Read about 80 Artworks
New research by curatorial scholar Jordan Poorman Cocker (Kiowa [Cáuigù], Tongan) was rooted in an oral history–based Indigenous research methodology of Daum Yì:dop, which roughly translates to “touching the Earth.” This process includes extensive input from the artists and their descendants or tribes, and it gives an Indigenous perspective and interpretation to 80 works of art, corrects previous inaccuracies, and enriches the story of America’s Indigenous past and present. Cocker was assisted by Chelsea Herr, Gilcrease’s curator for Indigenous art and culture. The 80 objects with their texts can stand on their own as a source of information about the work of art, and you can read them in any order.
You can read more about Jordan Poorman Cocker’s oral-history–based research process in “Daum Yì:dop (Touching the Earth).
Kiowa Warriors
The distinctive visual language of Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 and Navajo artist Dennis Belindo is revealed in his carefully composed abstract and figurative paintings, which reflect his various worldviews as educator, community advocate, combat veteran, and member of the Kiowa Black Leggings Warrior Society.2 The background of Kiowa Warriors is formed from geometric, balanced, color-blocked sections—a kaleidoscope of lavender, purple, red, pink, and blue—that frame the two warrior figures, who appear to be inextricably linked to each other within the teardrop-shaped ovals.
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Harvest Celebration of the First Fruits
Here, Joan Hill’s use of color-blocking and dry-brush techniques echoes the Flatstyle depictions of ceremony by early twentieth-century Indigenous Oklahoma artists. The composition of Harvest Celebration of the First Fruits is like a single frame from a storyboard sequence, and Hill has included a wealth of detail that offers viewers a glimpse into this celebration.
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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
Half Moon Night and Remembrance
Yatika Fields created Half Moon Night and Remembrance for Recall/Respond (2019), a collaborative exhibition by Gilcrease Museum and Tulsa Artist Fellowship. The show featured works by contemporary artists—present and past fellows—that responded to Gilcrease’s collections of the art, history, and culture of greater North America.
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Mother and Child
In Mother and Child, Marian Terasaz depicts a Comanche woman caring for her newborn infant. She sits comfortably on the ground, embracing her child’s cradleboard, and her posture, unbraided hair, and downcast eyes create a sense of intimacy, peace, and safety. Even though the baby’s face is not visible, the swaddling clothes bulging through the cradleboard’s laces indicate the infant’s presence.
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Contest Dance
Contest Dance depicts two Kiowa men in mid-motion, performing what is sometimes referred to as the War Dance. (The War Dance in its contemporary form is a type of contest dance.) The dancers wear ornate headdresses made from deer-tail hair or porcupine hair adorned with two eagle feathers, jewel-toned breechcloths, and bustles made of eagle wings. Over their shoulders are loom-worked beaded strips, which are fastened at the belt. Both wear beaded armbands tied at the biceps and beaded cuffs tied at the wrist, as well as silver-bell garters tied at the knees and around the ankles. Groups, and occasionally two people (as seen here), perform many types of contest dances today, always with musical accompaniment. Both men and women can compete, although the dancers are primarily men. Powwows with contest dances take place annually during the spring, summer, and fall.
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Medicine Man with Patient
Allan Bushyhead’s Medicine Man with Patient is in the Flatstyle, recognizable by its flattened perspective and lack of shading. The tempera painting portrays an interior view of a home, with a backdrop composed of a stretched and decorated panel separated into five sections. A Civil War cavalry saber in a leather sheath hangs on the right; below, a brightly colored parfleche satchel is propped on the floor. On the left hangs a shield of painted rawhide adorned with red trade-cloth wool and five eagle feathers. The patient lies comfortably on the floor, receiving healing treatment from the medicine man.
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Noon Meal after Peyote Meeting
The scene in Noon Meal after Peyote Meeting, a watercolor by Frank Knickerbocker (Otoe-Missouria), derives from the artist’s experiences with the Native American Church (NAC). Following a peyote meeting, men and women sit in a semicircle to dine under a brush-arbor shade. The abundant meal is served by the elderly woman wearing the pale blue dress. The others—with each figure defined by vibrant, painterly strokes—are formally dressed in striped wool blankets and collared shirts, and some wear cowboy hats. A cooking fire on the right is surrounded by pots and utensils used to prepare the meal. Only hours before, the peyote meeting took place in the tipi, now with its poles still erect but uncovered. A drying rack full of meat has been prepared for meeting attendees, so that no one will leave empty-handed. Beyond the gathering, a thin line of deep green spans the horizon and fades into the distance.
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Kiowa Flute Player
The painting depicts a Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 husband and wife at dusk, near their cold-weather home. We can tell that it is cold from their warm attire, and because the top of the tipi is darkened by smoke from a fire. The couple is preparing to end the day with prayer, and the man is playing a flute carved from wood, with a bird effigy perched between the lip plate and finger holes. The flute is adorned with thinly cut buckskin strips decorated with beads and tipped with feathers from the female northern flicker, sometimes called a yellowhammer.
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Mother and Child
Mother and Child depicts a Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 woman carrying her child in a cradleboard. The mother’s scalp is decorated with yellow paint, and her cheeks and the child’s are adorned with red ocher. Her black wool blanket has a beaded blanket strip at the hemline, and her buckskin dress has been painted green and yellow and adorned with beadwork details. Her yellow-painted leggings have cut fringes along the tops.
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Satanta - White Bear - Kiowa Indian Leader
Set’tainte (ca. 1820–1878) was a famed diplomat and decorated War Chief of the Kiowa Tribe during the nineteenth century, and he served his Kiowa people generously under the leadership of Chief Dohasan (died 1866). Set’tainte was also known as White Bear, which is a rough English translation of his Kiowa name, and as Satanta. One of Set’tainte’s most notable skirmishes was the First Battle of Adobe Walls in Texas in 1864, in which cavalry and infantry under Colonel Kit Carson were overpowered after they fired two howitzers on unsuspecting Kiowa and Comanche families. Set’tainte affected the outcome of the battle by sounding an army bugle, which confused the cavalry with contradictory commands, and Carson’s troops were eventually forced to retreat to New Mexico.
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Peyote Man
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Kiowa Family
Bou-ge-Tah’s true-to-life scenes provide an autoethnographic narrative of her experiences of Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 life, and her boldly delineated portraits are distinguished for their articulation of Kiowa social reality. Kiowa Family; Kiowa Mother & Children is in the Kiowa style, in which figures and forms are depicted without shading; this style has roots in the ledger art of the 1880s and Indigenous Plains region pictorial art. Bou-ge-Tah’s works focalize family relationships from a female perspective: the artist met many of her subjects through kinship connections, having been raised in her Indigenous community on ancestral territories in southwest Oklahoma.
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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.
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The Sign in the Fall
The Sign in the Fall depicts a Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 husband and wife seated atop a hill witnessing a seasonal event. The man, with one arm around his wife, points to the sign mentioned in the title: the sun, low on the horizon, with rings. He wears an eagle feather on his braided scalp lock, which falls down his back, and his hair is parted and braided, with two beaded adornments tied to the braids at the nape of his neck. A bandolier consisting of two strands of mescal beans falls from his left shoulder, and a yellow medicine tie fastens the strands together; both of these objects relate to spiritual practices. He wears a red wool breechcloth with a beaded knife sheath on his belt, and his beaded, loom-worked garters are tied below the kneecap. His moccasins are painted and beaded. A hand-carved flute lies on the ground behind the couple.
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Female Figure
Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 artist Woody Big Bow’s Female Figure, painted in the Kiowa Style,2 celebrates the everyday experience of early twentieth-century Indigenous women. The doll-like figure here carries a woven basket as she carefully traverses a stony landscape dotted with tufts of wild grasses. Her black and red velveteen Woodlands-style moccasins have a puckered toe and are decorated with white beadwork. The linework in the tips of her long black braids is echoed in the linework on the edge of her shawl as well as the patches of buffalo grass, creating a balanced composition.
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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.
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Cornstalk Match
Franklin Gritts’s tempera painting Cornstalk Match portrays four Indigenous men shooting arrows fashioned from cornstalks, a game won by the person who shoots the farthest and the most accurately. The Flatstyle1 background is void except for a sparse ground line registered by green patches of grass. Each of the competitors is equipped with a Plains-style longbow made of wood from the Osage orange tree. Skill-based Indigenous games such as lacrosse, stickball, double ball, lance toss, and canoe races were created for myriad social and cultural purposes including diplomacy, as events connected to ceremonial celebrations, and for well-being and health, in addition to simply lifting the spirits of the people in the community.
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Man and Pipe
George Kishketon was a survivor of the Carlisle Indian School, an infamous colonial residential institution in Pennsylvania that opened in 1879. Kishketon attended Carlisle between 1898 and 1903, and he lived through the brutality of the federally mandated institution, which had been intentionally designed by a colonial militarized regime to “kill the Indian and save the man.”1 Very little information was recorded about this artist, perhaps due to the anti-Indigenous political climate throughout the U.S. during Kishketon’s lifetime, primarily stemming from the desire of federal and state governments to possess the lands of Native people.
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Lullaby
Lullaby depicts a Kiowa (Cáuigù)1 mother holding her child up toward the sky as she looks upward, her lips parted in song. The mother’s cheeks are adorned with red ocher paint. She is wearing a yellow painted Cáuigù buckskin dress with beadwork at the sleeve line and skirt tail, and her belt has a worked silver drop trailing from beneath her fingertip-length fringed sleeves. Her beaded leggings are made from braintanned hide, whitened by the tanning process. The child is swaddled in a Cáuigù cradleboard, designed and created by the family’s matriarchs. Intricate beadwork has been sewn along both right and left panels, and the beaded cradle casement was constructed from hide. The cradle is fastened to a wooden lattice, with twisted hide fringes sewn to the footer.
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