Seeing Battle of Little Big Horn through Indigenous eyes
‘Peripheral Vision(s)’ exhibit challenges stereotypical portrayals of Indigenous people
The image presents a striking contrast — General George Custer stands illuminated under a deep blue sky, two sixguns raised defiantly as in victory, while all around him, in the red-and-black colours of battle, his men are slaughtered by mounted warriors.
The work by the late U.S. artist Fritz Scholder is titled, with some irony, “American Landscape.”
Scholder, an Arizona-based artist who traced his Indigenous heritage to the Luiseño tribe of Southern California, created the lithograph print in 1976, 100 years after the famous battle known both as “Custer’s Last Stand” and the “Battle of Little Big Horn.”
It makes you wonder why Custer gets all the attention. Isn’t he the guy who ignored warnings and led his men into a carefully planned trap? What about all those warriors, defending their way of life?
“American Landscape” now hangs on a fourth floor exhibition wall of the McMaster Museum of Art. On either side of it are works by Sioux and Crow warriors who actually fought at Little Big Horn. They were drawn in pencil and crayon on paper, depicting personal accounts of the battle, graphic and gory.
These are not your “They Died With Their Boots On” portrayals of the heroic deeds of the 7th Calvary. These artists come from a different perspective, an overlooked one, from some place on the periphery of the mainstream. Their heroes are the Sioux warriors who won the battle but ultimately lost the war. And it’s the victors, who are remembered in history as heroes.
These works are part of a remarkable new exhibition at the museum featuring more than 50 works of art that challenge the stereotypical portrayals of Indigenous people through history.
The beads, feathers and peacepipes we associate with the stereotypical ‘noble savage’ can still be found in these drawings and lithographs, but they are used
in jarring and unexpected ways.
The show is called “Peripheral Visions” and focuses on the work of two major 20th century artists — Scholder (1937-2005) and American artist Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) — as well as more than 20 “ledger drawings” of northern plains warriors from the late 19th century. It is the first time many of the ledger drawings have been placed on public view and they surprisingly match up well with the work of the more contemporary artists.
“Essentially, this exhibition is a critical rethinking of the origins of the ‘Indian’ image, endeavouring to understand how artists have shaped — and been shaped — by this image,” explains Rhéane Chartrand, who curated the “Peripheral Vision (s)” with Indigenous artist Gerald McMaster of the Ontario College of Art and Design.
“The invisible entity of the show is the stereotype,” Chartrand adds. “It’s so much a part of Canadian and American culture. It’s always there.”
The ledger drawings derive their name from the government ledger books that plains warriors used to draw their chronicles. In earlier years, they would have painted on buffalo hides. By the 1880s, however, the buffalo herds had disappeared.
The exhibition’s ledger art is represented by four warrior artists — Short Bull (Lakota, 1845-1923), Pretty Eagle (Apsáalooke, 1846-1903), White Swan, (Apsáalooke, 1851-1904) and Iron Cloud (Lakota, 1851-?). All four are believed to have been at Little Big Horn, with White Swan working as a scout for Custer.
“People may look at these and think of them as pretty pictures, kind of childlike,” Chartrand says. “But they are actually living documents of particular events.”
Fourteen of the ledger drawings are on loan from the Simcoe County Museum in Barrie, Ont., where they were donated by the family of a former Hudson’s Bay Company official who worked with the Sioux in Saskatchewan during the tribe’s temporary migration to Canada in 1877.
With the help of a $100,000 grant from the Chicago-based Terra Foundation for American Art, Chartrand and McMaster spent a year researching and developing the exhibition. They reached out to several institutions across North America to acquire material on loan for the exhibition.
The original idea came from the 27 portraits of 19th century Indigenous leaders by Baskin that are part of McMaster museum’s permanent collection. Baskin was a respected American artist based in Massachusetts. (His portraits are among 200 works by Baskin that were donated to McMaster by the artist’s brother, longtime Hamilton resident Rabbi Bernard Baskin.)
Leonard Baskin began focusing on Indigenous subjects in a series of what he called “Indian portraits” after being hired in 1967 by the U.S. National Park Service to illustrate a park guide on the battle of Little Big Horn. (At the time, the Montana park was called “Custer Battlefield National Monument.” In 1991, it was renamed “Little Big Horn Battlefield Natonal Monument.”)
“He developed an instant distain for Custer and the veneration of Custer bothered him,” Chartrand explains. “He created his ‘Indian’ portraits as a way to give back respect and dignity to these Indigenous leaders.”
Many of the portraits by Baskin and Scholder are based on the historical photographs of chiefs such as Sitting Bull.
“Baskin and Scholder were not afraid to use artistic license to reimagine that stereotype,” Chartrand explains. “In the case of Scholder, he’s debunking the stereotype.”
The work of both artists was given added incentive by the political action of groups such as the American Indian Movement (AIM). Many of Baskin’s portraits are dated 1973, the same year AIM occupied Wounded Knee in South Dakota, site of an 1890 massacre of several hundred Indigenous Lakota by the U.S. army.
At the time Baskin and Scholder were unaware of each other’s work, but they later became friends and eventually collaborated on a book together in the 1990s. Chartrand sees both artists as working from the periphery mainstream art.
“This is a show that requires you to think about what is real, what is false and what is imagined,” she says.