Indian Art is American Art

A recent piece in the New York Times described a large collection of “modern” and American Indian art being donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The headline is telling: “Native American Treasures Head to the Met, This Time as American Art.”

Alvin Josephy talking in my ear again: “Indians don’t have biography or history; they have anthropology and archeology.” To that we can add “art.”

Peter Rindisbacher Circa 1822

Alvin scoured the country for art by and related to Indians, finding, for the first Indian book he edited, The American Heritage Book of Indians, the earliest European depictions of Native Americans. He wrote a book about Peter Rindisbacher, the European artist who introduced the world to Plains Indians in the early 1800s with drawings and paintings that were taken back to Europe by Hudson’s Bay people, engraved and sold across the continent. In 500 Nations, Josephy easily mixed the art of John White, George Catlin, and other early Europeans who drew and painted Indians with ancient Mayan and Mississippian art objects and photos and artwork of contemporary Indians.

I digress. If we remember anything of “Indian Art” from schools and popular culture, it is probably the totems and masks of the Kwaikutl and related Pacific Northwest tribes. Or the basketry and clay of Indians from the Southwest. But, in our own minds, we—and certainly most American textbooks and museums—are more likely to consider it the stuff of religion and function, artifacts and everyday living tools, rather than art. As Randy Kennedy points out in the Times piece, it is most often found “in the galleries for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.”

I wonder if Alvin and Betty ever met Charles and Valerie Diker, who are making the donation to the Met? According to Kennedy, they “live in an apartment brimful of Native American pieces and American modernist painting just a few blocks from the museum, the Met’s curatorial decision is nothing less than a groundbreaking affirmation of the way they have thought about their collection for more than 40 years.”

20th century New Mexican Tewa potters
Maria and Julian Martinez

“We always felt that what we were collecting was American art,” Mr. Diker said in a recent interview with the couple in their apartment. “And we always felt very strongly that it should be shown in that context.”

What a revelation! Indians make art, and they have for thousands of years, and Indian art, like that of European cave painters, the Impressionists, and Pablo Picasso, is art. In this case, it falls into the stream of American Art collected by a couple who always saw it as such, and are allowing the most famous American art museum to make the case for it.

And here is the rest of the Diker story:

Fear of Indians


I keep trying to write about “assimilation,” because I know that Alvin considered it—the ways in which the white power structure has “zigzagged,” as he put it, with policies and actions aimed at “making Indians stop being Indians and turn themselves into Whites”—crucial to understanding the history of America. But I keep finding gems of understanding that seem to precede the concepts of assimilation, and extermination for that matter.

And this week it is fear, and not physical fear of Indians, though I am sure that those scrawny Dutchmen and Englishmen who came ashore on the Atlantic  Coast  in the early 1600s had some of that kind of fear and trepidation, but a deeper kind of fear. Alvin described it in a speech on “Fisheries and Native American Rights” given at the University of Michigan in April of 1979, and later published in The Indian Historian, Vol. 12, No. 2, Summer 1979.
Along the Atlantic Coast… the Dutch and English traders and settlers carried on the legacy of the Spaniards and immediately established the heritage of misunderstandings, stereotypic thinking, and conflicts that still pervade White-Native American relations within the United States. The first of these again, was that the Indians, being different, were inferior. But that inferiority often translated into fear, the religious and cultural fear that the wilderness man, the Indian, with his free, seemingly simple, and unChristian way of life would corrupt the European settler and the society the European had come to erect in the New World.
He goes on to deal with issues of land and natural resources, which are what we generally think about when we think about westward expansion and the displacement of Indians, but he puts this “religious and cultural fear” first, and that is worth thinking about.
I think it was in Ben Franklin’s writings about Indians that he talks about the Indians who have been taken in by whites most often wanting to go back to tribal ways, while the occasional white taken in by Indians sometimes did not want to return to white settlement.  I know that the French trappers were encouraged to blend with Indians, and many did so. (Some of the English trappers did as well, but theirs was a more measured blending. The HBC forbid intermarriage, though some of its prominent factors openly practiced it.)
“The French were more benign [than the Spaniards]. Though many of them also viewed the Indians as inferiors, in fact as children of nature, and converted and asserted dominance over them, the dynamics of the fur trade demanded dependent, but relatively content, Indian fur suppliers… the French made the greatest efforts to see the world as the Indians saw it.”
And of course it was the French philosopher, Jacque Rousseau, who famously talked about the “noble savage.”
Peter Rindisbacher, War Dance

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and another character Alvin wrote about, Peter Rindisbacher, the boy artist who arrived on the Canadian prairie in the1820s and made the first painting impressions of Fox and Cree and Chippewa, paintings that were turned into lithographs and widely distributed in Europe, has over 100 pictures that are worth 1000 words each. (“The Boy Artist of Red River” in American Heritage, February 1970, and The Artist Was a Young Man, a 1970 book.)

It was the handsome, vigorous Indians that earlier artists had brought to Europe that put thoughts into Rousseau’s head and fear into white Christian hearts. Rindisbacher, the first portraitist of the Plains, continued the unease. How could they be that way without the Gospel? Do we have it right?
The traditional way to strengthen faith among many religions is to send practitioners among the unfaithful and untouched, to preach the Gospel (or the Koran or the sacred text and/or beliefs of any evangelical religion). So it is a short step to say that this cultural and religious fear was early translated into the missionary movement in the New World, first informally, but gradually becoming more institutionalized and substantial.  Assimilation, extermination—that is what followed.
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