Indigenous artworks portraying animals and land
For many Indigenous communities, their relationships with place—including animals, plants, and other living beings—is vital to how they understand and navigate their lives. Reflective images of specific places and flora, such as a redbud or birch tree, encourage us to look closely at the natural features that we may take for granted in our own lives. Representations of familiar animals like horses and bison, emphasize their importance as our relatives and not just as commodities or resources.
Game of Skill
The scene depicts a game of skill and strength in which athletes throw arrows by hand into an open field, trying to achieve the greatest distance. The setting is a promenade at the village center of a Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 encampment within the Wichita Mountains in southwest Oklahoma, the traditional territory of the Kiowa and Comanche Nations. The image of a Kiowa community at leisure and ease contrasts with the stark colonial reality of the post-reservation era. The political climate had reached new lows for Indigenous nations after the General Allotment Act of 1887, under which the federal government greatly reduced reservation lands, redistributing small portions to individual Native Americans. When this painting was completed in 1933, the Wichita Mountains had already been seized by the U.S. government and made a national forest (1907); in 1936, Congress designated it the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge.
Read More
Indians with Meat Drying Rack
Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 artist Monroe Tsatoke painted scenes depicting his own lived experience as well as oral histories from his community. He also drew inspiration from his father, Tsa To Kee (also known as Huntinghorse and Hunting Horse),2 who had a prized American Paint Horse, similar to the breed seen here. The Kiowa Nation, like many tribes with ancestral territories within the Great Plains of the United States and Canada, has a strong horse culture.
Read More
The Angry Buffalo
This dramatic scene illustrates the moment a bison bull, wounded and stuck with arrows, has dropped its head, charged, and tossed the aggressor—in this case, the bow hunter—into the air. Bison were known to do this, and in some cases could throw their adversaries up to twenty feet high.
Read More
Treescape
Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 artist Woody Big Bow painted primarily in Flatstyle—recognized by its lack of figural shading, and backgrounds that have a shallow or indistinguishable depth of field—often combined with elements of realism. In Treescape, however, he explores a more impressionistic landscape. Almost certainly painted out-of-doors, the work depicts a small stand of birch trees in autumn. The artist’s feathered, painterly brushstrokes and rich palette of greens, oranges, and muted blue tones capture, in a moment, the vitality of American woodlands amid seasonal change.
Read More
An Island of Redbuds on the Cimarron
“This is a place where the Echohawk family grew up, this horseshoe bend in the river here. . . . Every man, woman, and child in the family received an allotment. . . . The family was camped down here in the valley near the Cimarron River, with the rest of our Kitkahahki Band of the Pawnee Nation. . . . [This land] probably reminded them of our aboriginal homeland up in Nebraska. Most of our villages were along rivers of the region . . . this is reminiscent of that country.”
—Walter Echohawk, nephew of Brummett Echohawk
Brummett Echohawk’s vibrant impressionistic oil painting An Island of Redbuds on the Cimarron captures a serene moment on his family homestead on Pawnee treaty land. The Echohawk family owns a number of Indian allotments along the Pawnee Nation reservation boundary. On the southern side of the property, the prairie grassland meets the Cimarron, a sandy-bottomed river with no dams. During the rainy season, the water reaches from bank to bank. During dry seasons, the Cimarron becomes a wide swath of sandbars spotted with islands of plant growth such as this eastern redbud. Echohawk’s father grew up on this land, and the family connections are intact and still strong today.
—Jordan Poorman Cocker, Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Scholar for Indigenous Painting Collection Research, 2021
This text was developed from an interview with author and attorney Walter Echohawk, nephew of Brummett Echohawk, by Jordan Poorman Cocker, June 21, 2021
Visit Smarthistory Video – Brummett Echohawk, An Island of Redbuds on the Cimarron
Joel Echohawk Reminisces about Brummett Echohawk
Kiowa Family Moving Camp
In Kiowa Family Moving Camp, Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 artist George “Dutch” Silverhorn combines elements of Flatstyle painting, such as a void background, with attributes of ledger art, including the use of objects and attire to inform viewers about the subjects’ identities. This tempera painting portrays a multigenerational family in graceful movement while they travel from one encampment to another, traversing ancestral trails across the Great Plains. The family’s casual ease and contentment on their journey locates the scene in pre-reservation life, before 1867.
Read More
Buffalo Hunt
In Buffalo Hunt, Muscogee artist Solomon McCombs uses Flatstyle techniques such as an absence of shading and a background devoid of landscape. He breaks with traditional Flatstyle painting, however, by creating a depth of field. He illustrates smaller bison in the top row, and the variation in scale provides perspective and a sense of distance between the foreground and background figures. Through his repetition of the bison figures and their almost identical color-blocked forms, McCombs has created a visually graphic take on Flatstyle painting.
Read More
Buffalo Hunt
Buffalo Hunt by Acee Blue Eagle (Muscogee, Pawnee) depicts two men hunting a bison. The artist has used a combination of Flatstyle painting approaches, evident in the dry-brush technique for the color blocking in the depictions of the horses and bison. The scene is an homage to figurative Plains painting: the artist combined the semirealistic postures of the hunters with a narrative symbolism that seems atypically and unclearly attributed to a specific Indigenous nation. He also drew upon ledger art techniques, which can be seen in the outlined figures and profile perspective.
Read More
Ledger Painting of Indians Stealing Military Horses
In Ledger Painting of Indians Stealing Military Horses, Virginia Stroud (Cherokee [United Keetoowah Band], Muscogee) depicts specific warriors on a coup raid to collect horses and other trophies from an invading colonial military group.
Read More
Indian Maidens on Horseback
Indian Maidens on Horseback depicts an intergenerational group of women and one small girl traveling across the prairie. The earth in Oklahoma is red, and the red ocher tracks beneath the horses’ hooves let us know that this party of Kiowa or Comanche women is traversing the Plains of Oklahoma. Here, artist Virginia Stroud (Cherokee [United Keetoowah Band], Muscogee) not only combines ledger art and Flatstyle techniques1 but also adapts a range of approaches to these styles. The minimal facial features of the women and girl, for instance, are similar to those found in the figurative styles of both Kiowa ledger art and paintings on hide. This minimal approach is juxtaposed with the high level of detail the artist chose for depicting the dresses, aprons, and blankets. The women’s modest trade-cloth dresses feature bright tartan plaids, stripes, and dainty florals, and they are worn with striped wool blankets, all of which are vividly documented in bold colors and scaled patterns. Several of the riders toward the front of the party are seated on Crow-style saddles with high horns and backs covered in braintanned hides, while other riders sit atop saddle blankets.
Read More
Gathering Corn
Norma Howard (Choctaw, Chickasaw), a self-taught artist from Oklahoma, is widely recognized for her touching family scenes, and her subjects often include women and children engaged in everyday activities. Howard’s style is reminiscent of pointillism, except that she achieves her effects through the repetition of small, weave-like, painterly strokes rather than dots.
Read More
Tonkowa Chief
The profile view that Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 artist Woody Big Bow chose for his tempera and watercolor Tonkawa Chief emphasizes the contours of the bison’s head and shoulder hump. The whimsical linework detailing the bison’s hair, which is speckled with freshly fallen snow, creates an endearing, almost playful portrait that illuminates the intimate connections between artist and subject. Throughout the Plains regions, Indigenous cultures have an intersectional relationship with the American bison that extends far beyond commodity or food source. The once ubiquitous Great Plains mammal sustained the ecology of the grasslands, as well as the Indigenous nations that shared its environment, and it played a key cultural role in many societies. Precolonial bison culture involved economic, environmental, and spiritual sustainability.
Read More