Two Indians portrays armed warriors conversing in American Indigenous Sign Language (also called Native American Sign Language or American Indian Sign Language), a nonverbal form of communication that includes various dialects. It has been widely utilized throughout the North American continent since at least the eighteenth century by Indigenous nations whose political or economic ventures took them across the Great Plains.¹

The warriors seen here are dressed similarly for battle, and are equipped with longbows and buffalo-fur quivers. Both have eagle feathers attached to their scalp locks, and their identical haircuts are traditional to their shared clan or social status. This Flatstyle painting is unlike early twentieth-century Flatstyle paintings, such as those by the Kiowa Six,² because of the definition in the warriors’ muscular, athletic physiques as well as the shaded detail in the quivers. Also, Flatstyle paintings typically have no background or depth of field, whereas the artist here has used tufts of prairie grass to indicate a sloped landscape.

—Jordan Poorman Cocker, Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Scholar for Indigenous Painting Collection Research, 2021

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¹ Davis, “The Linguistic Vitality of American Indian Sign Language.”
² The Kiowa Six (first known as the Kiowa Five) was 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 Oklahoma Style and Flatstyle, which is characterized by a lack of figural shading, and backgrounds that have a shallow or indistinguishable depth of field. The Kiowa Six artists were Spencer Asah, James Auchiah, Jack Hokeah, Stephen Mopope, Lois Smokey (Bou-ge-Tah), and Monroe Tsatoke, and all are represented in the Gilcrease collection.