Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2003
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring 2003, pp. 136-37.
Abstract
The study of Plains Indian art is currently in a transitive stage. Because of the enthusiasm of several non-Native researchers and scholars in the eighties and nineties-like Norman Feder, Dennis Lessard, Richard Conn, John C. Ewers (just to name those who have already passed away)-the appreciation of Plains Indian beadwork and quillwork almost reached the highest levels of connoisseurship, and prices for these pieces rose to the stars. At the same time, our knowledge of tribal or regional styles clarified to a certain degree, and our vision became less obscured by centuryold misconceptions. The presence of Native American scholarship also became apparent during these decades, bringing refreshing voices to the field.
The publication of Beauty, Honor, and Tradition is an important contribution to Native American art studies in general and to Plains Indian art in particular. The beauty and elegance of Plains Indian shirts should grip any admirer of Native American cultures. The display and survey of these amazing creations presented here evoke new, informed inquiries.
Father and son, George P. Horse Capture and Joseph D. Horse Capture, members of the A'aninin (formerly known as Gros Ventre) tribe, co-curated the exhibition of the same title at the George Gustav Heye Center in New York, for which this publication served as catalogue. Its format, typography, and photographic quality deserve only the highest praise. Unfortunate is the absence of a single measurement for the selected shirts, although the 2001 Charter Member Calendar of the NMAI illustrates thirteen shirts from the same collection (ten of these "participated" in the exhibition), all with exact measurements.
The pieces in the exhibition were selected from more than four hundred shirts, all from the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian. Although it is hard to accept the authors' statement that "relatively few Plains war shirts survive in museum collections or private hands," even this single collection would provide a sufficient number of examples to illustrate the stylistic differences of all Plains art areas. Thus it is hard to understand why only the Crow, as indicative of a tribal style, and the Southern Plains, illustrating a regional style, were selected. Based on Lessard's groundbreaking 1990 paper in the American Indian Art Magazine, the co-curators would be able to define and illustrate the characteristics of the Northern and Central Plains art areas as well. Their uncertainty is attested to, for example, by their claim on page 58 that "This shirt is catalogued as Blackfeet, but it could have been created by a member of any number of tribes located in the upper Missouri region in the early nineteenth century."
Comments
Copyright 2003 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln