Indigenous War Painting Of The Plains

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains practiced an archival art—narrating war exploits in large-scale paintings executed on animal hide robes, shirts, tipi covers, and tipi liners. Essentially autobiographical, the paintings were worn and lived in by the men whose war exploits they portrayed, and were made to be “read” by the public at large. Executed in a pictorial narrative style and documenting actual events, these paintings blend visual art and history. Indigenous War Painting of the Plains is the first comprehensive look at this important North American art form, covering the full corpus of war paintings from fourteen tribes across the plains. Two impediments have previously made such a book impractical: photography alone falls short of rendering war paintings for the printed page, and only about half of the surviving works have reliable documentation on their cultural origins. Arni Brownstone surmounts these difficulties by producing precise electronic redrawings and by using well-documented paintings to inform poorly documented examples, bolstered by a careful examination of collection histories. Featuring some 300 photographs and electronic redrawings, the book focuses on 83 paintings organized into four chapters covering the paintings of tribes associated with a specific geographical sphere of artistic influence. Four appendixes feature paintings combined with “translations” by Indigenous collaborators who had intimate knowledge of the depicted events. Offering vivid access to the key works of war painting preserved in 37 museums throughout North America and Europe, Indigenous War Painting of the Plains illuminates distinctions between painting styles of different tribes, reveals how they influenced one another and changed over time, and conveys a deep understanding of how war painting developed in relation to profound social changes in Plains Indian cultures.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains practiced an archival art—narrating war exploits in large-scale paintings executed on animal hide robes, shirts, tipi covers, and tipi liners. Essentially autobiographical, the paintings were worn and lived in by the men whose war exploits they portrayed, and were made to be “read” by the public at large. Executed in a pictorial narrative style and documenting actual events, these paintings blend visual art and history. Indigenous War Painting of the Plains is the first comprehensive look at this important North American art form, covering the full corpus of war paintings from fourteen tribes across the plains. Two impediments have previously made such a book impractical: photography alone falls short of rendering war paintings for the printed page, and only about half of the surviving works have reliable documentation on their cultural origins. Arni Brownstone surmounts these difficulties by producing precise electronic redrawings and by using well-documented paintings to inform poorly documented examples, bolstered by a careful examination of collection histories. Featuring some 300 photographs and electronic redrawings, the book focuses on 83 paintings organized into four chapters covering the paintings of tribes associated with a specific geographical sphere of artistic influence. Four appendixes feature paintings combined with “translations” by Indigenous collaborators who had intimate knowledge of the depicted events. Offering vivid access to the key works of war painting preserved in 37 museums throughout North America and Europe, Indigenous War Painting of the Plains illuminates distinctions between painting styles of different tribes, reveals how they influenced one another and changed over time, and conveys a deep understanding of how war painting developed in relation to profound social changes in Plains Indian cultures.

During much of the nineteenth century, paintings functioned as the Plains Indians’ equivalent to written records. The majority of their paintings documented warfare, focusing on specific war deeds. These pictorial narratives—appearing on hide robes, war shirts, tipi liners, and tipi covers—were maintained by the several dozen Plains Indians tribes, and they continue to expand historical knowledge of a people and place in transition. War Paintings of the Tsuu T’ina Nation is a study of several important war paintings and artifact collections of the Tsuu T’ina (Sarcee) that provides insight into the changing relations between the Tsuu T’ina, other plains tribes, and non-Native communities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Arni Brownstone has meticulously created renderings of the paintings that invite readers to explore them more fully. All known Tsuu T’ina paintings are considered in the study, as are several important collections of Tsuu T’ina artifacts, with particular emphasis on five key works. Brownstone’s analysis furthers our understanding of Tsuu T’ina pictographic war paintings in relation to the social, historical, and artistic forces that influenced them and provides a broader understanding of pictographic painting, one of the richest and most important Native American artistic and literary genres.

Presents an illustrated examination of the role of horses in Native American culture and history, providing information on the depiction of horses in tribal clothing, tools, and other objects.

For the Southwestern Indians, painting was a natural part of all the arts and ceremonies through which they expressed their perception of the universe and their sense of identification with nature. It was wholly lacking in individualism, included no portraits, singled out no artists. But the roving life of the Plains Indians produced a more personal art. Their painted hides were records of an individual's exploits intended, not to supplicate or appease unearthly powers, but to gain prestige within the tribe and proclaim invincibility to an enemy. Plains painting served man-to-man relationships, Southwestern painting those of man to nature, man to God. Such characteristics, and the ways they persist in contemporary Indian painting, are documented by the 157 examples Miss Dunn has chosen to illustrate her story. Thirty-three of these pictures, in full color, are here published for the first time.

Plains Indian biographic rock art can be “read” by those knowledgeable in its lexicon. Presented is a lexicon of imagery, conventions, and symbols used by Plains Indians to communicate their warfare and social narratives. The reader is introduced to Plains Indian “warrior” art in all media, biographic art as picture writing is explained, and the lexicon is described, providing a pictographic “dictionary,” and explains conventions and connotations. Finally, it illustrates four key examples of how these narratives are read by the observer. Familiarity with the lexicon will enable interested scholars and laypersons to understand what are otherwise enigmatic rock art drawings found from Calgary, Alberta through ten U.S. states, and into the Mexican state of Coahuila.

"Wishart and the staff of the Center for Great Plains Studies have compiled a wide-ranging (pun intended) encyclopedia of this important region. Their objective was to 'give definition to a region that has traditionally been poorly defined,' and they have