For centuries, Indigenous nations of the Great Plains preserved historical records and accounts through various figurative and abstract art forms. In fact, the oldest known painting in North America is a decorated bison skull found in Oklahoma, carbon dated to 10,200 BCE.[1] These art forms continue to be practiced today, and Gilcrease Museum’s collection includes key examples of Plains painting traditions on hide, muslin, and rawhide.

Plains artists created paintings using distinct graphic visual languages that can be expertly interpreted or accessed with accompanying oral histories.[2] The nuance involved in identifying the artist and individual subjects lies within Indigenous knowledge systems related to tribal, societal, and personal key identifiers such as clothing, weaponry, cosmological symbolism, landscape, and interpersonal relationships significant to the artist.[3] The visually complex artworks were created with oral stories, meaning the combination of spoken word and visual graphic language brings the two-dimensional figures to life, completing the artworks. Early painting techniques on braintanned hide, rawhide (such as this envelope, 89.94), muslin, and various other supports continue to inform the work of contemporary Indigenous art styles such as ledger art,[4] Flatstyle,[5] and mixed-media art forms (for example, the beadwork on this leather pipe bag, 84.494).

Unpacking the storied pasts and elaborate histories connected to these artworks is an ongoing project. In-depth research and interpretation require consultation and careful collaboration with tribal communities and the artists’ descendants. For example, the museum’s records for the late nineteenth-century muslin cutting (0226.589) by famed warrior artist White Swan (Crow) include an interview with Field Museum curator Nina Sanders, who discusses the narratives represented within the war record. Researching figurative works on hide involves interviewing key community members whose intergenerational knowledge includes oral histories that connect communities to the past. Relationship-building between Indigenous scholars and Indigenous communities through collaborative Indigenous research methodologies is vital to exploring present-day understandings of these works. 

—Jordan Poorman Cocker, Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Scholar for Indigenous Painting Collection Research, 2022

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[1] Bement, Bison Hunting at Cooper Site, 37, 176.

[2] Wong, “Pictographs as Autobiography,” 295–316.

[3] Blackhawk, “Toward an Indigenous Art History of the West,” 276–99.

[4] Not long after Fort Reno was established in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in 1874, more than thirty Cheyenne and Arapaho men and one woman defied the military takeover of the land. They were arrested and sent to Fort Marion (now called Castillo de San Marcos) in St. Augustine, Florida. At Fort Marion, attempts were made to assimilate and colonize the prisoners. They were encouraged to renounce their culture, were given Western educations, and were taught to speak and write English. The prisoner artists also continued to make narrative figurative drawings and paintings, although now using media such as graphite, ink, colored pencils, oil pastels, and watercolors on paper rather than natural pigments and hide. The works are called ledger art because the paper was from accountants’ ledger books. After they were released from prison in 1878, several Fort Marion survivors returned to Fort Reno, where they enlisted as scouts and continued drawing.

[5] This style was developed by the Kiowa Six (first known as the Kiowa Five), an early twentieth-century artist collective under the tutelage of Professor Oscar Jacobson at the University of Oklahoma. The collective birthed an Indigenous art movement known as the Kiowa Style of painting, also called Flatstyle and Oklahoma Style, which is characterized by a lack of figural shading, and backgrounds that have a shallow or indistinguishable depth of field. For more on this, see The Kiowa Six: Painting Oral Histories.