It began with horses and ended in massacre. The zenith of the cultures that are celebrated in “The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky,” a wondrous show at the Metropolitan Museum, lasted barely two hundred years. It started in 1680, when Pueblo Indians seized the steeds of Spanish settlers whom they had driven out of what is now New Mexico. The horse turned the scores of Plains tribes—river-valley farmers and hunter-gatherers who had used dogs as their beasts of burden—into a vast aggregate of mounted nomads, who ranged from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Rio Grande into Canada, hunting buffalo, trading, and warring with one another. The era ended with the killing of more than two hundred Lakota men, women, and children by federal troops at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890. Meanwhile, epidemic smallpox and other alien diseases took a toll far beyond that of military violence. The official census of 1900 found only a quarter of a million Native Americans in the entire United States. What ensued is a story of reservations—including the immaterial sort, which trouble the mind. But there’s an ameliorating epilogue of revivals and transformations of Plains heritage.
The show, of some hundred and fifty artifacts, curated by Gaylord Torrence (and coördinated by Judith Ostrowitz), is the most comprehensive of its kind. It began at the Musée du Quai Branly, in Paris, whose collaboration accounts for many of the earliest items on view. French explorers, missionaries, and traders were the first whites to encounter Plains Indians, in territory that France ceded to the United States only in 1803, with the Louisiana Purchase. (Lewis and Clark set out the next year.) The first seven of twenty superb items that are dated 1700-1820 come from the Branly. The most astounding is “Robe with Mythic Bird” (1700-40), from an unknown tribe of the Eastern Plains: a tanned buffalo hide pigmented with a spiky abstraction, probably of a thunderbird, in red and black, which rivals the most exciting modern art. (Squint at it, and it can suggest the innovation of an artist versed in but impatient with the aesthetic conventions of Art Deco.) Other robes introduce a pictographic tradition, recording events in personal and tribal history, which climaxes with riveting late-nineteenth-century drawings of violent combat with soldiers, made in a ledger book (a common source of paper for Plains tribes at the time), by anonymous Northern and Southern Cheyenne artists.
Except for a few ancient relics—the oldest a pipe in human form, from two millennia ago, which was found in Ohio—even the earliest works in the show evince contact with whites. Glass beads, acquired in trade, became a staple of Plains Indian decorative artistry. Beadwork, metal cones, and cotton and silk cloth figure in a headdress from the Eastern Plains, circa 1780, along with local stuffs including bison horns, deer and horse hair, and porcupine quills. (The formal integration of so many elements into a shapely accoutrement of authority smacks of genius.) A menacing steel blade protrudes from a gracefully curved and tapered wooden war club, circa 1800-20, which its Eastern Plains owner inscribed with a log of his conquests: pictures of seven people, all but one of whom lack heads. A boldly designed Comanche bridle, circa 1860, makes use of German silver, an alloy of copper, nickel, and zinc. The Plains tribes’ adaptation of European materials devolved, by the end of the nineteenth century, into cottage-industrial crafts for collectors and gift-shop markets. (But some of those, to this day, are aesthetically marvellous.)
Just about everything in the exactingly selected and elegantly installed show—war clubs, shields, garments, headdresses, many pipes, bags, a saddle blanket, a bear-claw necklace, dolls, cradleboards—impresses as a peak artistic achievement. So high is the level of quality that it rather distracts, with sheer pleasure, from the background history and the anthropology of Native American experience. That’s good if, having looked, you stay to reflect on the lives that the objects complemented. Notice that almost nothing on view bespeaks a settled existence or the character of a particular location. The makers of the things subsisted on the move. Portability ruled. Plains art is a world apart from the pottery of Southwestern tribes or the totems of the Northwest. (With just two inventively carved wooden “feast bowls,” the show suggests a relative indifference on the part of Plains tribes to rituals of cooking and eating.) The art was preoccupied with religious observation and war—fighting that was often governed by the performance of “counting coup.” A Plains warrior won prestige by physically touching an enemy—fatally or not—and getting away. For each coup, he might be awarded, quite literally, a feather in his cap. The European style of conflict—organized slaughter—tended to confuse as well as to scandalize the native Plains peoples, who effectively mastered it only under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, at the Little Bighorn, in 1876, by which time it was too late to make a strategic difference.
A richly informative essay, in the show’s catalogue, by the Oglala Lakota artist and writer Arthur Amiotte describes the ethos of Plains Indians as based in rites of passage, for men, and in principles of endurance, for all: “courage without complaint.” Elders were revered as conveyors of tradition. “The quality of hide tanning, tailoring, and decoration was the hallmark of an accomplished, talented, and industrious woman,” while “a man counted his wealth in the number of fine trained horses he owned.” Religious beliefs varied, but many tribes staged summertime Sun Dance ceremonies, which entailed gruelling tests for young men. In line with federal policies of forced assimilation, full observance of Native American rituals was proscribed from 1883 until 1978, when the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed.
The popular perception of Native American identity passed to Wild West shows (in a grainy film clip at the Met, we glimpse Buffalo Bill and galloping braves) and, of course, the movies, which appropriately are not addressed in the show, since they were solely about the attitudes of non-Indian audiences. But the past half century has seen a surge, led by “the fourth generation to be reservation born,” of festivals, arts, scholarship, and such religious expressions as the Native American Church and peyote ceremonies. The show ends with sophisticated contemporary paintings, photographs, a video installation, and works in mixed media.
Well-known Native American artists who emerged in the nineteen-eighties—notably the conceptualist and sculptor Edgar Heap of Birds and the painter and assemblagist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith—epitomize both the force and the burden of identity politics in art. A red-lettered sign, in enamel on aluminum, by Heap of Birds is from a public-art series, of 1990, that memorializes forty Dakota Indians hanged in Minnesota in 1862 and 1865. Quick-to-See Smith’s “Trade (Gifts for Trading Lands with White People)” (1992), a large painting with photographic images and attached objects, amounts, for a viewer, to a pitched battle between furiously exercised virtuosity and illustrated polemics. But such efforts now seem to have been necessary to establish grounds for more relaxed recoveries of tribal motives and forms, as in an intricate, stunningly lovely feathered fan—or is it a sculpture of a fan?—titled “We Pray for Rain” (2011), by the young Navajo artist Monty Claw.
What sinks in, as you absorb the show, is the spiritual spell of the Great Plains—an essence that will resonate with anyone who has spent time on the prairie. Standing out there, you are at once dwarfed to nearly nothing and made the dead center of everything that is. This inescapable paradox makes living sense of works that, whether drawn or carved or beaded or feathered, invariably broadcast qualities of painstaking, economical craft and jolts of resilient pride. There is a singleness to each of them, preserving the here and the now of its making by an individual who was an intimate of boundlessness, impelled often to move on with the maximum practicable speed. The enchantment of the prairie will be a pretty lonesome transcendence for most of us. (You get back in the car. Turn the key. Find a motel.) It hardly grants access to the subtleties of Plains Indian worship and philosophy, but it affords a vision that, once wholly theirs, is now perforce also ours. ♦