Daily Iowan

Issue date: 4/26/07 Section: 80 Hours

Click here to listen to the related segment from our '80 Hours On Air' Podcast.

---

"Do you know why they are called ledger drawings?" asked Gerald Solomons, pausing in front of a drawing hanging in the UI Museum of Art.

The work, drawn mostly in colored pencil, depicts two American Indian warriors. One is on horseback, the other standing. A cursive snippet provides context: "Pawnee killed by Cheyenne." Though the drawing hangs carefully framed on a museum wall, its thin paper is ruled with light blue lines, like common notebook paper - or 19th-century accounting ledger books.

"Initially, the Native Americans put pictures on the buffalo hide of the teepee," Solomons said. "Then, the buffalo went. They drew on muslin for a while on the inside of the teepee. And then when the trading posts came, around about 1850 or so, they bartered for these ledger drawings."

"These account books," interjected Hope Solomons, who is married to Gerald Solomons.

"Yes, these account books," he agreed. "That's why some of them even have writing on them - they'd been used."

The Solomons, both retired UI professors, have collected such drawings since 1981. Created by Plains Indians beginning in the reservation era, the illustrations depict scenes of warfare, important American-Indian spiritual ceremonies, courting rituals, and domestic settings. The Solomons, who have already donated a substantial Pre-Columbian ceramics collection to the museum, have also promised their 30 ledger drawings, which are on display through Sept. 30 in the museum's Hoover-Paul Gallery.

As with many culturally specific items, the ledger drawings raise questions about what exactly can be considered art. Michelene Pesantubbee, a UI associate professor of religious studies and academic coordinator of American Indian and Native Studies, said that historically, the ledger drawings served as something akin to calendars or journals. And while they were meant to be pleasing to the eye, their overall intent was to emphasize the importance of a cultural or spiritual event.

"It's the recording still of historical events, spiritual experiences, but on some kind of paper rather than on a more traditional hide," she said. "You chronicled things and marked them."

But outside the American-Indian community, traders and soldiers often saw in these drawings an opportunity for profit.

"For a long time, the ledger books were considered curios," said Dennis Kuhnel, a UI law student and history Ph.D. candidate studying Western history, Native North America, and federal Indian law. "U.S. soldiers, traders, missionaries, prison guards, and reservation employees would collect them from Plains Indians. Invariably, this property transfer included a good number of stolen and improperly acquired drawings." These guards would try to have famous warriors draw pictures, and then they would sell them for profit. Only sometimes did they actually pay the American Indians for their drawings, and then only a minimal amount.

After this initial curiosity, the drawings were for many years only of interest to anthropologists and historians, who studied their accurate depictions of Native customs and war apparel.

Hope Solomons described such details in a couple of the first drawings she and her husband purchased:

"If you look carefully, you can see the type of rifle he's carrying, the details of the bridle the horse has, a German silver decoration on his breast, and his wonderful, almost Viking, horns [on his headdress]," she said.

"They're very, very specific with regards to their regalia - the shields, the feathers," added Gerald Solomons. "And you can tell, if you're good at it, what tribe that is."

In the 1980s, the ledger drawings began attracting more broad-based attention from art experts, dealers, and collectors, who showed interest in the drawings as examples of American-Indian art.

The Solomons were two such collectors. Hope Solomons said that when a dealer from whom they had previously purchased Pre-Columbian art from showed her several ledger drawings, she was immediately drawn to the images, which are at once childlike and simple (they often include only outlined facial features and sketched backgrounds) and precise and detailed (the shields, headdresses, and war paint is strikingly accurate).

"You weren't at home," Hope Solomons said to her husband. "The more I looked at them, the more I liked them. And you came home, and they were scattered all over the living room."

But for some, having these drawings on display in a museum raises ethical questions. Is this just a continuation of the cultural assimilation that white Americans once imposed on American Indians through reservations and boarding schools?

Pesantubbee, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahomoa, said that for many American-Indian people, the answer is yes. For her, it depends. What she doesn't want is works that are presented as a documentation of a lost Native past.

"That assumes that Native people no longer practice these religious events or embody the values that are depicted," she said. "This interpretation of the drawings doesn't recognize how the federal government suppressed these traditions."

And labeling these drawings "art" raises yet another set of issues.

"Art is a Western perspective," she said. "So is capitalism. Art is, of course, not [the ledger drawings'] original purpose. They weren't meant to be a commodity. In a way, it's a continuation of colonization. Of a dominant people taking advantage of a marginalized people simply because they can." To Pesantubbee, that these are being displayed in a museum indicates that non-American-Indian people have control over the drawings, a fact she finds troubling.

She also has problems with the drawings being displayed if they were obtained illegally, as do the Solomons - they purchased all their drawings from dealers and said none of them were originally coerced.

But Kuhnel, who is doing his graduate research on the ledger drawings, said it can be difficult to prove an illegal acquisition. He cited case studies from the late 19th-century in which one American Indian, Little Fingernail, was looted, and another case in which a man named Red Fish sold his drawings under what could be considered duress.

With Little Fingernail, he said that even though his ledger drawings were looted there is probably no means for legal repatriation today under the common law in the United States.

"Anthropologists will say that the purpose of warfare in Native American societies is to plunder and loot, so who are we to retrospectively enforce repatriation?" he said. He drew a similar conclusion about Red Fish, noting that in court, the contract would likely stand.

Kuhnel is particularly interested in whether the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, could apply to ledger drawings. The law, passed in 1990, provides a process for museums and federal agencies to return certain American-Indian cultural items, particularly human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. In his research, Kuhnel argues that the drawings are a mnemonic device meant to aid in recall for oral storytelling and, as such, can be considered sacred objects.

"Stories are often times sacred [in American-Indian cultures]," he said. "Military narratives in Plains Indian society are also sacred."

Pesantubbee said that despite her concerns about the objects being displayed in a museum and her hope that in the future, descendents of the artists can be consulted, part of her thinks having the drawings in a museum provides a valuable lesson.

"In some ways, I don't mind them being displayed because they are a record of colonialism - of how [American Indians] had to cope to survive," she said. "As long as it serves that purpose, I'm OK with them."

E-mail DI reporter Maggie Anderson at:
margaret-anderson@uiowa.edu

---

ART EXHIBITION
Plains Indians Drawings
When: Through Sept. 30
Where: UI Museum of Art
Admission: Free

---

The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian has one of the largest collections of ledger drawings in the nation

This site functions as a guide for collectors of ledger drawings

Plainsledgerart.iorg has plenty of information about ledger drawings, and the controversy over how they are kept and displayed

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools