‘REVERSING THE GAZE’ WITH EARLY NATIVE AMERICAN VISUAL IMAGERY
by Amy Dianne Bergseth
A thesis submitted to the Miami University Honors Program and Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for University Honors with Distinction and History Departmental Honors
May 2008 Miami University Oxford, Ohio ABSTRACT
‘REVERSING THE GAZE’ WITH EARLY NATIVE AMERICAN VISUAL IMAGERY
by Amy Dianne Bergseth
In her article “Reversing the Gaze: Early Native American Images of Europeans and Euro- Americans,” A. Ruoff focused on literary images. This thesis, however, analyzes visual images produced by Native Americans of Europeans from the seventeenth to mid-nineteenth century. Although less prolific than the well-known representations produced by their Euro-American counterparts, Native visual images similarly express perceptions of the ‘other.’ Using skills acquired to ‘read the visual record,’ this paper argues that Native produced images of Europeans are a rich and under-utilized source for understanding early interactions between the two groups and are early expressions of indigenous self-identification. Native images leave out racial difference, and instead use cultural markers—dress, weapons—as the distinguishing feature of Europeans.
‘Reversing the Gaze’ with Early Native American Visual Imagery
A thesis submitted to the Miami University Honors Program and Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for University Honors with Distinction and History Departmental Honors
by
Amy Dianne Bergseth
May 2008 Miami University Oxford, Ohio
Approved by:
______, Advisor Dr. Carla G. Pestana
______, Reader Dr. Stephen M. Norris
______, Reader Dr. Daniel M. Cobb
Accepted by:
______, Director University Honors Program Acknowledgements:
I need to thank many people for all of their help in making this project a success. I am sincerely grateful to Fran Biehl (Museum Specialist), Tony Williams (Museum Specialist), and
Pat Nietfeld (Collections Manager) at the Culture Resources Center of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, in Suitland, Maryland. They let me look at many of the wonderful objects at the rich National Museum of the American Indian cultural repository, and juggled their time and rearranged their schedules, allowing me to do my research there.
I also benefited greatly from Rayna Green (Cherokee), Director of the American Indian
Program at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, for sharing her passion with me. It not only helped me in compiling more sources, but it also boosted my interest in this topic. I was encouraged by all of her enthusiasm for contemporary Native
American art. I also appreciate everyone at the Archives Center of the National Museum of
American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution, who were the guinea pigs for a short
‘show-and-tell’ at a staff meeting, while I was serving briefly as an intern in between my
Summer Scholars Project weeks. This includes Deborra Richardson (Chair), Wendy Shay
(Assistant Chair), David Haberstich (Archivist), Reuben Jackson (Archivist), Susan Strange
(Archivist), Cathy Keen (Archivist), Craig Orr (Archivist), Vanessa Simmons (Archivist), Alison
Oswald (Archivist), and John Fleckner (Archivist), and especially Kay Peterson (Customer
Service).
I also need to thank Catherine O’Sullivan (Reference Archivist) at the National
Anthropological Archives in the Smithsonian Institution Museum Support Center, Suitland,
Maryland, and Candace Greene, ethnologist in the Department of Anthropology at the National
i Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Candace Greene is a great inspiration as well as a wonderful resource for references. Also, staff at National Museum of Natural History
Libraries and the National Museum of American History Library must also be recognized for allowing me to use their collections. I am also very grateful to Ed Via and all the staff at the
InterLibrary Loan Office of Miami University for putting up with all of my requests. I also benefited from the help of Jenny Presnell, the Humanities/Social Sciences Librarian at Miami
University Libraries, in finding various resources, and from John Millard, a Librarian in Digital
Services, who answered my questions relating to copyright and fair use. Jeri Schaner,
Department of History Secretary, also helped to guide me through much of the university funding paperwork.
Other special thanks must go to the people at the Newberry Library in Chicago: John
Powell, the outstanding Photoduplication Department Manager; John Aubrey, the brilliant
Edward E. Ayer Collection Librarian; the efficient and friendly library assistants Kelly Reiss,
Autumn Mather, Dan Fink, Joy Austria, Andy Steadham, and JoEllen Dickie. They all make trips to the Newberry Library so enjoyable! Thanks for allowing me to have a glimpse of what it means to be a part of the “Newberry Mafia” of scholars of Native American History.1
Thanks must also be given to all of the inspiring professors at Miami University who have provided encouragement: Dr. Erik Jensen, for expressing his passion for history in the classroom. Some ideas and parts of this project were first developed in my Spring 2007 History class, HST 359 “Junior Honors Colloquium,” taught by Dr. Jensen. Dr. Helen Sheumaker for fostering my love for using material culture as historical evidence in her many classes. Dr. Sara
1 Philip J. Deloria, “Historiography,” in A Companion to American Indian History, ed. Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 18. The source of the phrase “Newberry Mafia” came from William T. Hagan, “The New Indian History,” in Rethinking American Indian History, ed. Donald L. Fixico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 33.
ii Butler, for teaching me the material culture framework and providing additional sources. Dr.
Wietse de Boer for fostering my passion for the “New Social History.” Dr. Lisa Poirier for her enthusiasm for teaching, whose class provided additional ideas and perspectives for this project.
Dr. Daniel M. Cobb for the classes that I have taken on Native American History and for providing partial inspiration for this project, as well as Dr. George Esber, for encouraging my interest in contemporary Native American politics and culture. Dr. Bob Wicks, for sharing his excitement with the world of art, which can be very useful historical evidence, if given the chance. Daryl Baldwin (Miami), Director of the Myaamia Project, for showing me the cultural legacies and inner gifts of linguistic evidence to aid in the understanding of contemporary as well as historical Miami native culture. Dr. Elspeth Brown, now Professor of History at the
University of Toronto, for sparking my interest in visual imagery as a rich source to study
American history. The idea for this project stemmed from my interest in her class, American
Studies 201 “Approaches to American Culture.” Last but not least, my advisor, Dr. Carla
Pestana, for her help and guidance.
Thanks also need to go to the University Honors Program for supporting and promoting my research through financial aid, as well as the Office for the Advancement of Research and
Scholarship for granting an Undergraduate Presentation Award. Also, the Summer Scholars
Program with the Department of History, the College of Arts and Science with the Dean’s
Scholars Program, and the Department of History for giving me financial support from the
Roschman Fund. All provided me with some funding to go to the American Indian Workshop, the premier European forum on American Indian issues, and other conferences to present some of the first drafts of my work.
iii I am also very grateful to The American Indian Workshop Committee, a group that hosts
an international workshop held in Europe that focuses on the study of Native American peoples,
histories, and cultures, for choosing my paper for the 28th American Indian Workshop. This conference, “Premières Nations, Collections Royales,” at the Musée du quai Branly, in Paris, 10-
13 May 2007, provided me with an amazing opportunity to share my research, learn about other’s research projects, as well as meet nationally and internationally renowned scholars.
Thank you especially to Denys Delâge, Professor of History in the Sociology Department, at the
Université Laval, Québec, for his encouragement and source recommendations. His information and comments on European and Native dogs helped tremendously. Thank you also goes to Dr.
James Hamill, professor emeritus of Anthropology at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, for his support and encouragement, as well as sharing with me one of his favorite conference experiences.
I need to thank especially all staff persons at all of the native museums that I e-mailed, who graciously responded to my inquiries. Without the native museums and communities who save the evidence that I use, there would be no project, no stories, and no histories.
I also need to thank my family, my mom, my dad, my sister Heather, for their encouragement. Also I am indebted to Elizabeth (Louie) Morgan and Whittney Barth, two of my colleagues, who provided me with friendship, encouragement, and inspiration. Also, I am grateful that Virginia Lohrmann, my roommate, was willing to read an early draft. I also owe
Mary Tippmann (Miami), Jessie Baldwin (Miami), and Amy Numrich thanks for listening to my stresses, complaints, and worries about this project. Also I need to thank my grandmother for her “pack rat” abilities, and to my grandfather, for his organizing abilities. Without both of these talents, I would not be able to do this project. Last but not least this project is dedicated to the
iv American Shorthair cats of the family, Charlie and Jingles, the living and the dead, for their lifelong companionship. This paper is also dedicated to Laura Sorensen Arnold, who informed me about the power and beauty that images have even for someone without the gift of sight. As
“Visual culture entails a meditation on blindness, the invisible, the unseen, the unseeable, and the overlooked,” it is often the blind that ask the most pertinent questions regarding the visual world.
After contemplating on the overlooked images in American Indian history and the Indian-White encounters, I used Laura’s inquisitive and creative stance towards history as my guide.2 I hope I brought back those images and asked those questions that have remained ignored.
2 W. J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 343.
v Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Using Native Sources to Study Native History…………………………...…….1
Chapter 2: Depiction of Dress & Comportment: Seneca Combs …………………………..12
Chapter 3: Testimony to Subjugation & Oppression: Petroglyphs & Pictographs ………...29
Chapter 4: Terms of Negotiation & Agreement: Wampum Belts ……………………….....46
Chapter 5: “Underneath all the conflicting images… one fundamental truth emerges”: Conclusion…………....….……………………………………………………………..…...61
Bibliography ………………………..……………………………………………...... 67
Appendices:
Appendix A: Images of Europeans by Native Americans: Seneca Combs ………...... 76
Appendix B: Images of Europeans by Native Americans: Petroglyphs & “Rock Art”….....79
Appendix C: Images of Europeans by Native Americans: Wampum Belts...………….….. 82
vi List of Figures:
Frontispiece: Revenge, or French to the Missouri……………………………...... viii
Figure 1: Pre-Contact Seneca Antler Combs……………………………………….16
Figure 2: A Timeline of Seneca Antler Combs……………………………………..17
Figure 3: European with Dog and Gun on Seneca Antler Comb…………………...19
Figure 4: The Greenhalgh Comb…………………………………………………....24
Figure 5: Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal………………………………………….26
Figure 6: Pre-Contact Petroglyphs………………………………………………….33
Figure 7: Spanish Cross Imposed Over Indigenous Petroglyphs…………………...34
Figure 8: Spanish Signature on Rock……………………………………………….35
Figure 9: Hunting Scene in Early Diné Petroglyphs………………………………..36
Figure 10: ‘The Skewered Priest’…………………………………………………..40
Figure 11: Spanish Entrada at Canyon del Muerto…………………………………42
Figure 12: Native-manufactured Wampum and European-made Bundle…………..51
Figure 13: Guswentah Wampum Belt………………………………………………53
Figure 14: Detail of William Penn Wampum Belt…………………………………55
Figure 15: George Washington Peace Medal………………………………………56
vii Frontispiece: Revenge, or the French to the Missouri Although created by a non-native person in the early nineteenth-century, this political cartoon raises many questions pertaining to perceptions of others amidst dominant hegemonic worlds. “La Revanche, ou les français au Missouri.” / (Revenge, or the French to the Missouri). From Indian Times: Nachrichten aus dem rotten Amerika (Frankfurt am Main: Museum der Weltkulturen, 2003), 92. Grandville, La Revanche, 1827. Kolorierte Lithographie, 22x30 cm. Private Collection.
viii Chapter 1: Using Native Sources to Study Native History: Question & Methodology
“There is an old saying that history is written by the victor—meaning that the voices of the defeated are often muted in the historical record, overwritten by the perspectives of the more powerful. I would add a further caveat to this truism—history is written by the literate… It is therefore not surprising that [Native American]… views were long omitted from the story of American history, which has traditionally relied heavily on written source material.” Candace Greene, Ethnologist 3
“Only those with extra gumption and imagination will try to buck that trend and write colonial history from the ‘other’ side of the frontier [using native sources as opposed to European sources that include Native Americans]” James Axtell, Historian 4
The imaging serving as a frontispiece to this thesis, the lithograph entitled, “La
Revanche, ou les français au Missouri ([Revenge, or the French to the Missouri]),” depicts the
1827 visit of Osage Indians (who call themselves wažáže or ni-u-ko’n-ska) to Paris.5 It’s comical to envision a Native elder standing up in front of a classroom discussing the “History and Culture of the White Man.” From the early seventeenth-century to the present, Native American peoples have turned the emphasis away from the study of themselves, to instead study those people who make their careers upon the study of Native Americans. Although it may seem that only in the last century role-reversals have become prevalent ways of critiquing dominant society, it is
3 Candace Greene, “Winter Counts and Coup Counts: Plains Pictorial Art as Native History,” AnthroNotes, Museum of Natural History Publication for Educators, 26 (Fall 2005): 1. 4 James Axtell, “The Ethnohistory of Native America,” in Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 10. 5 Garrick A. Bailey, “Osage,” in Handbook of North American Indians, ed. William C. Sturtevant, vol. 13, Plains, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution 2001), 493. Kristie C. Wolferman, The Osage in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 10. Indian Times: Nachrichten aus dem rotten Amerika (Frankfurt am Main: Museum der Weltkulturen, 2003), 92. From Grandville, La Revanche, 1827. Kolorierte Lithographie, 22x30 cm. Private Collection. This cartoon was published in the French journal La Silhouette in January 1830 by J. J. Grandville. Ali Kazancigil, “Strengthening the role of the social sciences in society: the World Social Science Initiative,” International Social Science Journal 55, 177 (2003): 378.
1 nothing new.6 Granville’s “La Revanche” returns agency to the Indian people. Emblematic of
issues raised in the study of history, this cartoon is an ideal image to introduce new
interpretations. Throughout history Indian people have been left “as bearer[s], not maker[s], of
meaning.”7 But this politically caustic, whimsical reverie forces students of history, as well as
contemporary society, to reflect on the exclusion of Native American points of view – and also
Native American sources of documentation – within the larger understanding of American
history.
Many know that European and Euro-American depictions of Native Americans illustrate
European impressions. Fewer realize that native peoples also created their own images showing
their own perspectives of the ‘other,’ the European colonialists. Although these primary sources
are less prolific than those produced by their Euro-American counterparts, Indians did convey
their own indigenous understandings in visual form. Indians created cartography, carved
decorative bone combs, and traded wampum belts with pictorial designs as mnemonic devices
for treaty agreements. Native Americans visually represented the world in which they lived as
well as the strangers they met.
While Native American images of Europeans have been ignored and dismissed, scholars
have focused intently on European images of Indians. When it comes to European depictions of
Native Americans, the most widely recognized manifestation is the representation of America as
a female Indian. Philip J. Deloria’s Playing Indian states that in the British political cartoons of the mid-eighteenth century, the Indian was a familiar symbol of the American colonies:
“Between 1765 and 1783, the colonies appeared as an Indian in no fewer than sixty-five political
6 Rayna Green, “Dr. Rayna Green, Cherokee, Offers a ‘Modest Proposal’ for a ‘Museum of the Plains White Person,’” in In Our Own Words: Extraordinary Speeches of the American Century, ed. Andrew Carroll and Robert Torricelli (New York: Kodansha International, 1999), 345-348. 7 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35.
2 prints– almost four times as frequently as the other main symbols of America, the snake and the child.”8 Although Deloria focused on the Revolutionary era, this depiction dates back at least to the sixteenth century. These images were drawn and engraved by late eighteenth century cartoonists and engravers, becoming ubiquitous at that time. The representation of America as the female Indian narrates a familiar story of European domination over the “New World.” The story is more complicated. Native people used art to tell stories of their interactions with the white visitors. In this project I analyze native images to find out what they say about European peoples, Indian-White relations, and the history of the encounter.
As historian James Axtell observed, the European sources will always outnumber the indigenous ones.9 Historian William Fenton echoed this assertion, stating, “Virtually all that we know of Indians at the time comes to us through the eyes and pens of white men whose interests and values differed from those of the Indians.”10 These Euro-American documents do tell us much about Native people, but they always have Euro-American biases. Historian Bernd Peyer has pointed out that although there are early Native American writings, they are not given enough credit.11 Material expressions, such as native-made maps, rock art, sacred birch bark scrolls, paintings, sculptures, pottery, wampum belts, effigy combs, and other art objects, illustrate native depictions of Europeans.
Relatively-speaking, however, there are plenty of native sources to analyze.12 They range from simply-carved images found in the arid landscapes of southern Texas, Arizona, and New
8 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (Chelsea, Michigan: BookCrafters, Inc., 1998), 28-29. 9 James Axtell, “The Ethnohistory of Native America,” 9-10. 10 Christopher L. Miller and George R. Hamell, “A New Perspective on Indian-White Contact: Cultural Symbols and Colonial Trade,” in American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500-1850, ed. Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell (New York: Routledge, 2000), 189. 11 Bernd C. Peyer, “Introduction,” in American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s-1930s, Bernd C. Peyer, ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 36. 12 See Appendices that illustrate the prevalence of images of Europeans in Native American art and material culture. Although these are not comprehensive, they give a sense of the variety and scope, in geography and chronology, of Native American images of Europeans.
3 Mexico, to intricate early-seventeenth-century effigy combs from archeological village sites of
the Haudenosaunee in the Northeast. These precious artifacts are constructed in many different
materials from the white and purple beads made from drilled clam shells called wampum to
cartography drawn upon paper or animal skin. Both indigenous men and women crafted this art.
Women decorated the quilled woodland pouches and the Plains beaded cradleboards, while
warriors depicted battles between the United States Cavalry on the Plains within the ledger
books. Long-forgotten evidence produced by native peoples reveal native stories and histories
history. This project reveals those native stories and histories.
Images, like Native peoples, who are often ignored in the construction of historical
narratives, also have a “subaltern status.”13 These Native views of the past, in Native-
manufactured images, can help give us a more complete and nuanced view of the Indian-White
encounters.14 Native American art has always been dismissed as being “primitive art.” Historian
Rick Hill (Tuscarora) has explained that Native sources have been finally given its due
recognition only with the coming of an “appreciation of tribal art from around the world. At one
time, scholars and curators led the public to believe that non-western art was unworthy of
13 Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, 33, 36. 14 Jack D. Forbes argues for the possibility of pre-1600 images of Europeans. Jack D. Forbes, The American Discovery of Europe (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 108-109. One significant article about the native perspective is James Axtell, “Through Another Glass Darkly: Early Indian Views of Europeans,” in After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 125-143. A. Ruoff writes about literary representations. A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff, “Reversing the Gaze: Early Native American Images of Europeans and Euro-Americans,” in Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations, ed. Gretchen M. Bataille (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001): 198- 217. R. D. Theisz, “The Bad Speakers and the Long Braids: References to Foreign Enemies in Lakota Song Texts,” in Indians & Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays, ed. Christian F. Feest (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 430. The best work of views of Europeans by the rest of the world is Julius E. Lips, The Savage Hits Back (New Hyde Park, New York: University Books, 1966). Its author, Julius E. Lips, Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, formerly Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Cologne and the Director of the Rautenstrauch-Museum, was fearlessly determined to share his breakthrough research despite dangerous Nazi pressures towards conformity, and first published The Savage Hits Back, a book ahead of its time, in 1937. I thank Christian Feest and Rayna Green for pointing this book out to me.
4 appreciation.”15 Western art historians did not see indigenous art as worthy of being included in the definition of art expressing cultural aesthetics and values. Petroglyphs and pictographs, commonly called rock art, often remain as fantastic “cave drawings” that European archaeologists look at with wonder.16 These representations or figures carved or painted upon rock, have been dubbed “prehistoric” art. This term, itself, is highly problematic. The word
“prehistory” has been used to refer to the period before written records, and thus cements into the popular imagination that rock art are scribbles made by a primitive “man” of great antiquity.
What can images ‘tell us’? Images expand on the emotive, hidden side of history.
“Images can have tremendous rhetorical force because they can gather together so much: information, attitudes, and relationships” explains archaeologist Michael Shanks.17 Both images and written documentation can be warped by an author’s hidden motives, but historians can use the distortions in images to understand the artists’ ideologies and attitudes towards the subject at hand.18 Archaeologist Richard Bradley states, “The history of art is the history of particular ways of seeing”19 While art cannot tell exactly how something was in the past, it does speak to the ways that people saw that past. These images and artifacts can be used as rich sources of information for not just archaeologists but also for historians, especially as indications of early
Native American depictions of Europeans. For a period when there are few written documents that reflect native perceptions of Euro-Americans, these images can be used to get a little insight
15 Rick Hill, “Seneca Art in Transition,” Turtle Quarterly, 1, 1 (1986), 4. 16 Jean Clottes, World Rock Art. Translated by Guy Bennett (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2002), 37- 38. James D. Keyser and Michael A. Klassen, Plains Indian Rock Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 16. Petroglyphs are defined as images inscribed upon the rock’s surface, while pictographs are images painted on the rock. Randall White, Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2003), 196. 17 Michael Shanks, “Photography and archaeology” in The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, ed. Brian Leigh Molyneaux (New York: Routledge, 1997), 82. 18 Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), 30. 19 Richard Bradley, “‘To see is to have seen’: craft traditions in British field archaeology,” in The Cultural Life of Images, ed. Molyneaux, 62.
5 into their own point of view. The historian can extract valuable information by looking at the physical and material aspects of the image, as well as thinking about the social and cultural implications and contexts.
Although visual images tell something about how people viewed the past, the ‘words’ that they express are often difficult to understand. With visual imagery each picture’s meaning can have many interpretations. Each image is not only biased by representing only the native point of view of the encounter, but the source type, an artifact, also brings to the surface other issues of reliability as evidence. Written sources also have similar challenges of interpretation.
The art does ‘speak’ about the ideologies and understandings of past events, but, “the art cannot speak for itself, and the messages have, for a variety of reasons, become distorted or difficult to grasp” 20 More work is needed to secure an adequate understanding of images.
A challenge then is to use the visual sources that can be somewhat trickier than traditional texts as historical evidence. To overcome such challenges, I use the material culture framework and theoretical approaches to understanding visual images along side cultural and historical context. Guides on how to use artifacts for historical evidence explain how to analyze images. By first stepping back from the context of the images, I can see the “messages” and ideologies embedded in the images. Many questions that seem simple at first, when taken the time to be answered, can help to understand an image. What is the function of an image? Why was it produced? Who created it?21 When I first just looks at the basics of the image—the shape, size, material, color, contrast, shadow— I can then move from description to making deductions and interpretations about what the images mean. Paying attention to connotations can help tease
20 James L. Pearson, Shamanism and the Ancient Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Archaeology (New York: AltaMira Press, 2002), 42. 21 Burke, Eyewitnessing, 187. Brian Leigh Molyneaux, “Introduction: The Cultural Life of Images,” in The Cultural Life of Images, ed. Molyneaux, 5.
6 out those ideological values that are included in the images. With material and cultural artifacts as well, I can look at its function and design, as well as the historical context in which it was made or used, to gain a better understanding about an object’s use and value to those who owned it.22
As I learned more about native-produced material and visual culture, I discovered that some of the historical evidence presented is sensitive in nature, such as the petroglyphs and archaeological artifacts. For many Native Americans, pictographs and petroglyphs carved on rock formations in the natural landscape are sacred. As C. J. Wheeler and A. P. Buchner succinctly explained, rock art are identified as “living things, sources of power, and the dwelling place of spirits.”23 The Seneca-carved antler combs are archaeological artifacts found as burial goods in grave sites. For example, at one archaeological site called Adams, near Livonia, New
York, more than 200 graves have been excavated. More than 50% of the graves have burial goods, and the rare 3% include these ornamental hair combs. In 1963 New York State
Archaeologist Charles F. Wray counted over two hundred and fifty combs in private and public art collections. Many of the combs used in this paper are those found behind or near the skull, as if (or suggesting that) they were placed in the hair of the deceased when buried.24 At the Cultural
22 For visual imagery I used Elspeth Brown, “Reading the Visual Record,” Appendix A, in Looking for America, ed. Ardis Cameron (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 362-370; and Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practice of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). See also Chapter 7 (“Visual Documents”) and Chapter 8 (“Artifacts”) from David E. Kyvig and Myron A. Marty, Nearby History: Exploring the Past Around You, 2d ed. (Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press, 2000), 123-164. 23 C. J. Wheeler and A. P. Buchner, “Rock Art: A Metalinguistic Interpretation of the Algonkian Word for Stone.” Papers of the Sixth Algonquian Conference, 1974, Canadian Ethnology Service, Paper No. 23, National Museum of Man Mercury Series (Ottawa, Canada: National Museums of Canada, 1975): 369. 24 Charles F. Wray, “Ornamental Hair Combs of the Seneca Iroquois (Morgan Chapter Study Group Report No. 1),” Pennsylvania Archaeologist Vol. 33, No. 1 & 2 (July 1963): 37-38, 42-44. For more information on Boughton Hill burial sites, see Albert Hoffman, “Additional Data on Historic Burials at the Boughton Hill Site (Can 2-2), Victor Township, Ontario County, New York.” The Bulletin No. 40 (1967): 4-17. William A. Ritchie, “Dutch Hollow, an Early Historic Period Seneca Site in Livingston County, New York,” Researches and Transactions of The New York State Archeological Association Vol. XIII, No. 1 (1954): 1-98. Charles F. Wray and Harry L. Schoff, “A Preliminary Report on the Seneca Sequence in Western New York,” Pennsylvania Archaeologist Vol. 23 Issue 2
7 Resource Center at Suitland, Maryland, for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American
Indian, these archeological artifacts are housed on the lowest level of the facility, respecting
Native wishes that they be placed in a sacred manner, closest to the earth.
These archaeological findings are not only sensitive, but also controversial. Some people may look at these artifacts and say that they should not have even been unearthed and disturbed to be now used in academic research. As Mohawk elder Tehanetorens poignantly states, “White people who read this can rest fairly secure that when they die, their remains will not be disturbed.
But Indian People find that the resting places of their grandmothers and grandfathers are fair play for archeologists–both professional and amateur–operating under the guise of ‘pursuit of knowledge.’” He continues, “Even today Indian people worry… that their own bones may someday rest in a museum to be viewed by curious eyes.”25 Should one be allowed to dig up
Indian grave sites to learn about the history and anthropology of the indigenous people of the past? Should archaeological excavations be allowed to disturb the dead to benefit the living? Or do the archaeological excavations help indigenous peoples?26 I have decided to use these Seneca combs in my research, given that they had been published in 1986 by an Iroquois Advisory
Committee and the New York State Parks Service, who grappled then with the controversial origins of the artifacts when writing about a publication for the Ganondagan State Historic Site.27
Despite attempts at trying to do so respectfully, tensions between science and belief still exist, putting into question whether the artifacts should or should not be displayed. Despite the thorny
(1953): 54. Charles Wray, “Rochester Junction,” The Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Central New York Vol. 8 (1953): 58-60. 25 Tehanetorens, Wampum Belts of the Iroquois (Summertown, Tennessee: Book Publishing Company, 1999), 124. 26 Devon A. Mihesuah, “American Indians, Anthropologists, Pothunters, and Repatriation: Ethical, Religious, and Political Differences,” in Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains? ed. Devon A. Mihesuah. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 96. 27 See Ben A. Kroup, Robert L. Dean, and Richard Hill, Art from Ganondagan: “The Village of Peace” (Waterford, New York: New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, 1986), 8.
8 nature of the indigenous artifacts used in this paper, they serve as significant confirmations that
native-produced sources can help disclose a native-focused history.
This paper is organized according to type of artifact specific to a particular culture, as a
means of organizing the interpretive framework of the research. I keep all the wampum images
from the Haudenosaunee in the Northeast together, as well as all of Southwestern rock art images
from Pueblo communities. By first looking at each particular artifact and its culture’s material
culture, I can gain a step-by-step understanding and interpretation of the artistic expressions.
Each artifact type also has its own set of interpretive issues and cultural context. When looking
at each material artifact with its cultural context as a foundation, I asked many questions relating
to the interpretation and meaning of the image. What did the Seneca combs stress that spoke
about indigenous perspectives of Europeans? What did the rock art, the most simplistic and
difficult to interpret, tell about native viewpoints of Europeans? How Native Americans visually
represented the world in which they lived and the strangers they met? How did Native
Americans see “themselves in relation to others, what traits they considered significant for visual
identification”?28 What do these images tell scholars about the relationship of the artist to the
images he or she created? 29 Are certain motifs used specifically so that the observers will
instantly recognize what is being depicted?30 I decided to focus on one or two specific artifacts in each section to tease out their nuances. Each section touches briefly on each type of artifact in a given community and explains the cultural context and the interpretive issues, as well as what the artifact can tell the historian about native views of Europeans. I use the image’s cultural context
28 Brian A. Sparkes, “Some Greek Images of Others,” in The Cultural Life of Images, ed. Molyneaux, 131. 29 Burke, Eyewitnessing, 139. 30 Lynette Russell, “Focusing on the past: visual and textual images of Aboriginal Australia in museums,” in The Cultural Life of Images, ed. Molyneaux, 243.
9 and other outside information to supplement and help to bring out the significances of each
artifact.
Throughout this paper I consciously use the terms American Indian or Native American
as a general term for all indigenous communities. All of the hundreds of unique and diverse
North American Indian communities do not deserve to be “pigeon-holed” into a single category
as “Indian” or “Native American,” but I use the terms because they seem to be some of the best
descriptors, holistically, for indigenous people, groups, and individuals.31 Each artifact presented in this paper was produced by its own artists and communities, designed and created by each of the anonymous Seneca, Navajo, Pueblo, Lenni Lenape (Delaware), and Catawba artists.
Examining the cross-country, transnational indigenous expressions indicate that the Diné and the
Seneca, although on different sides of the North American continent, similarly viewed the
Europeans that entered Indian Country as invaders.
Instead of the Euro-American always defining him or herself against the foil of the Noble
Savage, by including Native sources of material culture as evidence a “visual reorientation” is created. 32 Historians can return agency to the Native American people of the past.
Anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz explains that scholars should “consider accepting Indian cultural
productions other than writing as history.”33 These unique artifacts are not necessarily made just
as a response to Euro-American actions. Instead, the new designs and images, rooted in an
indigenous past and the art of traditional crafts, are new ways of using old methods to express
31 David E. Wilkins, American Indian Politics and the American Political System. 2d ed. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007), xxi-xxii. Christina Berry, “What’s in a Name? Indians and Political Correctness,”
10 Native thoughts and views.34 With images created by particular cultures “we see how different cultures, at various times in the past, represented and interpreted change for themselves.”35
Scholars can almost literally ‘see’ what the Native peoples are thinking about the Euro-
Americans who enter their communities.
I hope that throughout the paper, it becomes clear of the disparate stories that come from
‘Native histories’ that incorporate Native sources. What can these images tell us that may be different from the accepted understandings of history? These artifacts tell a story very different than one might otherwise assume. Native Americans incorporated ‘the other’ within their own values and worldviews just as Euro-Americans did. Each distinguished themselves by emphasizing their differences. European and Indian imagery had similar biases, stressing exoticism, dissimilarity, and strangeness created by their own experiences and understandings.
Early Native critics, however, don’t distinguish themselves from Euro-Americans through the discourse of race. Rather, they focus instead on ‘different’ visual indicators of difference, clothing and paraphernalia. Wide-brimmed hats, long stock rifles, and cloth robes and breeches are pervasive throughout these early images. These images are not just visual indicators of difference, but also are markers of cultural difference. In a way the tri-cornered hats and elaborate medal buttons serve as stand-ins for the Euro-American, Western culture. They are all critiqued and emphasized. The Diné and Haudenosaunee are separating themselves and creating a statement about themselves in relation to others.36
34 Frederick E. Hoxie, “Missing the Point: Academic Experts and American Indian Politics,” in Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics and Activism since 1900, Daniel M. Cobb and Loretta Fowler, eds. (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research, 2007), 30. 35 Pearson, Shamanism and the Ancient Mind, 40. 36 Keith H. Basso, Portraits of ‘The Whiteman’: Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols Among the Western Apache (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 17.
11 Chapter 2: Depiction of Dress & Comportment: Seneca Combs
Native people “regard our breeches as an encumbrance, although they sometimes wear them as a bit of finery, or in fun” French Missionary, 1650s 37
“The bulk of the savages who were there had never seen a Christian, and could not get over their wonder as they gazed at our customs, our clothing, our arms, our equipment.” Account from one of Champlain’s men 38
When the French Jesuits, such as Father Joseph Chaumonot began to visit the Seneca
villages in New York in the mid-seventeenth century, all of the Indian people would gather to
see the strange-looking visitors.39 The French priests would ride into the villages on their massive, powerful horses, in large, black flowing capes. Other French visitors wore tight-fitting breechcloths made from a bulky material that wrapped around their legs, restricting their movement. Strange round fasteners called buttons would be lined up vertically along their shirts and jackets. All of these Europeans would wear different sorts of hats— from large, wide brimmed top hats, to curvy tri-cornered hats. After the visitors left, many creative Indian craftsmen chose to depict these visitors in their carved antler combs, as souvenirs and reminders of the solemn-behaving and bizarre-looking visitors who entered their village.
The Seneca, called the “Keepers of the Western Door,” are one of the six nations of the
Iroquois Confederacy that consist also of the Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk nations.40
They call themselves Nun-da-wä’-o-no, “the great hill people.” The Seneca community, the
37 Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 80. 38 Cornelius J. Jaenen, “Amerindian Views of French Culture in the Seventeenth Century,” in American Encounters, ed. Mancall and Merrell, 72. 39 The Seneca had met Europeans as early as 1656, when Father Joseph Chaumonot visited many villages. Robert John Graham, Ashes to the Wind (New York: American Press Publication, Inc., 1964), 162. 40 Kroup, Art from Ganondagan, 17-19. James Homer Williams, “Great Doggs and Mischievous Cattle: Domesticated Animals and Indian-European Relations in New Netherland and New York,” New York History 76 (July 1995): 246-263. Pete Jemison, “Ganondagan Lives On,” Turtle Quarterly, 1, 1 (1986), 2-3.
12 largest in the confederacy, were said to be almost equal or larger than the rest of the confederacy
combined. 41 In the seventeenth-century they had between two to five thousand people lived in
Seneca villages and by 1668 the Jesuits established a mission among them.42 The Iroquois
Confederacy called themselves the Haudenosaunee, the “People of the Longhouse.” In Seneca
this word is hotinohsyóni’, or “they (who) are of the extended lodge.” The Haudenosaunee followed the metaphor of living in a longhouse, an extended lodge over fifty feet long and twenty feet wide. 43 Historian Rick Hill (Tuscarora) explained, “This longhouse symbolized the
unity of the Iroquois nations, living as one people, under one law, thinking with one mind.”44
Across the land, five distinct Indian communities saw themselves as strong allies with one
another, like local extended families live, cooperate, and work together in a longhouse.
In the present day archeologists have excavated many combs, especially from a
seventeenth-century Seneca village called Gannagaro by the Mohawk, known to the Seneca as
Ga-on-sa-gaa-ah or Ganondagan, “the Town of Peace.” They are now housed in museums.
Gannagaro was such a famous village that even in European capital cities people knew that it
was the largest Seneca village and the capital of the Seneca Nation. According to Seneca
tradition, Jikonsesah, the Peace Queen, of the founding of the League of Iroquois, was buried at
Gannagaro.45 This rich archaeological site of Gannagaro is now known to archaeologists as
Boughton Hill and has become the only National Landmark east of the Mississippi dedicated to
41 Lewis Henry Morgan, League of the Iroquois. 1962 (New York: Corinth Books, 1993), 51. Thomas S. Abler and Elisabeth Tooker, “Seneca,” in Handbook, ed. Sturtevant, vol. 15, Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 505-506. 42 Wray, “Ornamental Hair Combs of the Seneca Iroquois,” 37. Abler and Tooker, “Seneca,” 505-506. 43 William N. Fenton, “Northern Iroquoian Culture Patterns,” in Handbook, ed. Sturtevant, vol. 15, Northeast, ed. Trigger, 320. Wray and Schoff, “A Preliminary Report,” 61. 44 Hill, “Seneca Art in Transition,” 5. 45 Graham, Ashes to the Wind, 152-153. J. Sheldon Fisher, “Boughton Hill Editorial #1,” Morgan Chapter Newsletter 2, 3 (March 1962): 7.
13 Native American culture and history.46 J. Sheldon Fisher, Ontario County Historian, boasted that
“Probably no site in New York State has produced as many Indian relics as has the Seneca
Indian town of Gannagaro located on Boughton Hill, in the town of Victor, Ontario County,
N.Y.”47
Seneca artists originally carved these antler combs for personal decoration and as a testament to the community of their identity with a particular clan or animal totem by drawing upon powerful symbolism in the designs. Many of the animals, such as the Bear, Wolf, Beaver, and Heron, are Seneca clan animals, and possibly are used as designs that identify the clan of the wearer.48 These combs were artfully decorated and “worn in the hair with as much pride as one might wear an attractive necklace.” 49 Both men and women wore combs. Combs for men were simpler and smaller, while combs for women and children were fancier. 50 Archaeologist
Charles Wray has proposed that combs were decorated and made for children to wear in their hair by their family and relatives.51 Hill explains, “These creations remind us that art in the
Seneca community has a long history of manifesting personal identity and providing a Seneca
46 “SELECTED FOLKLIFE IN EDUCATION RESOURCES, 2002 American Folklore Society Workshop,”
14 perspective to their changing world.”52 Anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians can use
Seneca combs, a significant aspect of Seneca identity, to better understand the Seneca past.
Seneca combs hold a special place in Haudenosaunee mythology. According to the story, a man and a woman lived in the Sky World. The two did not live next to each other, but rather on opposite sides of a fireplace. They did not interact with each other except when the woman came to comb the man’s hair. It is said that mysteriously the woman became pregnant. The daughter who was born became known as Sky Woman. When Seneca and Haudenosaunee people would create carved combs and give them to loved ones, they symbolized the combing of
Sky Woman’s father’s hair. In a way combs “connected them to the spirit world” and were prized possessions in life and in death. 53
Just as old as the tradition of Sky Woman and her parents, the Seneca saw their carving of antler combs as a very old, on-going craft. The Seneca had always created their own combs.
Combs as much as 3,000 years old were found in the area known now as the state of New
York.54 Historian and archaeologist Arthur C. Parker has explained, “Almost every early
Iroquoian site, indeed, has yielded antler combs.”55 This is an exaggeration, because at their strongest popularity around 1687, combs still only appeared in twenty percent of the grave sites.56 At the same time, however, combs are prevalent pieces of historical artifacts found in
Seneca grave sites. Most Seneca combs contained powerful symbols used for animal medicine and were significant to Native American spiritual lives. Seneca artists carved images of bears, wolves, and herons that were believed to possess special powers.57 These significant symbols on
52 Hill, “Seneca Art in Transition,” 6. 53 Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 9, 28. 54 Wray, “Ornamental Hair Combs of the Seneca Iroquois,” 36. 55 Arthur C. Parker, “Antler Combs of the Iroquois,” Museum Service: Bulletin of the Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences, 9, 8 (15 October 1936): 156. 56 Wray, “Ornamental Hair Combs of the Seneca Iroquois,” 38. 57 Kroup, Art from Ganondagan, 34.
15 the antler combs fostered a Seneca identity. The images also represented important events or stories in Seneca culture and history.
The earliest, pre-contact Seneca combs have only three to five teeth (see Fig. 1). They are often just simple blocks with holes drilled.58 With the introduction of iron and metal tools, the combs could be made with up to twenty-five teeth and carved with intricate detail. Then images became more elaborate and more decorative. Animals and birds were shaped from the blocks. Some combs depicted figures from Seneca mythology and legend.59 The early combs were skinny, while later ones widened with the increased detail possible with metal tools imported from Europe.
Figure 1: Pre-Contact Seneca Antler Combs These pre-contact combs (estimated to be dated before 1615) are simpler and with less teeth than later combs. Number 9, in the shape of a bird, is early evidence of the more elaborate designs with the introduction of European tools. Parker, Arthur C. “A Prehistoric Iroquoian Site on the Reed Farm, Richmond Mills, Ontario County, N.Y.” Researches and Transactions of the New York State Archaeological Association, 1, 1 (1918; repr., New York: Krause Reprint Co., 1965), 25, Figure 11.
By the second half of the seventeenth century, with the introduction of iron European tools, Seneca artists were then able to produce more detailed combs faster (see Fig. 2). Iron saws
58 Wray and Schoff, “A Preliminary Report,” 54-55. 59 See Arthur C. Parker’s description of Sojiosko, the Mischief Maker, in one particular comb motif. Parker, “Antler Combs of the Iroquois,” 157. Wray, “Ornamental Hair Combs of the Seneca Iroquois,” 41, 45.
16 replaced stone ones, allowing for smaller and more teeth. The newer ones were larger, around two inches long, with fifteen to twenty teeth.60 These combs had more intricate detail and fancier, more elaborate designs. These decorative combs became the most popular from 1650 to
1675.61 By 1687 it had become common for combs to depict Indians as well as Europeans.62
Figure 2: A Timeline of Seneca Antler Combs Left: Early comb, dubbed “prehistoric.” Middle: Early elaborate comb. Right: Post-contact comb with fine details of a European with distinct hair, hat, and accouterments, standing next to a Native woman. Parker, Arthur C. “The origin of the Iroquois as suggested by their archeology.” American Anthropologist, n.s., 18 (1916): 491, Pl. XXII. Ben A. Kroup, Robert L. Dean, and Richard Hill, Art from Ganondagan: “The Village of Peace” (Waterford, New York: New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, 1986), 40, Fig. 39.
Indian artists from Gannagaro made beautifully decorated combs, some memorializing the white visitors. Hill explains, “Seneca artists continued the cultural traditions of their
60 Parker, “The origin,” 489-491. 61 Parker, “Antler Combs of the Iroquois,” 156. Harry L. Schoff, “‘Black Robes’ among the Seneca and Cayuga,” Pennsylvania Archaeologist, 19, 1-2 (1949), 19. Wray, “Ornamental Hair Combs of the Seneca Iroquois,” 35. 62 Wray and Schoff, “A Preliminary Report,” 58-59. Wray, “Ornamental Hair Combs of the Seneca Iroquois,” 42- 43.
17 ancestors. As individuals, however, the artists were also inspired by novel events of their day.”63
Richter also explained that traditional Iroquois combs “blossomed into works of art with as many as twenty-five thin teeth and elaborate zoö- or anthropomorphic designs, some of which apparently memorialized a specific event in the owner’s life.”64 Many of these combs illustrate
Native syncretism using new designs and grappling with changes in their lives. Indian artists combined traditional techniques and symbols with new images inspired by the European visitors and novel events that took place around them in the creation of the bone and antler combs. Since it was unusual for white men to visit their towns, they decided to commemorate these events through the making of souvenirs.65 By incorporating native design elements that invoked balance and harmony, Native Americans sought to include Europeans into their own traditions.
By adding Europeans to their Native art forms, Seneca people were making sense of the
Europeans in the context of their own artistic expressions. When Europeans began to visit the
Seneca villages, artists mirrored these novel meetings. These images imbedded in Seneca antler combs reveal many themes concerning their perceptions of Euro-Americans.
63 Hill, “Seneca Art in Transition,” 6. 64 Richter, Facing East, 45. 65 Kroup, Art from Ganondagan, 17-20.
18 Figure 3: European with Dog and Gun on Seneca Antler Comb This Seneca-carved antler comb is one of dozens of depictions of Europeans wearing breeches and hats and standing erect in a military-style. Ben A. Kroup, Robert L. Dean, and Richard Hill, Art from Ganondagan: “The Village of Peace” (Waterford, New York: New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, 1986), 39.
One exceptional comb found in the New York State Museum contains a chiseled image of a European man holding a rifle and standing next to a dog (see Fig. 3). It is a solid rectangular shape divided into two sections. The bottom half of the comb is devoted to the teeth of the comb. Seventeen straight vertical teeth stand in perfect unison. They appear to be sanded and tapered. This one particular image carved in the antler is reminiscent of the “bilateral symmetry” exhibited in the Seneca comb-carving tradition.66 The figure’s right arm is lifted to his hat, and his long musket reaches from his feet to the top of his head, creating balance. The man who is
66 Kroup, Art from Ganondagan, 21.
19 facing forward stands in triangle-shaped breeches, wearing a form-fitted jacket67 with eight buttons lining the center front of the coat. Both his arms extend straight across to his angled elbow. The left arm reaches for the musket and the right turns upward to touch his hat. On the man’s right sits a medium-sized dog, possibly a hunting terrier indicated by the squared jaw and brow, looking up at the master. His face is chiseled simply as a circle for an open mouth, with a
U-shaped nose, two dots for eyes, and straight lines above for eyebrows. The hat is very distinctive with five ‘spokes’ sticking out, indicating a tri-corner hat.68 Although the image is very stylistic, geometric, and simple in its form, it can still tell us much about native representations of Europeans.
The choice of the Indian to depict the character of a European or Dutch colonists also attributes power to the Europeans. Earlier Seneca combs depicted clan symbols and animals.
These animals and symbols were significant to the Seneca community for the sacred power associated with them. By including Europeans in the list of symbols and designs included in
Seneca comb creation, Native peoples were acknowledging the power that they perceived
Europeans had when they entered their communities.69
Imbedded in Seneca cultural tradition and artistic expression, these combs with European figures also indicate a native fascination with the strange people and animals that came to visit them. Graham explains that as the Indians wanted to preserve the memory of the visit of the white man to their village, they decided to depict the extraordinary scenes in their artwork.
Wentworth Greenhalgh wrote in his journal about his 1677 trip to the Seneca villages,
67 Clothing and fashion historian Linda Welters explains, “The explorers and colonists came from cultures entrenched in a highly-developed fashion system. This system was a legacy of the Renaissance, when fine cloth began to be cut into increasingly elaborate pieces which were then fitted to the body.” Linda Welters, “From Moccasins to Frock Coats and Back Again: Ethnic Identity and Native American Dress in Southern New England,” in Dress in American Culture, eds. Patricia A. Cunningham and Susan Voso Lab (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993), 13. 68 For one of the best descriptions of this particular comb, see Williams, “Great Doggs,” 263. 69 Kroup, Art from Ganondagan, 34.
20 “Canagorah (Boughton Hill), lyes on the top of a great hill, and in that as well as the bignesse much like Onondago, Contayning 150 houses…Here ye Indyans were very desirous to see us ride our horses, wch wee did.”70 While most of the Seneca had never seen those animals before, they were intrigued by the sight of the pale-skinned males riding these animals.
European imported animals such as dogs, along with goats, hogs, horses, cows, and sheep were strange animals to the Indians, contributing to cultural misunderstandings. One observer explained that the greater size of Dutch dogs provoked fear in the Indians and made them suspicious of the invaders that seemed to have great power.71 Another account explains that when a European dog came out and smelled the animal skin clothes that the Indians wore, it ferociously barked and leapt at the Indians, although restrained by a leash.72 Native fascinations and fears about these strange new versions of dogs also contributed to their preservation in powerful carved combs.
The image is reminiscent of similar designs of animal power and association, but the comb may also indicate a disassociation, rigidity, or slight estrangement. Compared to other animal combs that include fluid and sinuous curves, this image is very blockish and starched.
The man’s position suggests he is stern and inflexible in the standard ‘stand at attention’
European military fashion. His hand is attached to his ever-present musket, ready to put it to use.
The eyebrows, so close to the eyes, indicate a stern, serious, or worried look of determination on the colonist’s face. The facial features, stance, and implied mannerisms of the character indicate a reserve and detachment of the European colonists toward Indians.
70 Graham, Ashes to the Wind, 160, quoted in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York, Vol. III (Albany, 1853). It is explained on page 159 that the passages are taken from this journal, but no page numbers are given. 71 Williams, “Great Doggs,” 246-247. 72 Williams, “Great Doggs,” 248.
21 This comb seems to indicate one of the many domestic animals that Europeans brought along with them. One can deduce that it is a European dog rather than an Indian dog due to its demeanor and size. Indian dogs were smaller than European dogs and looked more like foxes or small wolves. They had short pointy ears and had thick fur. Jesuit Father Louis Nicolas, who lived with the Algonquians in the seventeenth century, described Indian dogs as having “a temperament very different from that of the French… they are melancholy like the savages.” The term melancholy is used to explain the calm and reserved behavior of both Indians and dogs towards each other. An American Indian dog would probably not rush and jump up eagerly at his master as this dog appears to do on the comb nor have a master in European clothes.
European dogs were trained to stay loyally at the master’s side as companions. According to
European observers, Indian masters did not pet or play with their dog, but nevertheless they valued the dogs.73 Nonetheless, this dog that is depicted is more likely to be a faithful European dog jumping excitingly up at its master rather than a curious Indian dog sniffing an approaching stranger.74
This image illustrates that dress was one of the distinguishing features between Native
Americans and Europeans. The European’s triangle-shaped breeches, drastically-spiked hat corners, his hour-glass shaped waist, and emphasized elbows and shoulders of the man’s coat all indicate a different style of dress. By focusing a lot of detail on the way in which the Europeans looked, this artist preserved the memory of the Europeans’ appearance, which was most obviously and immediately revealed through dress. The Indians were very much fascinated with
English clothing, especially buttons. Many colonists at Roanoke were told that the native name
73 Denys Delâge, “Gazing Across the Divide: Dogs in the Colonial Canadian Context: Part 1,” Le Journal [Publication of the Center for French Colonial Studies] Vol. 23, No. 3 (Summer 2007): 1-6, 11. 74 Although Arthur C. Parker describes this comb as “a soldier frightened by a small dog,” Denys Delâge asserts that this is a European dog, not a Native one. Parker, “Antler Combs of the Iroquois,” 156.
22 of the region was “Wingandacoa.” Sir Walter Raleigh later explained that this really meant,
“you weare good clothes, or gay clothes.” The European’s inquiry for the native name of the land was instead supplanted with a native comment on European clothes. Roger Williams also reported that the Narragansetts’ word for Europeans meant “Coat-men, or clothed.”75 This comb artifact further illustrates the use of clothing to differentiate Europeans from indigenous peoples and the native interest in European clothing, which is here exemplified in Seneca traditional craftsmanship.
Another comb is popularly called the “Greenhalgh comb,” referring to the comments that
Wentworth Greenhalgh wrote in his journal, since it visually displays the native interests in
European horses (see Fig. 4). The Greenhalgh comb depicts two Europeans on horses, both facing to the left, as if they were going that direction. Arthur C. Parker surmises that these two figures are Cammerhoff and Zeisberger, who visited the Cayuga village near present-day Union
Springs, New York.76 The horses have large round indentations for eyes, and perhaps have short- cut manes about their necks. The two figures, assumed to be men, are wearing leather boots, as indicated by the heels obvious in the one leg that is drawn across the horses’ bodies. They are wearing what seem to be large, balloon-like breeches. They wear wide brimmed hats, either rounded or squared at the top. Their arms are outstretched, angled from the design of their fitted coats, touching the horses’ heads. The man, possibly a soldier, on the right is holding some long tapered object, perhaps a rifle that touches the ground. Their eyes are long, chiseled slits. They have what appear to be large carved noses.
75 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians & English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 53. 76 Parker, “Antler Combs of the Iroquois,” 156.
23 Figure 4: The Greenhalgh Comb These two Europeans on horseback are another example of Iroquoian comb carving art from New York that depict Europeans riding horses. Although faint, one can vaguely make out the details of their stern looks on their faces and their identical brimmed hats, coats, and breeches. Courtesy of the Rochester Museum & Science Center, Rochester, New York. Through Indian Eyes: The Untold Story of Native American Peoples (Pleasantville, New York: The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., 1995), 119.
24 These Native-made combs show how Native people make sense of Europeans, just as
Europeans were doing with them. Europeans also used dress to depict Indianness. The 1629 seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony consists of a male Indian, naked except for “leaves” around his private parts (see Fig. 5). In his hands are a bow and arrow, and he speaks to the viewer, “Come over and help us.”77 This seal was included as a part of the March 4, 1628/1629 charter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony by King Charles I. Used until the end of the seventeenth-century, this seal was stamped on government documents concerning the
Massachusetts Bay Company.78 The picture implies that the Native Americans in the “New
World” are “primitive,” without any clothes except for a leaf loincloth. They needed help and salvation from their pitiful existence. The background shows only trees and grass, a reference to the “virgin” forests and vegetation that the Europeans saw in America.
77 This is from the Bible, Acts 16:9, where the Disciple Paul sees a Macedonian man in a vision, pleading. John Wood Sweet erroneously writes that the “come over and help us” phrase comes from Jeremiah 5:19; Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 104-105, 425. Richter, Facing East, 100. 78 The first document with the described Massachusetts Bay Colony seal is a 1644 copy of the charter. William Francis Galvin, “The History of the Arms and Great Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” in Public Records Division: William Francis Galvin, Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
25 Figure 5: Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal This 1629 rendition of the first Massachusetts Bay Colony seal depicts an Indian not unlike the European’s ideal Indian. Pleading for religion and almost naked, the Indian awaits European intervention. Massachusetts Archives. Jill Lepore, Encounters in the New World: A History in Documents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 148.
This early image already suggests how the Europeans dichotomized native identity, combining savagery and childlike innocence. The image suggests that Indians live a simple, innocent life, waiting for Europeans to come along and bring them the word of God, as well as agriculture and civilization. The simplicity suggests that America was the Garden of Eden, the paradise on earth, fruitful and lush, full of “untouched” land. Historian Jill Lepore imagines the seal’s character coming to life in a Puritan daydream, saying “share with us the good news of your savior, who will be our Lord. We have here an empty land, an Eden, yours for the
26 taking.”79 At the same time, however, the selection of leaves as the clothing of choice for Native
Americans is also suggestive of the Indian’s fall from grace, as with Adam and Eve, and illustrates Indian backwardness as perceived by Europeans. The Superintendent of the Indians of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Daniel Gookin described the Indian dress as “of the same matter as Adam’s was.”80
The Massachusetts Bay Colony seal and the image of the European with the dog on the comb both simplified depictions of ‘the other’ that differentiate using dress and equipment. Yet the Indian image depicts European dress with precision. The European’s triangle-shaped breeches, drastically-spiked hat corners, his hour-glass shaped waist and emphasized elbows and shoulders of the man’s coat all indicate a different style of dress. By detailing the way
Europeans looked, this artist wanted to preserve the memory of what he or she saw in actual encounters with Europeans. The European image, however, is more fantasy than reality, developed from hear-say or second-hand accounts of what Native Americans were like across the ocean in America. The American Indians around the Massachusetts Bay Colony did not wear leaves. In both cases, artists used clothing, as well as equipage, especially weapons, to differentiate and distinguish the two groups–– the Europeans and the American Indians. While the European image of the Indian shows the male Indian holding a bow and arrow, the Indian depiction of the European also includes a large musket in the soldier’s hand.81 Notice, however, that the European has an added means of communicating meaning, that of language. Europeans are able to put their own value-laden words literally in the mouth of the Indian. Both American
79 Jill Lepore, “Advocating Massachusetts History: The First Annual Community Forum on Historical Records: Keynote Address: Whose History Is It?” Massachusetts Historical Records Advisory Board, 1998
27 Indians and Europeans used differentiation by dress and equipage to identify each other, although the European’s version was composed from imagination and fantasy, rather than from reality.82
While European images show Euro-American ideologies surrounding the vision of the
Indian, these Iroquoian combs help to shed light on the native depiction of the European visitors.
To the Native American, the significant aspects of Europeans were incorporated into their artistic creations. They visually described the European’s dress and comportment. They wore strange, ill-fitting clothes and stood rigidly and stoically as soldiers. The mementos in the form of delicately carved antler combs, served as visual reminders of the behavior and physical appearance of the soldiers wearing shiny silver buttons, bulky breeches, and funky-shaped hats.
82 Historian Jill Lepore also laments the lack of an Algonquian version of history, pointing out that with the seal, “We have here only words put in an Indian’s mouth.” Jill Lepore, “Advocating Massachusetts History: The First Annual Community Forum on Historical Records: Keynote Address: Whose History Is It?” Massachusetts Historical Records Advisory Board, 1998
28 Chapter 3: Testimony to Subjugation & Oppression: Petroglyphs & Pictographs
“So what does the conquered call her conqueror? What name does the victim give her victimizer? What is the proper name of the man who brings a bewildering storm of people, wagons, guns, strange ways, and a cold philosophy of fear into your beautiful peaceful place?” Simon Ortiz (Acoma), Poet 83
“The earth shook, the heavens showered fire (gunfire), large stones were hurled through the air like hail (stone mortars), and strange birds shrieked a deafening cry (trumpets). Riding atop ferocious monsters (horses), the katsina [Spaniards] were bedecked in the sun’s glittering radiance (gilded armor) and were crowned with feathers (plumed helmets)” Ramón A Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 84
The Pueblo people of North America created rock art that recorded their encounters with
Europeans. Historian David Roberts describes his encounter with the Southwestern pictorial images in the cliffs of New Mexico. He described seeing the images “that vividly recorded these years of oppression… some of them on the margins of panels that exuberantly celebrated the pre- contact glory of a way of life presided over by the kachinas—were unmistakably intended to proclaim the gloomy truths of a world changed forever by the coming of the Spanish.”85 These images are scattered throughout New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas and their authors are more than likely Indian peoples from many different Southwestern Pueblo Indian nations.
The Diné (Navajo), Western Pueblos, Eastern Pueblos, and Apache peoples have all incurred the devastating effects of the Spanish invasion. The Apache, Diné, and Pueblo peoples had long established themselves as adversaries. When the Spaniards entered Indian Country,
83 KNME-TV Albuquerque and the Institute of American Indian Arts, Surviving Columbus: The Story of the Pueblo People. Directed by Diane Reyne (West Los Angeles: PBS Home Video, 1992). 84 Recalling the 1540 encounter with the Spanish: Ramón A Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1991), 43. 85 David Roberts, The Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion That Drove the Spaniards Out of the Southwest (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 118.
29 however, they all felt the suffocating restrictions that the Franciscan missionaries imposed upon
their way of life and began to see themselves as similar, sovereign people who might unite
against a common enemy. Although each Southwestern nation was a distinct, separate people,
their contacts with the Spanish were alike.86 Joseph H. Suina (Cochiti Pueblo) explained it well:
“Pueblo communities, otherwise very independent of one another united to a single force to cast out a common foe.”87 The Southwestern nations began to see themselves as separate cultures
from the Spanish whose incursions disrupted their ways of life. The Southwestern nations all
had their own names for the Franciscans they met which mirrored the Spanish attempts at
suppressing indigenous religious practices. The Hopi called a Catholic priest, tota’tsi, a dictator
or bossy person.88 Many of the Native communities saw the Spaniards as so and saw themselves
as separate and distinct from the Spanish intruders.
The most famous Pueblo and pan-Indian cooperation against the Spanish was the so-
called Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Its name is somewhat misleading. The Athapaskan-speaking
Diné, living West of the Pueblos and East of the Hopi, also participated in the revolt.89 The
Southwestern nations joined together against the Spanish to prevent the Spanish occupation of
their land and the censorship of traditional Native cultures. The leader of the famous revolt was
a man from San Juan named Pop’ay (meaning Ripe Pumpkin).90 On August 10, 1680, the San
Lorenzo Day of celebration in the Catholic Church, the Southwest Indian communities revolted,
86 Joseph H. Suina, “The Persistence of the Corn Mothers,” in Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt: Identity, Meaning, and Renewal in the Pueblo World, ed. Robert W. Preucel (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 213. 87 Preucel, “Writing the Pueblo Revolt,” in Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt, 22. Curtis F. Schaafsma, “Pueblo and Apachean Alliance Formation in the Seventeenth Century,” in Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt, ed. Preucel, 198-201. Quote from Suina, “The Persistence of the Corn Mothers,” 212-213. 88 A Concise Hopi and English Lexicon, compiled by Roy Albert and David Leedom Shaul (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1985), 90, 173. Hopi Dictionary Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni: A Hopi-English Dictionary of the Third Mesa Dialect, compiled by The Hopi Dictionary Project (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1998), 607. 89 Brugge, “Navajo Prehistory and History to 1850,” 489-491. 90 Herman Agoyo, “Preface: The Holy War,” in Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt, ed. Preucel, xii.
30 killing over four hundred Spanish colonists including over twenty Franciscan priests.91 A major catalyst to the 1680 Revolt was the Spanish suppression of the indigenous religions. Priests destroyed sacred spaces (kivas) and persecuted individuals for heresy. Historian Ralph Emerson
Twitchell explained, “the Spaniard was regarded as a tyrant… all burned with a desire to rid themselves of the system of tyranny which had been their portion for nearly a hundred years.”92
Spanish priests indulged freely in the confiscation of Native foodstuffs and even Indian women
for the priests’ own sexual pleasures.93
By the time of the revolt, the region had already long experience with the Spanish
missions. On September 8, 1598 the Franciscan Order declared New Mexico to be a missionary
province.94 The Franciscans established the First Spanish mission in the 1630s at a Hopi village
at Awatovi on Antelope Mesa. To build the church’s altar and establish the church in a
prominent place among the Hopi, the priests filled the most important kiva, a sacred site of
worship for the Hopi, with sand.95 A Zuni mission was established in 1629, and within a year
because of surmounting disagreements the Zuni people killed two priests.96
As early as the fourteenth-century the Southwest Indian peoples in what is now New
Mexico and Arizona drew spiritual figures in the rocky cliffs. Southwest Indian peoples inscribe
images of sacred beings such as Rain gods, the Horned Serpent, and katsinas (Hopi ancestral
spirits) were, and still are, inscribed on rock walls, in public places and private spiritual places
91 Robert W. Preucel, “Writing the Pueblo Revolt,” in Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt, ed. Preucel, 3. Surviving Columbus. 92 Preucel, “Writing the Pueblo Revolt,” 4. 93 Wiget, “Truth and the Hopi,” 186. Preucel, “Writing the Pueblo Revolt,” 9. Surviving Columbus. 94 Marc Simmons, “History of Pueblo-Spanish Relations to 1821,” in Handbook, ed. Sturtevant, vol. 9, Southwest, ed. Alfonso Ortiz (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1979), 179. 95 Wiget, “Truth and the Hopi,” 184. Kurt E. Dongoske and Cindy K. Dongoske, “History in Stone: Evaluating Spanish Conversion Efforts through Hopi Rock Art,” in Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt, ed. Preucel, 118. Surviving Columbus. 96 Barbara J. Mills, “Acts of Resistance: Zuni Ceramics, Social Identity, and the Pueblo Revolt,” in Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt, ed. Preucel, 87.
31 (see Fig. 6). Bill Weahkee (Cochiti/Zuni) has explained, “The petroglyph area is where messages to the spirit world are communicated. It is here that our Pueblo ancestors ‘wrote’ down the visions and experiences they felt.”97 The Pueblo people say that the sacred sites are where Native people visualize the revelations stemmed from ceremony and ritual.98
Southwestern peoples also traditionally painted sacred images upon the kiva walls for ceremonial purposes.99 Other rock art images appear to be clan symbols recognizing an individual’s or group’s identity.100 Many of these visual representations may be acting as boundaries between communities as well as marking “sacred localities… [and] prominent topographical features.”101
97 Bill Weahkee, “Petroglyph Area is Sacred Place for New Mexico Pueblos,” La Pintura: The Official Newsletter of the American Rock Art Research Association, 23, 2 (Fall 1996), 1. 98 Polly Schaafsma, “The Prehistoric Kachina Cult and Its Origins as Suggested by Southwestern Rock Art,” in Kachinas in the Pueblo World, ed. Polly Schaafsma (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 63-72. Pearson, Shamanism and the Ancient Mind, 46, 64. Wesley Bernardini, Hopi Oral Tradition and the Archaeology of Identity (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2005), 93-95. 99 Jeannette L. Mobley-Tanaka, “Crossed Cultures, Crossed Meanings: The Manipulation of Ritual Imagery in Early Historic Pueblo Resistance,” in Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt, ed. Preucel, 82. 100 Schaafsma, “The Prehistoric Kachina Cult,” 63-72. Pearson, Shamanism and the Ancient Mind, 46, 64. Bernardini, Hopi Oral Tradition, 93-95. Dongoske and Dongoske, “History in Stone,” 120-125. 101 Bernardini, Hopi Oral Tradition, 95.
32 Figure 6: Pre-Contact Petroglyphs Pre-contact rock art incorporates images of things valuable and sacred to the Pueblo people: plants (corn), animals (bear) and supernatural figures from Pueblo cosmologies (horned serpents). Photograph by Karl Kernberger. Polly Schaafsma, Indian Rock Art of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980), 266 (Fig. 209).
The tradition of drawing images on rock surfaces is imbedded in the Hopi worldview.
The Hopi say that they came out of Sipáapuni, the place of emergence, to the present world.
Maasaw the Guardian of the world, lead the people to Tuuwanasavi, the center of the earth on where the Hopi would live. According to tradition, “Along the way, they were instructed to leave their footprints on the land (ang kukota) in the form of settlements, petroglyphs, and artifacts as evidence they had satisfied their spiritual obligations.”102 Many Hopis also believe that some petroglyphs depict the sacred Hopi migrations recounted in many of their myths.103
The Spanish recognized the spiritual significance of these images and imposed their own beliefs on to them. Many missionaries added crosses to sacred indigenous rock art sites, in hopes of counteracting the pagan beliefs embedded in the stone.104 One even explained that he felt satisfied enough to leave the surrounding landscape alone, as soon as he left the area “With the figures erased and crosses drawn on the same large rock.”105 After the Spanish conquered the
Puebloans, they would place their churches directly on top of the kivas, the Puebloan sacred place of worship.106 Similarly, the imposition of a cross upon the sacred rock art designs in the stone, acted once again as another Spanish intrusion into indigenous cultures, communities, and religion (see Fig. 7 & Fig. 8). The crosses are visual reminders of the Spanish oppression of their indigenous religions.
102 Bernardini, Hopi Oral Tradition, 26-27. Quote on p. 27. 103 Campbell Grant, Rock Art of the American Indian (Golden, Colorado: Outbooks, 1981), 36. 104 Clottes, World Rock Art, 46. (Figure 3.6) Petroglyph National Park, NM, Photo by J. Clottes. 105 Roberts, The Pueblo Revolt, 122. The quote was presented by Roberts without attribution. Perhaps this is also from Polly Schaafsma’s passage by a dispatch officer at Abiquiu in 1763. 106 Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, 59.
33 Figure 7: Spanish Cross Imposed Over Indigenous Petroglyphs This collection of rock art drawings from Galisteo Basin, New Mexico illustrates the Spanish resistance to Native religions. In the midst of the somewhat chaotic jumble of images, one can see a cross which was drawn over the Pueblo drawings by a Spanish priest as an attempt to cancel out native religion. Polly Schaafsma, Images in Stone (San Francisco: BrownTrout Publishers, Inc., 1995), 152.
34 Figure 8: Spanish Signature on Rock No less benign than the previous drawings or etching superimposed upon Native sacred images, this mark by Juan de Oñate in 1605, aims to erase indigenous sacred symbols. Dennis Slifer, Signs of Life: Rock Art of the Upper Rio Grande (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1998), 224.
These impositions carved or painted on rock serve as visual reminders of Spanish oppression of indigenous spirituality. By taking the Native artwork and drawing one’s own designs and symbols—also laden with meaning—Europeans were dismissing Native rights to religious expression. Art historian W. J. T. Mitchell explains, when dealing with impositions and alterations, by an outside actor, “Whatever is done to the image is somehow done to what it stands for.” The explorers and missionaries were not just defacing Native artwork, but rather what the art work represented—a separate indigenous way of being and expressions of individual and community spirituality. For the Spanish conquistadors and Franciscan missionaries, the iconic symbols carved in stone were the very definition of visible indigenous resistance.
Mitchell elaborates, “The offensive character of an image is not written in stone but arises out of social interaction between a specific thing and communities that may themselves have varied and divided responses to the object.”107 By using visual evidence of interactions between Native and
107 Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, 127, 131.
35 European peoples concerning the implementation of ideas and symbols in rock art, we can see some of the tensions that triggered hostilities and fighting.
Southwestern Indian people not only inscribe supernatural and spiritual beings in the rock surfaces. They also record significant historic events in the images (see Fig. 9). Gail Bird
(Laguna Pueblo) explains that many Pueblo people record events and history in their petroglyphs.108 Some of the oldest images are said to be illustrations that Southwestern Indian peoples drew to integrate the sacred power of powerful animals they were hunting into their own skills and influence. Other images could represent animals that the hunters would like to have added success in stalking.109 Other images with human figures were made to commemorate historical events, such as astronomical phenomenon and the arrival of the Spaniards.110
Figure 9: Hunting Scene in Early Diné Petroglyphs Native peoples of the Southwest already had images of people in their pre-existing artistic expressions before the arrival of the Europeans. This selection of contact petroglyphs representing Diné hunting deer in the area now known as Canyon de Chelly, Arizona is just one
108 Surviving Columbus. 109 Pearson, Shamanism and the Ancient Mind, 46, 64. Bernardini, Hopi Oral Tradition, 95. 110 Dongoske and Dongoske, “History in Stone,” 120-125.
36 example of Native peoples from the Southwest recording events and achievements on rock surfaces. Photograph by Karl Kernberger. Polly Schaafsma, Indian Rock Art of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980), Fig. 2.
Some art records historical evidence of the encounter between the First Nations and
Europeans dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. All across the continent, rock art depicts Europeans, or at least vestiges or identifying markers of Europeans. From the
Northeast coasts of the Micma’q people, to the arid Southwest Navajo Country, pictorial carved rock drawings stand as native testaments to European incursions.
Without any written documentation, it is very hard to analyze and interpret a piece of rock art. Rock art interpretations must remain with some sort of “representational ambiguity” in what is depicted or why it is depicted.111 Many experts argue that it is impossible to decipher rock drawings, as no clear interpretation can be verified. As Jean Clottes explains, “When it comes to deciphering their meaning, the mysterious images of rock art pose many complex problems…. Answers to thorny questions regarding the specific meaning of these images… are not easily found.” This does not necessarily mean it is completely hopeless. Clottes continues,
“Faced with the twin dangers of pursuing an arid intellectual exercise [in creating classifications and statistics], on the one hand, and indulging in baseless fabrications, on the other, we must steer a careful course. In doing so, in spite of the undeniable difficulties we must face, there are ways to approach the study of meaning in a rigorous and scholarly fashion.”112 Several examples of Southwest rock art created by Native peoples during this encounter reveal what they saw and how they felt about what was happening.
111 White, Prehistoric Art, 196, 221. Clottes, World Rock Art, 6. Grant, Rock Art of the American Indian, 28. 112 Clottes, World Rock Art, 102.
37 Native views of Europeans more often than not emphasize conflicts. This is especially
poignant in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas, where rock art drawings depict conflicts between
native peoples and the Spanish. Rock art specialist Solveig Turpin explains that indigenous rock
art created three centuries after the first Spanish explorations, and the subsequent conquests and
travels into Indian Country, “tells a melancholy tale of initial openness and trust that gradually
gave way to distrust and aggression.” The images depict native apprehensions and distrust
coupled with European bellicosity. 113
Other images do not depict Spanish soldiers, but rather the forced labor and conversions
pressed upon the indigenous communities that the Spanish brought with them. One of the most
vivid pictographs only survives in sketches and photographs because in 1954 the area was
flooded, submerging the image under water and erasing it off the rock wall (see Fig. 10). Forrest
Kirkland in the 1930s made a watercolor drawing and in 1932 A. T. Jackson took a photograph
of the drawing on the rock.114 This image is amusingly nicknamed “the skewered priest.”115 It represents a missionary priest, holding his hands up to the sky, who found himself with an arrow pierced through his torso. This image depicts the hostility that some American Indians had towards the Church in the seventeenth century. Keres Indians Juan and Francisco Lorenzo explained in 1681 the Pueblo Indians, “said they rebelled because… [the Spanish] would not leave them alone, and burned their kivas… They were weary of putting in order, sweeping, heating, and adorning the church, and they proclaimed… that he who uttered the name of Jesus
113 Solveig Turpin, “Rock Art of the Despoblado,” 41, 5 Archaeology (September/October 1988): 50. Roberts, The Pueblo Revolt, 225-226. 114 Turpin, “Rock Art of the Despoblado,” 54. 115 Rayna Green gave the clever name “The Skewered Priest.” Thank you Rayna for pointing out this fascinating petroglyph.
38 would be killed immediately.”116 Native peoples were fed up with the relentless intensity with which the Spanish missionaries worked to replace indigenous religion with the Catholic faith.
116 Howard Morrison, Richard Ahlborn, Lisa Falk, Hank Grasso, Rayna Green, and Lonn Taylor, American Encounters: A Companion to the Exhibition at the National Museum of American History (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1992), 31.
39 Figure 10: ‘The Skewered Priest’ “The skewered priest” pictograph, a pre-1700 depiction of a slain Catholic priest, was found in West Texas, and stood as a once-visual testament to Indian hostility to Spanish intruders, including missionaries. Drawing from the watercolor by Forrest J. Kirkland, Texas Memorial Museum, Austin, Texas. Howard Morrison, Richard Ahlborn, Lisa Falk, Hank Grasso, Rayna Green, and Lonn Taylor, American Encounters: A Companion to the Exhibition at the National Museum of American History (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1992), 31.
40 The “skewered priest” represents the Pueblo distain of Spanish suppression of their way of life and spiritual practices. This figure is a square-bodied stick figure who sits atop a white rectangle. His torso is all-black, as are his arms. Cross-like protrusions represent his arms, reaching up towards the sky. His arms are stretched high above his head. He has oval-shaped ears, with two dots widely spaced apart on his face as eyes. A large squared object fits on his face. Perhaps this is a large, caricatured nose, planted smack in the middle of his face. Across the middle of this man’s torso is a stick, perhaps an arrow, fixed into his body, entering in on the right and sticking out on the left. Above his head stands another arrow or spear, sticking directly in at the top of his skull. Around his arms and head are designs that look like plus signs or Xs.
Perhaps these are visual indicators of the cross fire, of gunfire bursting out of the barrel of a gun during a heated battle.
This image implies violence. The priest is depicted in such a brutal manner that the rock art memorialized the revenge the Indian people took when killing him in a horrendous way. The
Native peoples retaliated viciously against Church rule, which they illustrated with the image of the mutilated priest. The priest is shown as helpless, with his arms up in defeat. Regardless of the priest’s peaceful surrender, the Indian people still killed him for the religious and cultural submission which he advocated.
These rock art drawings are ghastly reminders of Spanish conquest over native peoples and their land. One particular rock art drawing in Arizona is called so because of the massacre that took place at that location, when the Spanish murdered hundreds of Indian people (see Fig.
11). Located at the Blue Bull Cave in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, these rock art drawings depict a group of Spanish entering Indian Country in 1805 led by Antonio Narbona. This incident led
41 to the popular name for the canyon, Canyon del Muerto, the Canyon of the Dead. Antonio
Narbona was coming from the south with reinforcements for Spanish settlers. The Navajo were giving the Spaniards a hard time about settling in their homelands. More than one hundred
Navajo, including women and children who had taken refuge in the Canyon, were mercilessly killed by the Spanish invaders armed with guns.117 Native peoples, vividly remembering the massacre that took place, memorialized the event in petroglyphs. It is believed that this particular artist was a Diné named Dibé Yázhi Nééz, or Tall Lamb, a man who lived in the area after 1805.118
Figure 11: Spanish Entrada at Canyon del Muerto This piece of rock art from an area of Arizona popularly called Canyon del Muerto depicts the dangerous entradas that crossed through the Southwest bringing destruction, new animals, and their new religion with them. Photograph by Karl Kernberger. Figure 273. Polly Schaafsma, Indian Rock Art of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980), 330.
This image describes the Spanish movement onto Indian land, bringing with them their horses, dogs, and religion. There are at least eleven images, although faded, of horses mounted
117 Clottes, World Rock Art, 50. 118 Brugge, “Navajo Prehistory and History to 1850,” 492. Dibé Yázhi Nééz is also translated as Little Sheep and is said to have drawn these images in the 1830s. Charles D. James III and Howard M. Davidson, “Style Changes of The Horse Motif in Navajo Rock Art: A Preliminary Analysis,” in American Indian Rock Art II, ed. Sutherland, 31- 33. Another petroglyph site with Spanish soldier depictions was also located around a known-refugee hideout. Roberts, The Pueblo Revolt, 120.
42 by figures. Many show almost trapezoid-shaped bodies sitting upon horses. These caped figures
are colored either white or black. One particular figure, the largest planted in the center, wears a
black cape with a white cross symbol. All wear tall, squared hats with thick rims. Their feet
stick out at right angles from their body, as if they were wearing boots. The “ring leader” also
has five black and white dog figures at the horse’s feet. All of the horses walk forward, moving
across the rock surface from left to right. The horses’ feet are fluid as if in motion. The soldier-
like uniformity with which the figures move across the rock surface suggests a determination to
get where they are going. One’s eye is encouraged to move left to right across the rock surface,
stopping briefly to look at each figure. The objects are painted on a flat, smooth surface just
above a rocky, jagged edge of broken pieces of rock. This rocky surface acts as a sort of
“ground” upon which the figures move, horizontally across the rocky surface. The one black,
cloaked figure demands attention and its due respect. Two suns shine above the figure, next to a
man carrying a gun. Most of the men all have a hand sticking up out of their cloaks, holding on
to the triangle-shaped stock of the rifle. The barrels stick out straight in front at forty-five degree
angles.
Again these figures reflect the behavior and dress of the Europeans, along with bellicosity
and weaponry capable of destruction. They are again signified by their clothes: the leather boots,
brimmed hats, and fitted breeches and coats. Their faces look as if they are facing the sun,
grimacing at the glaring light, because they have such stern looks on their faces. The two
soldiers sit straight on their horses, in military stances, ready for what comes. Like the combs,
this image of the Spanish entrada depicts soldiers. The mid- to late-seventeenth-century New
York Seneca comb and the post-1800 Southwestern Diné petroglyphs present almost identical
43 soldiers in their similar hats and boots. With purpose, they stand erect with serious looks on
their faces while dressing the part of an entrada or military expedition into the Indian Country.
The rock art image mirrors the Indians’ witness to a military gang intruding upon Indian land by military force. To the Pueblo people, the dogs would have been a menacing sight. The
Spaniards brought with them weapons and “war hounds.”119 The image connotes quick movement, an army-like precision of travel. Each one follows behind the other, almost all of them carrying rifles in front of them ready for use. One can imagine an Indian saying to the
Spanish, as they did to the English and French in the East, “If you love us, why do you stand with your weapons pointed at us when we come to your village?”120 Although the Spanish come
to interact with the Indians and convert them to Christianity, they still came with their guns
aimed directly at the Indian people, showing their distrust and caution. As this image was
created by a Navajo witnessing the menacing entrada crossing the landscape which the Native
people had always called home, the figures act as spiteful intruders invading the land. The
figures on horseback tower above any eye-level of an Indian who might be standing and
watching. These scary Spanish figures are uniformly dressed, in cloaks, rimmed hats, and boots,
often supplied with a gun. The Spanish entrada would represent a terrifying sight for native
peoples, as invaders who brought with them death and destruction.
By depicting the Spanish soldiers accordingly, the Indian people were describing them as
a threatening force. Riding brawny horses, the Spanish were seen as powerful people. By
illustrating every Spanish soldier holding a gun ready for use, the Indian artist was emphasizing
their intrusion by massive military power and force. The Spaniard is associated with martial
demeanor and destructive behavior. According to the petrogylphs engraved on the rock walls,
119 Surviving Columbus. 120 Kupperman, Indians & English, 183.
44 the Indian peoples met these strange invaders with extraordinary animals. But the people kept coming, and brought with them their guns and their horses to be used as tools of war, causing strife, murder, and displacement from the land, religion, and culture.
These Southwestern visual expressions of religion served as “everyday forms of resistance” for the Pueblo people. Anthropologist Robert W. Preucel explained that there is
“dialectical relation between acts of resistance and structures of domination as mediated by material culture.” While the dominant Spanish idea of religion and the visual expression of spirituality continued to try to suppress Indian peoples, individuals continued to ignore this summon to switch their symbolic expressions within their own material culture. The rock art images are symbols of passive resistance. By maintaining their own identity and way of being despite outside pressures, the Pueblo and Diné people fought back.121 During the larger all- pueblo uprising of 1680, the Indians again exacted revenge upon the Spanish oppressors. The rock art images with intruding soldiers on horseback and the “skewered priest” both represent similar reminders of Spanish oppression and subjugation. While the image of the soldiers acts as a constant reminder of the Spanish intrusion, the killing of the priest serves as a boastful reminder of one Indian’s retaliation against the Spanish rule.
121 Preucel, “Writing the Pueblo Revolt,” 17, 19-20. Quote from Mobley-Tanaka, “Crossed Cultures,” 79.
45 Chapter 4: Terms of Negotiation & Agreement: Wampum Belts
“It is this treaty that I brought today. It is this belt I speak of. This is our canoe, the Indian people, their government, and their religions. This is our brother the white man’s boat his religions, his government, and his people. Together, side by side, we go down the river of life in peace and friendship and mutual coexistence. As you note, we never come together. We are equal.” Oren Lyons, Onondaga, speaking of the Albany Treaty, 1613 122
“Instead of conforming to Indian political behavior We should force them to adopt ours – dispense with belts, etc…. I would never suffer the word ‘Nation’ or ‘Six Nations,’ or ‘Confederates,’ or ‘Council Fire at Onondago’ or any other form which would revive or seem to confirm their former ideas of independence.” James Duane, Continental Congress Delegate, 1784 123
The recitation and display of wampum belts were significant aspects of treaty negotiations among the Haudenosaunee, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. As a treaty was negotiated the speaker would hold the wampum or it might be displayed on a blanket or bark mat. As negotiations continued among the delegates, each touched the wampum to agree with what was being said.124 The wampum belt had political and ritual significance in
Haudenosaunee diplomacy.
Some of the most significant sources of American Indian interactions, such as those with the Haudenosaunee and the Lenni Lenape, with Europeans are the wampum belts, which emerged from the nation-to-nation diplomacy and treaty-making. Wampum was used in many different rituals and ceremonies including marriage, adoption, and diplomacy.125 These belts, made out of purple and white clam shell beads strung into rows of designs and motifs, served as mnemonic devices, which triggered remembrances of agreed upon settlements, and documentations of agreements made among Native Americans and with Europeans. Indian
122 Oren Lyons, “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave,” in Indian Roots of American Democracy, ed. José Barreiro (Ithaca, New York: Akwe:kon Press, 1992), 34. 123 Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. 1969 (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 197. 124 Sandra Joyce Pflug, “The Iroquois Wampum Belt as a Cultural Metaphor” (Master’s Thesis, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, 1992), 226-228, 235-237. Quote on p. 226. 125 Pflug, “The Iroquois Wampum Belt as a Cultural Metaphor,” 184-185.
46 leaders and councils would keep copies of these belts as reminders of the agreements.126 The belt serves as a mnemonic device for a speech, prepared and memorized in advance, to be told to the people concerning the meaning behind each belt.127
Designated orators would bring out the wampum and “recite” the pacts that were signified on each belt. The ceremonies for recounting the agreements, known as the “reading of the archives,” are held regularly, twice a year, at Iroquoian council meetings. Other wampum belts are “read” at Wabanaki Confederacy (consisting of the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy,
Malecite, and Micmac) meetings. All of the wampum are taken out for the community to see the designs and their symbolic meanings are repeated and recited for all to hear.128 Only when someone is carrying or holding the appropriate wampum belt are their messages and words taken seriously or with grave attention because the belts act as assurances of friendship and promise.
The belts have proper protocol with which they should be used and held to “guarantee an attentive audience.”129
Native peoples believe that wampum carries the message imbedded in the sacred beads.
In this way, the wampum belts themselves are the words of the past agreements. The word for wampum belts in Wabanaki Confederacy languages, as well as other Indian languages, denotes
126 Museum of the American Indian Heye Foundation, The Penn Wampum Belts. Leaflets of the Museum of the American Indian Heye Foundation, No. 4 (New York: Museum of the American Indian Heye Foundation, March 22, 1925), 7. Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 65. 127 Frank Speck, “The Eastern Algonkian Wabanaki Confederacy,” in Wapapi Akonutomakonol The Wampum Records: Wabanaki Traditional Laws, ed. Robert M. Leavitt and David A. Francis (Fredericton: Micmac-Maliseet Institute, University of New Brunswick, 1990), 23. Willard Walker, “Wabanaki Wampum Protocol,” in Wapapi Akonutomakonol: The Wampum Records, ed. Leavitt and Francis, 26-27. 128 Carrie A. Lyford, Iroquois Crafts, ed. Willard W. Beatty (Lawrence, Kansas: Haskell Institute, 1945), 47-48. Tehanetorens, Wampum Belts, 12-13. Speck, “The Eastern Algonkian Wabanaki Confederacy,” 14-15. Bruce M. White, “‘Give Us A Little Milk’: The Social and Cultural Meanings of Gift Giving in the Lake Superior Fur Trade,” in Essays in North American Indian History, ed. Michael J. Gillis (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1990), 113. The Seneca wampum archives are called Kanonsionni. Wallace, Death and Rebirth, 42. 129 Richter, Facing East, 137. Tehanetorens, Wampum Belts, 11-14. Ashbel Woodward, “Wampum, a paper presented to The Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia.” (Albany, New York: J. Munsell, Printer, 1878), 18-19, 24-26. Quote in Willard Walker, “Wabanaki Wampum Protocol,” 34.
47 “speech.” The Iroquois described wampum beads as “‘word’ or ‘voice.’”130 The belts themselves serve as significant historical evidences and the “[i]nterpretation of the wampum belt has the potential to reveal the Iroquois perception of historical events.”131
Wampum can be used to understand the relationship that was created by the acceptance of wampum agreements. Sandra Pflug has explained that “the significance of wampum lay not in its ability to document the specific details of proposals and counter proposals in council, but rather, in its ability to establish and to define relationships between the individuals and among the nations involved in council proceedings.”132 This idea should not be underestimated. The wampum belts were, and are, material evidence of established relationship between two parties.
By defining relationships among many Native nations and outsiders, the wampum belts became a significant aspect of Indian-White relations.
The Haudenosaunee people had always had a long tradition of making wampum. At first wampum beads were used to make jewelry such as bracelets, earrings, necklaces, headbands, and belts. Ceremonial strings of beads were also carried to neighboring communities to serve as reminders of intertribal agreements made in the past.133 According to the Woodland Cultural
Centre in Ontario, Canada, “Wampum records were created to assist their memories and were stored at Onondaga, the geographic and political centre of the Confederacy and the location of
130 Pflug, “The Iroquois Wampum Belt as a Cultural Metaphor,” 244. Wilbur R. Jacobs, “Wampum: The Protocol of Indian Diplomacy.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser., 6, 4 (October 1949), 598. 131 Pflug, “The Iroquois Wampum Belt as a Cultural Metaphor,” 3-4. 132 Pflug, “The Iroquois Wampum Belt as a Cultural Metaphor,” 224. 133 William C. Orchard, Beads and Beadwork of the American Indians: A Study Based on Specimens in the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 2d ed. (New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1975), 71. Martin Sullivan, “Return of the Sacred Wampum Belts of the Iroquois,” The History Teacher, 26, 1 (November 1992), 8. Jacobs, “Wampum,” 597.
48 the Council Fire.”134 The Onondaga were called the “wampum keepers.” This exchange was to acknowledge the sincerity of agreements.135
Wampum beads are significant aspects of Iroquois sacred mythology. The
Haudenosaunee say that Hiawatha (Ayonwatha) showed the Iroquois the first wampum at the founding of the League of the Five Nations. It was to be used to bring peace. Deganawidah, the
Peacemaker, used the wampum belts to wipe away the tears of Hiawatha. Deganawidah made strings of beads to serve as reminders of his condolence ceremonies, which were to be continually practiced to console the people after war and death. Deganawidah became the founder of the Iroquois League and he taught the people how to make and use wampum in ceremonies.136 Another legend describes Hiawatha collecting the “first Iroquois wampum,” when a flock of birds drained a lake. Hiawatha collected the shells from the bottom of the lake and taught the Iroquois how to make wampum belts and strings. Hiawatha’s name can be translated as “seeker after wampum.”137 As seen in oral tradition, the significance of wampum itself is imbedded in the foundation of the League itself.
The League of the Five Nations (now Six with the addition of the Tuscaroras in 1722) was symbolically unified with wampum. The larger and longer the wampum belt, the greater the significance. The League of Five Nations Wampum Belt is considered the most sacred of all wampum belts. The Great Peace and The Great Law unify the Six Nations, and the wampum
134 Woodland Cultural Centre, Council Fire: A Resource Guide (Brantford, Ontario: Woodland Cultural Centre, 1989), 5. 135 Trigger, “Early Iroquoian Contacts,” 422. 136 Speck, “The Eastern Algonkian Wabanaki Confederacy,” 23. Walker, “Wabanaki Wampum Protocol,” 26-27. For other Hiawatha stories, see William M. Beauchamp, “Wampum and Shell Articles used by the New York Indians,” Bulletin of the New York State Museum Vol. 8, No. 41 (February 1901), 338-341. His name is also spelled Dekanawidah. Woodland Cultural Centre, Council Fire, 1-3. 137 Lynn Ceci, “The Value of Wampum Among the New York Iroquois: A Case Study in Artifact Analysis,” Journal of Anthropological Research, 38, 1 (Spring 1982), 102-104. Wampum is also in the Geganawida story. Charles W. Smythe, “Assessment of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy Request to the National Museum of Natural History to Repatriate Two Wampum Items” (Washington, D.C.: Repatriation Office, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, 15 August 1995), 10.
49 with which it is represented is used to understand the basics and foundation of Iroquois law. The
League is bound in unity as signified by the wampum belt.138
Originally wampum was only made by the Indians of the east coast, but traveled its way
to other nations. Wampum beads, cylindrical beads, were initially made out of clam shells.
Different colors denote different meanings. White means peace, goodness, and purity, while a
belt painted red means war. Purple wampum was used for important civic agreements.139 The whelk and quahog clam shells made white and black (purplish) beads respectively. The Seneca word for wampum is oh-ko-äh, named from the white shells used to make the beads.140 The word
“wampum” is an Algonquian term for shell beads, a term from the coastal communities that first began to create beads out of the shells. Europeans called any shell bead wampum. The Indians, however, initially separated wampum, the white beads, from the word wompi, “white,” to the
suckáuhock, “dark colored shell” beads.
Men and women would both help in the construction of wampum beads and belts. As wampum scholar Sandra Joyce Pflug explains, however, “Indian women seem to have been the primary weavers.” Men or women would drill the beads and the women would string the beads and create the wampum belts that the men would use in treaty negotiations.141
138 William C. Sturtevant, “David and Dennis Cusick: Early Iroquois Realist Artists,” American Indian Art Magazine 31, 2 (Spring 2006): 45. Tehanetorens, Wampum Belts, 16-18. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1975), 121. Smythe, “Assessment of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy Request,” 8. See also the Executive Summary. 139 Tehanetorens, Wampum Belts, 14. Heye Foundation, The Penn Wampum Belts, 19. Woodward, “Wampum,” 12- 13. Beauchamp, “Wampum and Shell Articles,” 327-330. Some scholars have said the white wampum symbolized the female, and the black the male. Ceci, “The Value of Wampum,” 99. 140 Lynn Ceci, “The Value of Wampum,” 103. 141 Quote from Pflug, “The Iroquois Wampum Belt as a Cultural Metaphor,” 15. Alison Hirsch explains that women collected the shell and strung the beads. Both men and women drilled the beads. Alison Duncan Hirsch, “Indian, Métis, and Euro-American Women on Multiple Frontiers,” in Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania, ed. William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 64.
50
Figure 12: Native-manufactured Wampum and European-made Bundle Right: European-manufactured wampum in bundle for sale. Left: Wampum from Lewiston, New York; made without European steel tools. William C. Orchard, Beads and Beadwork of the American Indians: A Study Based on Specimens in the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 2d ed. (New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1975), 80-81 (Fig. 72 & Pl. XVI).
Iroquois and Algonkian Indians first smoothed the shell and then drilled holes into them using a stone tool a metal awl or steel drill obtained from Europeans. The beads were then threaded into strings or weaved into belts with vegetable fibers or “strands of buckskin, tanned animal hide.”142
Before incorporation of European metal drills sometime after 1624, the Haudenosaunee used stone tools to drill the holes in the shells to make the beads (see Fig.12). While the origin of wampum is unknown, wampum can be said to be a large part of the material culture of Native communities before European contact.
With the introduction of metal drills, more beads could be made by the Indians faster and wampum became more prevalent in Indian-White diplomacy. With the adoption of European tools, the holes of the shells were more of smooth, “small straight bores.” 143 Archaeologists have
142 Frank G. Speck, The Functions of Wampum Among the Eastern Algonkian (Lancaster, Pennsylvania: American Anthropological Association, 1919), 5. For wampum as personal adornment see p. 18-22. Beauchamp, “Wampum and Shell Articles,” 330-335. Jacobs, “Wampum,” 599. Pflug, “The Iroquois Wampum Belt as a Cultural Metaphor,” 11. Jacobs, “Wampum,” 597. 143 Dean R. Snow, The Iroquois. 1994 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1996), 111.
51 x-rayed wampum beads, studying the internal constructions of the beads. The earlier beads have
rougher holes, while the European beads were clean-cut, evidently drilled with a harder material
able to drill completely through the bead.
Indians were not the only makers of the wampum beads. Eventually European settlers
learned how to make their own, and sold them to the Indians to make a profit. The Dutch even
made “fake” wampum as early as 1627.144 Europeans established factories for making wampum
beads en masse. English and Dutch companies crafted wampum to sell to the Native
populations.145
When early European settlers came to the Iroquois Country, the Iroquois incorporated the
Europeans into their already established ritual of wampum making. Kathryn Muller explains,
“As wampum belts developed as integral components to the treaty making process, it seems
likely that encoding pictures on the belts evolved as a means to avoid miscommunication due to
language barriers among different Native and European nations.”146 These early interactions
allowed the Europeans to form friendships with Indian Nations. Treaties were seen as sacred to
Indian people, and the wampum belts were the sacred pieces that sealed the agreements. Once
an agreement was made with wampum, it was believed that neither would ever go against the
agreed upon terms. The wampum belts affirmed agreements and served as verification for what
was later said that was agreed upon. Therefore, this belt indicates that Indian believed the
144 Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 84. Tehanetorens, Wampum Belts, 10-11. Heye Foundation, Penn Wampum Belts, 19. Woodward, “Wampum,” 8-10, 21-23, 47-49. Janette Saquet, “Wampum: a systematic bibliography on its origin, development, and use in North America.” (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, n.d.), i. Beauchamp, “Wampum and Shell Articles,” 338. G. Malcolm Lewis, “Traditional Cartography in the Americas,” in Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, vol. 2 of The History of Cartography, ed. David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 88. 145 Trigger, “Early Iroquoian Contacts,” 423. Pflug, “The Iroquois Wampum Belt as a Cultural Metaphor,” 8. Ceci, “The Value of Wampum,” 97. Woodland Cultural Centre, Council Fire, 2. Snow, The Iroquois, 91. 146 Kathryn V. Muller, “The Two Mystery Belts of Grand River: A Biography of the Two Row Wampum and the Friendship Belt,” American Indian Quarterly, 31, 1 (Winter 2007), 134.
52 Europeans to agree to go their own separate ways, and be their own separate people, and respect
the Indian way of life as a mutually respectful and equal to the European way. This was as
agreed upon with the wampum belt.147
Figure 13: Guswentah Wampum Belt Although not a pictorial representation of Europeans, this wampum belt depicts the two separate but equal paths (the darker lines) of the Indian and European communities. “Guswenta (Kaswentha): Two Row Wampum,” in Degiya’göh Resources: Using the Wisdom of the Past as a Resource for the Future, ed. Ken-A-Rah-Di-Yoh, 2003
One wampum belt called Gus-wen-tah, or The Two Row Wampum, is poignant in its message (see Fig. 13).148 It has been duplicated many times, especially to renew the agreement
imbedded in its images. It is believed to be, according to tradition, the oldest treaty between the
Iroquois League and Europeans.149 This belt counteracted the European idea of negotiation and
agreement making. Tehanetorens explains, “These two rows will symbolize two paths or two
vessels, traveling down the same river together. One a birch bark canoe, will be for the Indian
People, their laws, their customs, and their ways.” The other represents the White Man and his
147 Robert A. Williams, Linking Arms Together: American Indian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1600-1800 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 76, 49-51. 148 Woodland Cultural Centre, Council Fire, 7. Kathryn Muller argues that this belt, the Two Row Wampum belt, has been confused with the Two Road Wampum belt. She continues to argue, “While it seems plausible that the Two Road actually existed at the time of the American Revolution, the Two Row seems to only have existed implicitly as an ancient assumption of independence until verbalized as a wampum belt in the late nineteenth century.” Muller, “The Two Mystery Belts,” 151. Quote from p. 161. While this may be true, I call this belt the Two Row Wampum, using its now-commonly attributed, contemporary title. She also does not take into consideration that the Haudenosaunee may have made more than one copy of the belt. 149 Woodland Cultural Centre, Council Fire, 7. Quote from Muller, “The Two Mystery Belts,” 129.
53 ways. Tehanetorens continues, “We shall each travel the river together, side by side, but in our own boat. Neither of us will make compulsory laws or interfere in the internal affairs of the other. Neither of us will try to steer the other’s vessel.”150 No doubt, this belt was created in response to white pressures and encroachments on Indian customs and lifeways. Although this image is a figurative reference to Native-European interactions rather than a direct depiction of
Europeans, it does provide a basic understanding of how Native peoples saw their relationship to non-Indian in treaty making and agreements. Onondaga Oren Lyons explains that the
Guswentah belt illustrates the Native and Euro-American “separate and equal coexistence.”151
The wampum belt symbolized the recognition that both the Europeans and the Indians had the
“common experience of travel,” yet both remained on their own separate journeys.152
Perhaps the most famous wampum belt is the Penn Treaty belt, given to the
Pennsylvanians by the Lenni Lenape, or Delaware, Indians. At the signing it is believed that
William Penn said, “We meet on the broad pathway of good faith and good will. No advantage shall be taken on either side, but all shall be openness and love. We are the same as if one man’s body was to be divided into two parts. We are of one flesh and blood.”153 The image imbedded in the wampum belt beadwork of the 1683 Treaty between the Lenni Lenape and William Penn shows an Indian and a European, supposedly William Penn, holding hands (see Fig. 14).154
150 Tehanetorens, Wampum Belts, 73-74. 151 Lyons, “Land of the Free,” 33. For a discussion of two versions of the two row wampum belt, see Richard Hill, “Oral Memory of the Haudenosaunee: Views of the Two Row Wampum,” in Indian Roots of American Democracy, ed. Barreiro, 149-159. 152 James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 137. 153 Heye Foundation, The Penn Wampum Belts, 8. Quote from Tehanetorens, Wampum Belts, 82. 154 Hirsch, “Indian, Métis,” 63. An earlier version of the Penn Wampum belt deserves to be at least noted. As the Woodland Cultural Centre in Ontario, Canada explains, “the white man is marked with a white heart, and the Iroquoian with a dark one.” The significance of this is not discussed. Woodland Cultural Centre, Council Fire, 12. More attention should be given to this symbolism with future and additional research. See also Axtell, “Through Another Glass Darkly,” 136-137. Muller, “The Two Mystery Belts,” 139. While white wampum often signified peace, it could be speculated (before further investigation) that the white heart symbolized a “heart… filled with
54 Figure 14: Detail of William Penn Wampum Belt These two figures from the William Penn wampum belt of 1683 show Indians and Europeans holding hands in friendship and agreement. Figure 334. William H. Holmes, “A Study of the Textile Art in its Relation to the Development of Form and Ornament,” Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1884-'85 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1888), 189-252. The Project Gutenberg
The Native American is on the left and the European is on the right. The European wears a top hat, a visual signifier of a European according to many American Indian artists. Both are about of equal height, and the European is only larger in girth and size of his feet, legs, and torso. The
European’s torso and waist is made using six beads, while the Indian’s is half that size. Musing, one could say that the European is twice as fat as the American Indian! However, the difference is more likely to be caused by layers of clothing than by physical obesity.155 Here again dress was used to denote difference.
Looking at another image, this time taken from a piece of material culture denoting the
European idea of treaty negotiations, can help illustrate the European perceptions of Indian peace and good will.” Tehanetorens, Wampum Belts, 66. Gary A. Reneker, “William Penn – Tamanend Treaty Belt (1682),” G.A. Reneker Since 1979, January 1999-2006
55 negotiations (see Fig. 15). This image is that of the engraving on a 1792 Washington Peace
Medal, one of many medals issued to Indian peoples from the United States to show goodwill during negotiations and peace making at the time of George Washington’s presidency. These medals were made by a white craftsman to be given to important Indian chiefs present at the treaty signing after negotiations. In a way, this medal mimics native representations of the treaty-making process. The Indian similarly stands on the left and President George Washington stands on the right. The figures are facing each other. The Indian wears a headdress of feathers as well as a “skirt” of feathers, and is very muscular in his physical appearance.
Figure 15: George Washington Peace Medal This George Washington Peace Medal from 1792 stands as a European example with which to contrast the American Indian idea of treaty-making. Notice the two different backgrounds behind the European and the Indian. Plate 25. Francis Prucha, Indian Peace Medals in American History (Bluffton, South Carolina: Rivilo Books, 1994), 28.
56 George Washington is all decked out in his military attire, with a tailcoat, waistcoat, breeches, and long boots. Behind each individual, scenery reflects each individual’s lifestyle and place of residence. Behind the Indian trees indicate a landscape of wilderness, while a house, two oxen, and a man plowing busily are represented behind George Washington. As in the seal of the Bay
Colony one-hundred-and-sixty years before, Indians are linked to wilderness. The Indian is dropping his tomahawk of war with his right hand while in his left he is receiving the pipe of peace from George Washington. Notice that the Indian also wears an oval medal around his neck, somewhat similar to this very artifact that would have been given to native leaders during nation-to-nation treaty negotiations.
The wampum belt and peace medal images are very similar in their depiction of power, epitomizing their ideas of the treaty-making process. In both artifacts the Indian is just about the same size in height compared to the European. They are both represented on equal planes, indicating mutual respect and even understanding for each other. This equality presents the idealized vision of what both communities looked for and wished for in negotiations. Both wanted to portray their agreements as being made with mutual respect and understanding, building on common foundations. Both represent native or European ways of visually recording agreements and negotiations made between the groups, although the forms differ: a wampum belt or peace medal. Similar symbolism and values are behind each artifact.
The Washington Peace Medal shows an underlying implication of these treaty negotiations. It seems to be an early representation of Manifest Destiny, extolling European progress and the value of agricultural industry. The Europeans are represented with a pair of oxen, a plow, and a farm, indicating that the landscape is already being manipulated to fit
57 European needs. The Native American is also portrayed wearing only a “feather skirt,” another
suggestion of Indian primitiveness. By making peace with “scantily clad” Indians and giving
them peace medals to wear around their necks, Europeans tried to impose their values upon the
American Indians.
In many ways Native peoples showed their resistance to this visual representation of
American imperialism. Haudenosaunee linguistic evidence directly contradicts the themes
presented in the Washington Peace Medal. Among the Onondaga, Seneca, and Mohawk George
Washington was known as “the Town Destroyer” 156 So while the Americans were viewing
George Washington as a diplomat, the Haudenosaunee had their own nicknames for this
President. Native peoples throughout the colonial period in all different locations commented on the civilizing program. Cherokee leader Corn Tassel in 1785 argued to American diplomats,
“You say: Why do not the Indians till the ground and live as we do? May we not, with equal propriety, ask, Why the white people do not hunt and live as we do?”157 By recognizing these
Euro-American themes of land aggrandizement and feigned peaceful diplomacy, Native peoples
were actively overturning the perceived hegemony of negotiation the Europeans. The Native
peoples, as dynamic agents of their own present and futures, were actively engaging in the
diplomatic rhetoric.
Initially, Indian-European negotiations were made in which both sides, Europeans and
Native Americans, consented to follow each other’s own sovereign way of sealing and marking
their agreements. Indians would agree to sign parchment papers with the written words of the
agreements, while Europeans would smoke the calumet peace pipe and exchange wampum belts.
The Indian chiefs would wear medals presented to them by the Europeans while Europeans
156 Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, ed. Peter Nabokov (New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1991), 93. 157 Native American Testimony, 123.
58 would also follow Indian protocols for diplomacy.158 By both consenting to meet together, each
with written records or wampum in hand, the Native people and the Euro-Americans were seen
as similar in their respect, or rather in what both believed should have been, shown towards each
other. When they both did not show similar respect, it was then their differences clashed and
hindered agreements.
Slowly the Europeans started to ignore the Indian diplomatic protocol. Indians gave
wampum to the Europeans because they were guests inside Indian Country, where Indian law
and customs resided. Native Americans began to complain when the Europeans no longer
followed their ways of exchanging wampum. One leader said, “since that you are heere
strangers, and come into our Countrey, you should rather conforme yourselves to the Customes
of our Countrey, then [sic] impose yours upon us.”159 Indians and Europeans had different ideas of diplomacy. According to Native peoples, negotiations were made not just as agreements, but defined bonds between people. When Europeans decided not to use wampum, they were ignoring Indian ideas of sovereignty and diplomacy.160 As one bystander on such an occasion
described the reaction, “it made the Indians stare. The speech was delivered… in a language by
no means accommodating or flatting; quite unlike what they used to receive.”161
When Europeans ignored the common treaty protocol that they had both earlier agreed to,
the Indian idea of the European had changed. Native peoples believed that Europeans should be
treated with the same dignity and respect shown to other Indian communities. Although
Europeans looked different, wore funny hats, and owned guns, they still were seen as equals.
158 Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 115. Jennings, Invasion of America, 123. 159 Calloway, New Worlds for All, 123. 160 G. Malcolm Lewis explains that wampum belts became prohibited according to American law. G. Malcolm Lewis, “Traditional Cartography in the Americas,” in Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, 90. Richter, Facing East, 138, 144. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: University of Cambridge, 1995), 100. 161 Wallace, Death and Rebirth, 198.
59 Using the Indian metaphor, it was believed that both communities were to “go down the river” together, or reside next to each other, but in their own way, using their own methods, culture, and means of transportation, the ship or the canoe. Native Americans were shocked to see a change in the attitude of the Europeans that they thought they knew. The Europeans were diverging from the Indian’s idea of what Euro-Americans were supposed to act like, especially when they started telling the Indians that compromise and alliance were no longer the laws of the land, but rather European rules and regulations.162 The Haudenosaunee communities reminded and still continue to remind Euro-Americans about the significance of the wampum agreements.
162 James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 204.
60 Chapter 5: “Underneath all the conflicting images… one fundamental truth emerges”: Conclusion
“The biggest of all Indian problems is the whiteman.” Anonymous Indian 163
“Underneath all the conflicting images of the Indian one fundamental truth emerges– the white man knows that he is an alien and he knows that North America is Indian– and he will never let go of the Indian image because he thinks that by some clever manipulation he can achieve an authenticity that cannot ever be his.” Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), Historian and Activist 164
Within early Native depictions of Europeans, one fundamental truth emerges— the
European is defined by what the Indian is not. The European is a strange person who wears clothes that are in no way similar to Native dress. He wears fancy breeches with buttons, wide hats, cloaks, and large, encumbering boots. Often, the European’s behavior is also very unlike the Indian’s. The European soldier is stern, unnerving, and dangerous, holding a gun. Whether it is a simple pictorial design on Iroquoian wampum, an image from a beautifully-carved antler comb, or graffiti-like petroglyphs embedded in Southwestern landscapes, all Native depictions of
Europeans have distinctions that make the figures or symbols specifically Euro-American. Even wampum belts symbolically represent either the European or the European’s place in society.
One such European distinction is dress and costume. Europeans almost always wear some sort of hat, either a dandy’s black hat in a wampum belt design, a conquistador’s helmet in a rock art drawing, or a colonial’s bicorn hat in a carved antler comb. Lenape (Delaware) prophet Neolin mentioned European clothes in his teachings. When the Great Spirit, called the
Master of Life, provided Neolin teachings to share with other Indian people, the Great Spirit told
Neolin to sit down on top of a European hat. At first Neolin was confused, because he knew that
163 Basso, Portraits of ‘The Whiteman,’ 3. 164 Peter Nabokov, “Present Memories, Past History,” in The American Indian and the Problem of History, ed. Calvin Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 151.
61 a European did not sit on and crush a hat. He was told to pay no attention to its design. By not paying attention to the European practices of dress, Neolin was separating Indian people from the alternatively-dressed Europeans and Euro-Americans.165 The European was symbolically represented by the hat, almost always representing a male colonist, settler, or soldier. By always illustrating the European in a hat, the Indian is tacking on what the hat represents – the military, religious, or traveling hat depicting the ‘civilizing’ mission that the male European brings with him.166
Other Native leaders used clothing as a distinguishing factor of Euro-American civilization. Historian Jill Lepore described, “When [John] Eliot tried to preach to [King] Philip, the influential Wampanoag sachem and son of Massasoit, Philip ripped a button off of Eliot’s coat, held it up before his eyes and told Eliot that he cared for his gospel just as much as he cared for that button.”167 The Euro-American dress, signified through the button, and the Christian religion were seen as separate from Native American lifeways. Both Neolin and King Philip viewed the Euro-American clothing styles with indifference. They cared neither for the Euro-
American fashionable nor for its usefulness to them. For Neolin and King Philip, the dress symbolized a strange, separate culture.
Euro-Americans also were defined as always entering into Native communities with weapons and distrust. This is echoed in the Seneca carved antler combs where rifle barrels frame the edges of the designs, to the Southwestern images of Franciscan Black Robes marching with their rifles held high. Even in the early written documentation one can see the Indian’s
165 Alfred A. Cave, Prophets of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 24. 166 In the seventeenth century Indians would also greeted Europeans by touching the Europeans’ hats. Denys Delâge, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-1664. Translated by Jane Brierley (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993), 180. 167 Jill Lepore, “Advocating Massachusetts History: The First Annual Community Forum on Historical Records: Keynote Address: Whose History Is It?” Massachusetts Historical Records Advisory Board, 1998
62 recognition of the omnipresence of the weapon in Euro-American encounters. Wahunsonacock of the Powhatan Confederacy argued that the Euro-Americans would be accepted into their community as guests, “if you will come in a friendly manner, and not with swords and guns, as to invade an enemy.”168 In early historical evidence, written as well as visual, Native peoples point out the militarism of Euro-American societies and object to their presence in Native communities.
Although the material itself doesn’t dictate the themes presented in representations of
Europeans, wampum belts are the only analyzed materials that include an ideal of a European.
The products of successful treaty negotiations, the wampum designs depict agreements, compromise, or consensus. The wampum illustrations show what both Europeans and Indians had decided together. They agreed to view each other as equals with mutual respect. This equality later became only an Indian ideal of the Europeans. This image rarely existed in reality.
The Europeans generally did not view the “savage” Indians as equal, sovereign nations with legitimate cultural and religious traditions.169
While the European expected the Indian to become more like them, the Indian did not expect the European to adopt Indian ways. In their view Europeans and American Indians were to go their own separate ways, live their own lives, and maintain their own unique cultures, while interacting with each other in mutual friendship. At the same time that Europeans and Euro-
Americans anticipated a native transformation into becoming more European and less Indian,
Americans also began to use the symbol of the Indian to define themselves separate from
England. The Indians, however, did not see themselves as being a part of the Euro-American communities, and did not want to be assigned to any European or Euro-American definitions of
168 Native American Testimony, 72. 169 Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness, 100. Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 50.
63 what it meant to be Indian. Instead, Indian communities were seen as being on equal “river paths,” along with their white neighbors, each with their own distinct sovereignty and independence.170 This theme is symbolically reflected in the Two-Row wampum belt Guswentah as well as the way in which Europeans are visualized in pictorial wampum belts such as Penn’s
Treaty belt and in Seneca carved-antler combs. According to Indian views, indigenous peoples did not need to become more like Europeans.
European representations are similar to Native depictions of Europeans, however, in that both illustrate the exotic and the strange, defining the other by what they themselves are not.
Indians are defined by supple circular communities in their own native-made maps, Europeans by their contrasting, rigid forts. Europeans distinguished the inhabited parts of the country from the wild wooded forests.171 Europeans are a people who do not dress in the native way and do not act in the Indian manner. Euro-American and Europeans saw Indians as noble, gallant warriors, and often used them as foils to the degenerate citizens in Europe. At the same time, however, the word “savage” is used to describe the wild Indian as opposed to the “civilized” gentlemen in Europe. Both viewed the other as different counter to their own identities.172
While Indians depicted Europeans as how they should be, treating Indian communities with respect, they also pictured them as they were, collectively and stereotypically as a group of stern, bellicose intruders who wear fancy clothes. Early Indian representations of Europeans differentiates between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ This theme has continued even now. American Indians
170 Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 20. 171 Merrell, Into the American Woods, 24. 172 Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 17-27, 72, 75. Heather M. Bouwman, “The Familiar Foreigner: English Colonists and American Indians Writing Each Other” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998), 3-8. Kupperman, Indians & English, 20. Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness, 11.
64 still assert their sovereign and unique identities as Native American communities and people despite outside cultural, social, and political Euro-American pressures.
As Janice Acoose (Sakimay First Nation/Métis) explains about indigenous art, “Art, in its many different forms, is an affirmation of ourselves.”173 In affirming the difference of Europeans and Euro-Americans, even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the present, Native
Americans have used visual expressions of Europeans as a means of distinguishing themselves.
While maintaining good relationships was a key to Native American community life, commenting on relationships of others was prevalent throughout early Native art. While art can be used to express identity, it is also used to express the relationships between two different groups of identifying people. Anthropologist Barbara J. Mills argues that the “intentional use of material culture as a means of expressing social identity.” She continues, “material culture can be a powerful way of expressing social difference and group membership.”174
This identity was most closely visualized through dress. Scholar Wendy Parkins argues,
“notions of citizenship may be bound up with and understood through notions and practices of dress. These protests can be read as attempts to refashion the body politic through drawing attention to the significance— and the signification — of dress in political contexts.”175 Although
Parkins is writing about women wearing pants as a form of feminist protest, this idea can be applied to early America. Native Americans protested Euro-American attempts to define indigenous America by their standards. Native peoples delegated certain signifiers of dress to these outsiders. Even within Native communities, individuals were described as either being the
173 Janice Acoose, Iskwewak- Kah’ki Yaw Ni Wahkomakanak: Neither Indian Princesses nor Easy Squaws (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1995), 118. 174 Mills, “Acts of Resistance,” 85-86. 175 Wendy Parkins, “Introduction: (Ad)dressing Citizens,” in Fashioning the Body Politic: Dress, Gender, Citizenship, ed. Wendy Parkins (New York: Berg, 2002), 2.
65 “breeches” pant-wearing Indians and “Blanket” Indians.176 These terminologies emphasized the acceptance or rejection of Euro-American culture.
By ‘reversing the gaze’ and looking at Native American depictions of Europeans, one gains a better understanding of what the ‘other perspective of history,’ the so-called subaltern peoples viewed the Indian-European encounters. As a Narraganset man asked in colonial
America, “‘Why come the English hither,’… ‘and measuring others by themselves.’”177 From
Native art, we can see that Native peoples resisted European definitions of themselves; they underscored cultural distinction; and they thereby questioned European efforts to absorb them into the dominant society.
176 Native American Testimony, 71. 177 Native American Testimony, 71.
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75 Appendix A: Images of Europeans by Native Americans: Seneca Combs
*In addition to examples in the text, the following artifacts also depict Europeans. The
appendices are in no way comprehensive.
One Seneca comb (2¾ inches high by 3¼ inches wide) is attributed to being from the
Boughton Hill site in New York, ca. 1670-1687. Three Euro-Americans stand next to each
other. The two on the ends are flanked by long poles, possibly representing long barrel rifles.
The middle Euro-American is wearing a floppier hat than the two on the ends. Their waists are
fitted and V-shaped. In Art of the North American Indians: The Thaw Collection. Edited by
Gilbert T. Vincent, Sherry Brydon, and Ralph T. Coe. Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown:
University of Washington Press, 2000, p. 41.
One Seneca antler comb depicts a European man with hat, breeches, fitted jacket, and
gun. A dog jumps up at his side. See Figure 38 on page 39 (New York State Museum 13-4B).
In Ben A. Kroup, Robert L. Dean, and Richard Hill. Art from Ganondagan: “The Village of
Peace.” Waterford, New York: New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic
Preservation, 1986, Figure 38, p. 39.
A comb from the Rochester Museum & Science Center, Rochester, New York illustrates
two European traders riding horses. The two Europeans both wear hats. Buttons are visible on
their jackets. It is said to have been made by a Cayuga artist. See page 119. In Through Indian
Eyes: The Untold Story of Native American Peoples. Pleasantville, New York: The Reader’s
Digest Association, Inc., 1995, p. 119; and David W. Penney, North American Indian Art. New
York: Thames & Hudson, Inc., 2004, Figure 37, p. 55.
76 Two other combs from the Rochester Museum and Science Center depict European men on horses: RMSC 153-103 and RMSC 12001/103 (11.8 x 7cm). Each comb illustrates one
European man on horseback. One obviously wears a hat, while the other one has a fitted waist.
In Ben A. Kroup, Robert L. Dean, and Richard Hill. Art from Ganondagan: “The Village of
Peace.” Waterford, New York: New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic
Preservation, 1986, Figures 33 and 34, p. 38.
Additional combs depict European men wearing hats, breeches, fitted jackets with visible buttons (Figures 35 and 37: RMSC 548/103 (7 x 2.8 cm) and NYSM 13-2 (11.7 x 6.3 cm). Both wear breeches. One is framed by an arch and has his hair cut at ear-length. In Ben A. Kroup,
Robert L. Dean, and Richard Hill. Art from Ganondagan: “The Village of Peace.” Waterford,
New York: New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, 1986, Figures
35 and 37, p. 39.
A unique comb from the New York State Museum illustrates what could be a European man with chin-length hair, standing next to an Indian woman. He holds a long rifle in his hand, which touches the ground. In Ben A. Kroup, Robert L. Dean, and Richard Hill. Art from
Ganondagan: “The Village of Peace.” Waterford, New York: New York State Office of Parks,
Recreation and Historic Preservation, 1986, Figure 39, p. 40.
Another comb shows two European men with breeches, jackets with buttons, and hats, holding hands (RMSC 154/103). They hold guns in their free hands. In Ben A. Kroup, Robert
L. Dean, and Richard Hill. Art from Ganondagan: “The Village of Peace.” Waterford, New
York: New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, 1986, Figure 40, page 41.
77 A comb that is badly weathered depicts perhaps a male or female, wearing either a tight- corseted or a fitted jacket. In the person’s right hand there is what could be the remains of a rifle. In Carrie A. Lyford, Iroquois Crafts. Edited by Willard W. Beatty. Lawrence, Kansas:
Haskell Institute, 1945, Figure 15, p. 23.
Iroquoian carved antler combs show Euro-Americans wearing jackets and hats
(247470.000; 2213094.000; and four items as a part of 223132.000) from Monroe and
Livingston County, New York. In National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian
Institution, “Depictions of Europeans.” Unpublished manuscript, June 1, 2007.
78 Appendix B: Images of Europeans by Native Americans: Petroglyphs & “Rock Art”
One pictographic image is described as, “[p]robably a non-Navajo male with beard,
fringed shirt, boots, and spurs” (Kolber, 164). In Jane Kolber, “The Human Figure in Navajo
Rock Art, with an emphasis on Mockingbird Canyon, Chaco.” In Diné Bíkéyah: Papers in
Honor of David M. Brugge, ed. Meliha S. Duran & David T. Kirkpatrick. Albuquerque:
Archaeological Society of New Mexico, 1998, Figure 5, p. 165.
Site #28 is reproduced, illustrating many of the European goods and products: not only a
fort, but also a ship, a man with a gun, and a man riding a horse. In Selwyn Dewdney and
Kenneth E. Kidd, Indian Rock Paintings of the Great Lakes. Toronto: Published for the Quetico
Foundation by University of Toronto Press, 1962, p. 48.
Campbell Grant reproduces a rock art depiction of a man wearing a hat, coat, and holding a gun from A. T. Jackson’s Picture-Writing of Texas Indians. Bureau of Research in the Social
Sciences, Study No. 27. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1938. The rock art drawing was
located in Real County, Texas. In Campbell Grant, Rock Art of the American Indian. Golden,
Colorado: Outbooks, 1981, p. 43.
Another photo shows the Canyon del Muerto, Arizona pictographs by Parker Hamilton.
In Charles D. James III and Howard M. Davidson. “Style Changes of The Horse Motif in Navajo
Rock Art: A Preliminary Analysis.” American Indian Rock Art Volume II, Papers Presented at
the Second Annual Rock Art Symposium, El Paso Community College, August 30-September 1,
1975, El Paso, Texas. Edited by Kay Sutherland. El Paso, Texas: El Paso Archaeological
Society, Inc., 1976, Figures 4, 5; p. 32, 33.
79 A petroglyph in Big Bend, Texas, is said to be of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Spanish
slave masters, soldiers, priests, and cattle herds. In A. Miriam. Lowrance, “El Dorado Through
La Junta, Big Bend, Texas.” American Indian Rock Art Volume II, Papers Presented at the
Second Annual Rock Art Symposium, El Paso Community College, August 30-September 1,
1975, El Paso, Texas. Edited by Kay Sutherland. El Paso, Texas: El Paso Archaeological
Society, Inc., 1976, Figure 2, p. 55, 56; Figure 3, p. 57, 58; Figure 4, p. 59; and Figure 5, p. 61.
A person wearing a European hat is shown in a rock art drawing, but one cannot be sure
whether this is a European or an Indian. In Sabra Moore, Petroglyphs: Ancient Language/Sacred
Art (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 1998), p. 15.
The “skewered priest,” a watercolor sketch by Forrest J. Kirkland of an Indian rock art
drawing in western Texas. The watercolor is now housed at the Texas Memorial Museum in
Austin, Texas. In Howard Morrison, Richard Ahlborn, Lisa Falk, Hank Grasso, Rayna Green,
and Lonn Taylor. American Encounters: A Companion to the Exhibition at the National
Museum of American History. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1992, p. 31.
One rock art drawing at Lake Kejimkoojik in Nova Scotia is of a white man shooting a moose. In Marion Robertson, Rock Drawings of The Micmac Indians. Halifax, N.S.: The Nova
Scotia Museum, 1973, Figure 15.
Many petroglyphs at Lake Kejimkoojik and Medway River in Nova Scotia depict
Europeans or European ships. In Robertson, Rock Drawings of The Micmac Indians, Figures
203-239.
The “Explorers Petroglyph” is purported to be the “only recorded rock drawing of either
white man or boats on the Montana High Plains.” In Rock Art of the Montana High Plains. An
80 exhibition organized by Stuart and Betty Lu Conner for The Art Galleries. University of
California, Santa Barbara, April 6 – May 16, 1971, Figure 21, p. 23.
Karl Kernberger’s photograph of a group of Spanish on horseback moving left to right across the Canyon walls of Standing Cow Ruin at Canyon del Muerto depict the Navajo’s point- of-view of the Spanish intrusions. In Polly Schaafsma, Indian Rock Art of the Southwest.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980, Figure 273, p. 330.
A rock art drawing, photographed by Tom Bean, is of the Spanish riding horses. In
Through Indian Eyes, p. 97.
Turpin reproduces “the skewered priest.” In Solveig Turpin, “Rock Art of the
Despoblado.” Archaeology 41, 5 (September/October 1988): 50-55, p. 52, 53.
Other pictographs drawn by Forrest Kirkland on July 24, 1935 at the Meyers Springs
Rock Shelter in the Big Bend region of west Texas show another version of a priest. The original is also located at the Texas Memorial Museum, Austin, Texas (Acc. No. 2261-71). In
Visions of the People: A Pictorial History of Plains Indian Life. Minneapolis: The Minneapolis
Institute of Arts, 1992, Figure 1, p. 71.
81 Appendix C: Images of Europeans by Native Americans: Wampum Belts
The Washington Covenant Belt (75½ inches long, 5¼ inches wide) is one such wampum belt depicting Europeans as well as Indians in the design. In Peter T. and Jill L. Furst, North
American Indian Art. New York: Rizzoli, 1982, p. 220.
The Washington Covenant Wampum Belt depicts the Treaty of Canadaigua in 1794.
Thirteen men represent the thirteen colonies. The two other figures belong to the Six Nations.
At the time this photograph was taken, the belt still belonged to the New York State Museum in
Albany, New York, before Iroquoian repatriation took place. In Herman J. Viola, After
Columbus: The Smithsonian Chronicle of the North American Indian. Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Books, 1990, p. 108; and Ray W. Gonyea, “Give Me That Old Time Religion: A story of a successful wampum repatriation.” History News Vol. 48, No. 2 (March/April 1993): 4-
7, p. 4.
The William Penn Wampum belt, which once belonged to The Historical Society of
Pennsylvania, depicts a European and Indian holding hands. In Oliver LaFarge, A Pictorial
History of the American Indian. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1956, p. 76; Illustrated Atlas of Native American History. Edison, New Jersey: Chartwell Books, Inc., 1999, p. 109; The Penn
Wampum Belts. Leaflets of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, No. 4, New
York: Museum of the American Indian Heye Foundation, March 22, 1925, Plate III; In Through
Indian Eyes, 141; Patricia Trenton, Native Americans: Five Centuries of Changing Images. New
York: H.N. Abrams, 1989, page 28
One undocumented wampum belt is reproduced on page 33 as Figure 2. Men with what looks like wide, baggy breeches hold hands with skinnier men. The belt belongs to the National
82 Museums of Liverpool (Acc. No. 58.83.9 from the King’s Regiment Collection). In Simon
Jones, “Caldwell and DePeyster: Two Collectors from the King’s Regiment on the Great Lakes
in the 1770s and 1780s.” In Three Centuries of Woodlands Indian Art: A Collection of Essays.
Edited by J. C. H. King and Christian F. Feest. Vienna: ZKF Publishers, 2007, Figure 2, p. 33.
A wampum belt from the McCord Museum in Canada and depicts an agreement between
the Jesuits and the Hurons in 1638. Two different human figures are depicted: one in a robe, as
designated by the lack of visible legs and feet, and the other wearing a hat. A church and a cross
are clearly visible. In Lainey, La «Monnaie des Sauvages», Figure 49, p. 193.
The Two-Dog Wampum was given to the Europeans by the Kanesatake Indians in the eighteenth century. Two different figures are presented. Some of the people are outlined in white wampum and others are filled in completely with the white wampum. The wampum belt is housed at the Musée McCord d’histoire canadienne, Montréal as artifact No. M1905. In
Lainey, La «Monnaie des Sauvages», Figure 62, p. 265.
One wampum belt, photographed by Walter Larrimore and from the Photo Archives of
the National Museum of the American Indian, was created to memorialize a Western Chippewa
(Ojibwe) chief’s visit to England to visit George III. Two figures with different ‘hearts’ stand
side by side. In Native Universe: Voices of Indian America. Gerald McMaster and Clifford E.
Trafzer, Editors. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian
Institution, in association with National Geographic, 2004, p. 146, 147.
The ends of the Huron’s Four Nations Alliance Belt represent a fort while the four
squares symbolize the Wyandots, Ojibwas, Ottawas, and Potawatomis being protected. It dates
around 1710. The fort symbolically represented the Euro-Americans. In Frank Speck, “The
Eastern Algonkian Wabanaki Confederacy,” in Robert M. Leavitt and David A. Francis, eds.,
83 Wapapi Akonutomakonol The Wampum Records: Wabanaki Traditional Laws. Fredericton:
Micmac-Maliseet Institute, University of New Brunswick, 1990, p. 24
The Coming of the White Faces Belt, the Two-Row Wampum Belt, the Champlain
Wampum Belt, the First William Penn Belt, the Great Britain and Six Nations Friendship Belt,
the Delaware Land Belt, an Onondaga record belt, Governor Denny’s Invitation Belt, the
Akwesasne Wolf Belt, the Two Road Belt, the George Washington Belt, and an Unknown belt
with European images and a cross all depict Europeans pictorially or symbolically. In
Tehanetorens, Wampum Belts of the Iroquois. Summertown, Tennessee: Book Publishing
Company, 1999, p. 71,73, 76, 81, 99, 100, 103, 105, 108, 111, 113, 126.
The Wolf Clan Belt represents an agreement between the Mohawks and the French in
1701. Two figures, presumed to be representing a Mohawk leader and a Frenchman, stand next
to each other. They are holding hands. Although the image is not a photograph but rather a
sketched reproduction, it is hard to tell the exact size and details. It seems that one of the figures
may be wider than the other, perhaps indicating thick European dress. In Through Indian Eyes, p. 131.
Another wampum belt from the McCord Museum of Canadian History depicts the founding of a mission in the 1600s. Five figures stand next to a cross and a church building.
Two of the figures are in robes, as designated by their undiscerning legs. In Through Indian
Eyes, p. 381.
A belt which now belongs to the National Museum and Galleries on Meryside-Liverpool
Museum in England was given by the Indians to Arent De Peyster at Detroit during the
Revolutionary War. Twelve figures in rows of three stand hand-in-hand. The figures are placed
vertically rather than horizontally. Many have different dress as shown by their varying
84 silhouettes. In Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the
Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 401.
85