, “Photography,” Western Trail 1, no. 3 (1900): 187. 57 Anne Makepeace, Edward S. Curtis: Coming to Light (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2002), 63. The photographer Gertrude Käsebier, who was associated with the Pictorialist movement, photographed a number of Native peoples who worked for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show when they visited New York City in 1898 with the

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so they tended to use soft focus and laborious printing techniques. Curtis’s employment

of outmoded photographic technology—as well as the prevalence of glassy and reflective

water surfaces, and other formal devices—correspond with Pictorialist practices,

generally.

Curtis’s treatment of buildings suggests his engagement with artistic models from

the Pictorialist movement. British photographer Frederick Evans was one of the most

revered Pictorialist photographers to engage with the built environment. Evans is well-

known for his 1903 picture “A Sea of Steps,” which depicts from a low vantage the worn,

undulating stone staircase leading up to the chapter house of the Wells Cathedral.58

Steiglitz displayed Evans’s prints in February 1906 at the Little Galleries of the Photo-

Secession in New York, and included his work in the journal Camera Work on multiple

occasions.59 Evans took great interest in photographing British and French medieval

buildings, especially cathedrals. In a photograph of the turret stairs at Lincoln Cathedral,

for example, Evans presents a dramatic spiral of arches and steps through a tight doorway

(fig. 4.14). Walls at left and right take up a third of the picture each, compressing the area

beyond this hallway into a small section at center. The wall at right obscures a window,

which throws light on the twisting vaulted ceiling of the staircase and illuminates the

risers of a few ascending steps. In the staircase at center, the dynamism of the various

planar surfaces and the deep tonal range help to draw viewers through the passageway. company. Elizabeth Hutchinson, “The Indians in Käsebier’s Studio,” in The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 131–170. 58 Anne M. Lyden, The Photographs of Frederick H. Evans (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010), 97, plate 67. 59 Lyden, Frederick H. Evans, 6–7.

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Evans typically spent weeks at a site observing the changing effects of light on the space

to determine when and where to make photographs, what he referred to as studies. He

would often create one picture of the building exterior, showing the site in relation to its

environment. He would then move inside the building to photograph passageways and

architectural patterns. Unburdened by the documentary requirements of survey

photography, Evans privileged his own aesthetic and emotional response to the built

environment.

Curtis’s photograph of the Kwakwaka’wakw house frame (see fig. 4.13) recalls

the spatial dynamics of Evans’s work. Both photographs pull viewers through

architectural apertures in the space of the picture. Curtis’s photograph “A Mono Home”

also demonstrates this approach (fig. 4.15). Here conical baskets spill out of the doorway.

They mirror the shape of the dwelling behind, though the smoothness and even tones of

the baskets stand out against the rough surface of the house. A succession of ridges and

mountain peaks fill the background, echoing the conical shape of the house and baskets

below. The compositional strategy here—consistent with Evans’s picture of the turret

stairs—is to show repeating forms across multiple scales or configurations. This

engagement with deep pictorial space works against the flattening effect of photography,

the always-partial translation of a spatial form into a flat image. Curtis’s photograph

suggests instead a spatial, embodied view. Curtis thus pairs a pictorialist emphasis on

personal aesthetic response with the archival agenda of the nineteenth-century surveys. In

the margins of a photograph, as well as the accompanying text, Curtis often provides

information about the design, structure, and location of a building. In “A Mono Home”

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he includes the Sierra Nevada mountains. Curtis features another source of information:

the rough texture of the building surface indicates that the builder used mats and brush to

create the exterior walls. Merging informational and aesthetic approaches, layered forms

accrue a narrative function. Resemblances turn into relationships. The grassy hut in “A

Mono Home” thus appears to grow out of the earth, just as the baskets emerge from the

hut. In this photograph, a Native dwelling accrues associations with the natural, the non-

industrial, and the past. The photographer treats the building as a mute object for his

aesthetic contemplation.

Curtis devoted the fifteenth volume of the North American Indian, which was

published in 1926, to California. Curtis used photographs of California Native buildings,

more so than with the architecture other groups, to tell a story of cultural change. The

thirty-five folio sheets in that volume include eight pictures of historic dwellings and two

photographs of newer houses. Both of the new homes are rectangular in floor plan with

chimneys and door sills. He took care to label these as non-traditional structures, printing

the title “Modern Cupeño House” on the sheet just below the image to the left (fig. 4.16).

Cupeño peoples interacted closely with a succession of settlers in Southern California —

Spanish, Mexican, and American—through much of the nineteenth century. In 1903, the

State of California forced the people off of their homelands in the San Jose Valley.

Featured among a series of photographs of historic Native dwellings, “Modern Cupeño

Home” indicates this force of disruption. This vantage enabled him to convey the

rectangular layout and placement of the chimney. Harsh midday light casts the building

in high relief, revealing the texture of its earthen brick walls and thatched roof. The yard

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features an assortment of containers, including a frying pan at bottom right and a metal

basin near the front door. Though the scene lacks any people, the casual arrangement of

everyday things indicated a human presence not far from view. If Curtis thought these

types of industrially produced things detracted from “In A Piegan Lodge” (see fig. 4.12),

then he likely saw the pan and basin as reinforcing the major themes of the Cupeño

picture: change in Native American material culture. The terms of this change (decline)

were unambiguous.60 In The North American Indian, the attention to change in

architectural styles and materials related to Curtis’s overarching story of a vanishing

peoples.

Considering “Modern Cupeño House,” together with “A Mono Home,” the works

seem to testify to the changing conditions and expressions of indigenous culture at the

beginning of the twentieth century. This is similar to Mindeleff’s illustration of a hogan

and a square house in his study of Diné architecture. Unlike Mindeleff’s rather

straightforward use of photography to illustrate a narrative of architectural change, Curtis

inflicted his photographs with a melancholic affect. Many of Curtis’s architectural

photographs are eerily empty. Buildings take on a symbolic role and stand for absent

peoples. Curtis suggests a view of Native-style buildings as memorials in the landscape,

as ephemeral markers of the past.

I do not intend to suggest that The North American Indian was a federally-

sponsored expression of official American sentiments. On the contrary, Curtis organized 60 The Californian case is especially revealing, as the popular imagination of this time focused on Ishi, the famed “last of” the Yahi peoples in Northern California. See Orin Starn, Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).

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the project by raising funds jointly through the patronage of J. P. Morgan and

subscription sales to libraries and wealthy Americans. The financial life of the project

loosely corresponds with the way US citizens constructed public memorials at the time.

During the same period that Curtis traversed the country making photographs, local

groups erected memorials to civil war heroes (Union and Confederate).61 Set in public

places—urban parks, mostly—memorials seem to present “official,” state-sanctioned

histories. In fact, private groups of citizens with their own agendas and visions largely

sponsored the memorials.

Compared to the abundance of signs and statues honoring significant locales of

other American sites of catastrophe, few sites of conflict relating to Native American

experience mark the landscape. Geographer Kenneth E. Foote describes this relative lack

of traditional memorials—obelisks, cast statues, and neoclassical architectural

constructions in stone—for Native cultures in the landscapes and built environments of

the United States.62 Instead of manifesting in sculptural works, the nostalgic desire to

61 For an astute study of these memorial forms, see Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 62 Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscape of Violence and Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 322. For Foote, any endeavor seeking to commemorate the heroism of Native Americans who resisted “the destruction of their cultures” would run counter to the nationalist function of memorials in American culture and “an entrenched frontier mythology that celebrates the perseverance of white settlers in driving these cultures to distinction.” For a compelling examination of contemporary movements to memorialize past Native American peoples and events, see Erika Doss, “Anger: Contesting American Identity in Contemporary Memorial Culture,” in Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 313–376.

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memorialize Native cultures in the early-twentieth century conditioned the architectural

photographs of The North American Indian.

Following the reappraisal of Curtis, I want to resist the impulse merely to heap

more criticism on The North American Indian. Curtis’s project generated an elaborate

and often fantastical view of Native peoples, to be sure. He treated historical buildings as

memorials for people who were not, in fact, disappearing and for cultures that survive

today. But transforming a structure to symbol does not necessarily entail a process of

complete dislocation. It would be a mistake, I contend, to assume that the flattening and

dislocating effects of Curtis’s architectural views lead to an outright denial of Native

agency or a foreclosing of indigenous perspectives. Instead, photographs allow for a

multiplication of perspectives on the history of Native dwelling. While these photographs

introduce Native dwellings to new audiences, histories, and meanings, they can also help

to retain and buttress indigenous perspectives.

In a few photographs, Curtis showed how Native peoples in the early-twentieth

century related to their historic architecture as sites of memory. In the 1926 photograph

“A Feast Day at Acoma,” for instance, people line the plaza and rooftops of the Acoma

Pueblo (fig. 4.17). The crowd assembles to celebrate the day of Saint Esteban, patron

saint of the Pueblo. Outside of the picture lie surrounding villages, including Acomita,

where many Acoma residents moved during the beginning of the twentieth century.

During this period Acoma Pueblo transformed from a working village to a ceremonial

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gathering place.63 A number of families still maintain a house in Acomita to use

occasionally, rather than residing there full-time.64 In the early-twentieth century the

Pueblo became a site of memory, an arena where people could renew bonds with the past

as they actively participated in modern worlds. The photograph does not present technical

information such as the structure of the buildings or the geographical siting of the village.

Instead, it highlights Pueblo ceremonial use of the space, the endurance of a historical

practice into the present. An annual ceremony in “A Feast Day at Acoma” becomes an

allegory of the past, qualified by the longing and nostalgia that pervades The North

American Indian. Instead of merely buttressing a popular misunderstanding of

indigenous-style dwellings, Curtis’s architectural photographs show some of the

changing uses of architecture in Native communities during the first decades of the

twentieth century.

Reanimation in Auto Immune Response

In The North American Indian, Edward Curtis presents a photographic account of

changes in the built environment and the partial transformation of Native-style buildings

into sites of memory. In Auto Immune Response, Will Wilson harnesses the

transformative power of Diné dwellings. The tenth photograph in the series shows the

metal-frame hogan in the center of a long and narrow picture (fig. 4.18). Set in a lush

landscape, light trickles through the canopy as water rushes around the glowing building. 63 Peter Nabokov, Architecture of Acoma Pueblo: The 1934 Historic American Buildings Survey Project (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1986), 12. 64 Velma Garcia-Mason, “Acoma Pueblo,” in Handbook of the North American Indians 9, Southwest, ed. Alfonso Ortiz (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1979), 450.

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Wilson’s twin characters stand on either side. Compared to the earlier landscapes in Auto

Immune Response, the world appears verdant. Wilson suggests, by transposing the metal-

frame hogan to a woodlands environment, that his new hogan has regenerated the world.

The story in Auto Immune Response thus hinges on the idea that hogans are animate

things that help to recreate the world. The hogan, connected to the mythical beginnings of

Diné people, allows Wilson to reanimate Dinétah after the apocalypse. In Diné origin

stories, Changing Woman, a figure roughly equivalent with the earth, engenders

perpetually renewing life. Diné religion takes death—cultural or personal—as a stage

before reanimation.65

If Curtis showed the early-twentieth-century transformation of Native dwellings

into places of memory, then Wilson shows how Native peoples in the early-twenty-first

century use Native dwellings not only to reflect on the past but also to shape the future.

Wilson made the first seven photographs in Auto Immune Response by 2005. These

pictures chronicle the character’s journey through Dinétah, encountering a wooden

hogan, taking refuge, setting out to the landscape, and beginning to construct his metal

hogan. AIR is an ongoing series. In works made since 2007, Wilson has developed the

hogan into a greenhouse, a sub-section of the project he refers to as AIRLAB. He has

exhibited the hogan as a greenhouse on multiple occasions, including at the Denver

Botanical Gardens in 2011 (fig. 4.19). In that installation, Wilson placed potted plants in

sections of the hogan frame. Leafy plants fill up the modular blocks, and a geodesic dome

65 Farella, The Main Stalk, 100–101. On page 95, Farella writes: “The Navajo emphasis is on repeated creation which is often, if not always, cyclical. It is to be contrasted with the lineal, progressive view of time that characterizes our own evolution and/or genesis.”

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caps the structure. These plants are indigenous food cultivars, including Navajo blue corn

and varieties of squash. Later that year, Wilson exhibited the greenhouse at the Navajo

Nation Zoo, which features a collection of southwestern animals. In 2014, I saw the

hogan outside of the Wheelwright Museum (fig. 4.20). Containers with young plants

filled the hogan frames. A green tarp flapped violently in the wind, revealing glimpses of

the dome underneath. The geodesic dome, of course, evokes the American architect

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1935), and his future-oriented vision of utopian buildings and

cities. Inside the Wheelwright museum, Wilson’s prints from Auto Immune Response and

Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange filled the main gallery, the design of which

is based on a hogan. This greenhouse actualizes the Diné religious metaphor of animate,

world-making houses. The greenhouse also suggests, more broadly, how we might see

Native dwellings as harbingers and generators of future worlds, rather than just

reflections of the past.

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Conclusion

In the previous four chapters I examined how Native artists, working in various media,

have helped to maintain the vitality of historic Native architectural sites and styles in the

early-twentieth century, despite a legacy of change in the built environment. In chapter

one, I considered how an anthropological commission of model tipis helped James

Mooney to counteract an evolutionary paradigm in museum anthropology. At the same

time, the commission enabled Kiowa artists and American audiences to perceive a link

between historic styles of architecture and emerging forms of flat painting. In chapter

two, I discussed two early-twentieth century series of paintings by Earnest Spybuck and

Pablita Velarde in relation to nineteenth-century graphic artworks depicting the built

environment, a novel subject matter for Indigenous artists in that century. In chapter

three, I examined Hopi House, which opened in 1904, and how it affected the aesthetic

category of American Indian art through the first half of the twentieth century. In the final

chapter, I turned to a contemporary project, Will Wilson’s Auto Immune Response, to

describe how Native artists continue to engage and expand an iconography of

architecture. In these chapters I have presented case studies, historical narratives, and

comparisons across cultures and time periods. By using a variety of methods and

considering artistic projects across a range of media, I have attempted to indicate the

diversity and breadth of architectural themes in Native art.

By looking at architectural themes, I have examined how Native artists made

sense of changes in the built environment and how they fostered continued cultural and

aesthetic lives for often-absent buildings. Historians, art historians, and anthropologists

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have chronicled the forms and constructions of nineteenth-century Native buildings. And

scholars have investigated the rise of aesthetic paradigms for viewing Native-made works

in the early twentieth-century. Yet the histories of Native American architectural change

and adaptation are little-known. By considering Native art and architecture as separate

topics, scholars have perhaps taken for granted the loss of so-called traditional building

styles. At least some have highlighted a revival of Native architecture. In the past few

decades, architectural historians have analyzed recent projects that incorporate

indigenous spatial epistemologies into building designs for Native communities. Like

these architectural historians I argue, against the narrative of Native architecture as a lost

tradition, that Native peoples in the twentieth century continued to engage with

customary architectural forms and spaces. To support this argument, I have looked

mostly to the realm of visual culture and considered some of the ways that Native artists

have represented dwellings.

In this dissertation, I have contributed to the general study of visual culture by

examining how representations work as more than a type of social construction, a tool for

enacting ideology and politics. Pictures seem to cut views from the world, to transport

their subjects and viewers from the realms of embodied experience to the arena of form,

representation, and allegory. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,

scholars have seen works of art and other visual representations as purely invented forms

exercising a troubled relation to the world. In this context, representations can mask

reality, construct a different version of it, or reflect perceptions of the world from

particular subject positions. There is a way to see works of art and other visual

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representations, though, not only as apart from the world but also as a part of it.

Attending to the life of representational forms means asking about their agency, how they

have shaped views of the world and existed in it. This, in turn, requires taking seriously

the material dimensions of visual representations and thus taking up Jennifer Roberts’s

call for a “material visual culture.” In practical terms, endorsing this understanding of

representation has led me to examine the continued legacy of Hopi House on Native

artists in the Southwest well beyond the 1904 debut of the building, for instance, or

considering how a project to miniaturize historic buildings helped to foster the early-

twentieth century conditions for Kiowa painting practices.

I have also sought to contribute, more specifically, to the field of Native art

studies. Throughout the chapters I have taken a comparative approach, looking at

relations between shifting art practices and changing built environments. This helps to

expand the purview and bounds of Native art by incorporating architectural sites and

historiographies. Since the early 1990s, much scholarship has pushed against these

disciplinary bounds by investigating the intercultural and cosmopolitan histories of

Native art. Yet more work is needed to continue examining how Native art relates to

other aspects of art history and visual culture. Here I have used comparison to relate

artworks to another form of expressive culture: buildings.

The many, complex relations between Native art and architecture could inspire

and support additional study. Synthetic accounts of the historical relationships between

art and architecture could consider similarities and differences between murals in the

Southwest, painted and carved screens in Northwest Coast houses, and tipi painting on

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the Plains. Pursuing the argument developed in my analysis of Pablita Velarde’s

paintings for Bandelier National Monument (see chapter two), continued scholarship

could consider the ways that studio-trained artists (Native and non-Native) have

represented customary forms of Native art, and how those representations have shaped

perceptions of Native art, more broadly. Examining the diverse iconography of Native

dwellings in contemporary Native art could sustain countless essays. One final avenue for

potential future research could include a study of later-twentieth century movements

toward reconstructing historic buildings and villages as Native-run community centers,

interpretive sites, and, occasionally, art schools.

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