PARFLECHES How Native Women Pushed the Envelope of Abstraction
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PARFLECHES How Native Women Pushed the Envelope of Abstraction By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) EFORE PIET MONDRIAN the senior curator of American Indian helped found the De Stijl move- art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, ment, before Kazimir Malevich Torrence curated The American Indian Bpenned The Non-Objective Parfleche: A Tradition of Abstract Painting World, before Wassily Kandinsky at the Des Moines Art Center, with a cata- painted Composition I, even before logue, back in 1994. Torrence strives to the rise of modernism, there was the teach new generations to appreciate this parfleche. Indigenous women from the once widespread art form. Great Plains, Plateau, Great Basin, and While closely associated with the Southwest painted abstract imagery onto Great Plains, parfleches come from rawhide containers to create bold, graphic other areas including the Plateau, Great artworks meant to be seen from a distance Basin, Southwest, Subarctic, and Prairie and meant to be seen in motion. Using cultural regions. Tribes as far south as a visual vocabulary of simple shapes and the Lipan Apache of Southern Texas and a limited palette, they created a corpus as far north as the Tsuu T'ina of Alberta of paintings that continue to amaze and made parfleches, as did tribes as far west confound audiences today. as the Wasco, Wishram, and Tenino of Unlike those early 20th-century Washington and Oregon. European abstract painters, the Native While parfleches predated the women who painted parfleches did not 16th-century Spanish reintroduction of create “art for art’s sake.” Indigenous the horse, the art form flourished with the artists, like the overwhelming majority rise of horse culture in the Western United of artists throughout world history, above Lakota artists, Parfleche States and Canada. The horse enabled did not separate art from daily life. A Cylinders, Flat Cases, Boxes, agrarian Great Lakes tribes to move west and Envelopes, collection of and interact with tribes already there, and parfleche is eminently utilitarian. Art the National Museum of the historian Gaylord Torrence wrote, “The American Indian, Smithsonian to create the new nomadic cultures that containers were lightweight, unbreakable, Institute. Photo: Taoboy49 (CC epitomize American Indians in popular and weather-resistant, and their creation BY-SA 3.0). imagination. Prior to the reservation era afforded women an important means of opposite Cheyenne artist, of the mid- to late 19th century, this was Parfleche, ca. 1890, rawhide, artistic expression. The superb utility of pigment, collection of the a time of great wealth. Parfleches simul- these objects, their compelling beauty National Cowboy and Western taneously stored precious material goods as works of art, and their inseparable Heritage Museum, 1981.28.4, and displayed a family’s skill at hunting gift of Mrs. Doane Farr. Image association with the horse all contributed courtesy of the National and creativity. Torrence writes that “great to their importance in Plains culture.”1 Cowboy and Western Heritage numbers must have been required; Torrence is the champion of Museum, Oklahoma City. they were undoubtedly one of the most parfleches in the field of art history. Now commonly produced aesthetic forms.”2 1. Gaylord Torrence, “Parfleche Envelope,” in The Plains Indians: Artists of the Earth and Sky, ed. Gaylord Torrence (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2014), 90. 2. Gaylord Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche: A Tradition of Abstract Painting (Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with the Des Moines Art Center, 1994), 24. 34 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM The term parfleche, as early conser- vationist and ethnographer George Bird Grinnell wrote, derives from the French terms parer, “to parry” or deflect, and flêche, “arrow,” referring to rawhide shields. The term broadened over time to include a range of embellished containers crafted from rawhide.3 One reason why parfleches have not received more scholarship is they have historically been a women’s art. Among Plains and neighboring tribes, painting historically was a gendered practice, with men typically painting figu- rative and narrative works while women painted abstract geometric works—on hides, textiles, and bodies. Instead of 6 acknowledging the two genders’ painting containers ubiquitous in the Great Lakes but rather overlapped them. Later the practices, I have often heard the senti- region, where the Dakota, Cheyenne, and painting aligned with the folded flaps, so a 4 ment voiced that “Plains women didn’t other Plains tribes once lived. They also unified image would be created when the paint.” Why does women’s geometric share aesthetics with painted hide robes, parfleche was folded into its final shape. painting get so easily dismissed? Just as widespread across the continent, and in By 1840, distinct tribal styles emerged. the abstract painters of early 20th-century turn with Indigenous tattooing and body Parfleches were sculpted from Europe challenged public perception, the painting. “This fundamental vocabulary of rawhide, which is processed but not abstraction of parfleches continues to visual forms consisted of geometric motifs, tanned, so instead of being soft and challenge the public. One could engage both straightedged and curved, organized supple, the hide is tough and water-resis- with this geometric abstraction on a into complex compositions with some type tant and holds its shape. Bison was the purely aesthetic level or delve deeper into of rectangular frame,” Torrence wrote. “The preferred hide until American merce- a quest to understand its symbolism, but images were based on highly elongated naries decimated their herds in the late it takes the ability to embrace uncertainty triangles, hourglass shapes, diamonds, 1860s and early 1870s; after 1880, it was and engage with Indigenous perspectives rectangles, lines, and circular forms.”5 seldom found. A bison hide is darker from different tribes. It may take more Some of the earliest parfleches brown than other hides and develops a effort and time to explore Indigenous in museum collections are unpainted craquelure over time. Besides bison, it aesthetics, but the rewards are great and or incised. Thick bison hides had dark is difficult to determine exactly which the art helps us understand the artists’ epidermal surfaces that could be etched animal hide was used. Elk, deer, horse, worldviews—to hear voices of Indigenous with fine lines and crosshatching to cow, and even moose hide was used, and women who have too often been silenced reveal a lighter layer of hide. Many all were off-white to beige. The unpainted in the past and today. early 19th-century parfleches combine surfaces provided the lightest parts of the Few historical parfleches can be incising with painting. Exclusively parfleche design. Typically a single hide attributed to named artists because they incised containers began to disappear in could yield a pair of parfleche envelopes. were collected with little accompanying the 1860s and it is doubtful that any were Ute and Jicarilla Apache artists made large information. However, based on made after 1880. Incising shared aesthetic pouches three to five feet wide that took studying 1,500 specimens in more qualities with woodcarving. It was up an entire hide. than 100 collections by 1994—and far particularly popular among Mescalero Men typically hunted and skinned more since—Torrence developed a Apache parfleche makers who may have the animals, while women prepared the diagnostic methodology for attributing been influenced by Spanish colonial hides in a complex process requiring tribal affiliations to the many historical leatherwork. strength and skill. The artist staked a parfleches scattered in museum collections The earliest painted parfleches hide about six to ten inches above the across the globe. Rawhide disintegrates reflect “a transitional form between ground, with its hair side facing down, rapidly, so it is extraordinary than any robes painted geometrically and the then defleshed the hides by scraping off 18th-century examples are still intact final development of the parfleche the muscles, tissue, and fat with bone or, in museum collections today. They may envelope,” in which the painted design later, metal hide scrapers. The hides shrank have been modeled on folded birchbark did not conform to the folding surfaces as they dried and were doused with water 3. George Bird Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life, Vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1923), 244. 4. Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians, 245; Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche, 30, 57. 5. Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche, 30. 6. Torrence, “Parfleche Envelope,” 90. SPRING 2020 | 35 Standing Rock Reservation, was ground into powder then heated to become a deep red: “The baking of this ocherous substance—a process which requires skill—is done by the women.”9 Clark Wissler, who conducted field research among Northern Plains tribes from 1902 to 1905, transliterated Blackfoot terms for their paints: “Yellow earth. Buffalo yellow (buffalo gall stones). Red earth (burned yellow earth). Red earth (as found). Rock paint (a yellowish red). Many-times-baked-paint (a yellow earth made red by exposure to the sun). Red many-times-baked (a similar red, as found). Seventh paint (a peculiar ghastly red-purple). Blue (a dark blue mud). White earth (as found). Black (charcoal).”10 Native black, made from iron oxide, lignite, charcoal, walnut hulls or roots, or sunflowers, leaned toward brown. Native artists used natural blacks long after commercial pigments were available. Reds, the most common natural pigment, were primarily made from red ocher, that is clay with iron oxide, but also from buffalo berries, pussy willows, or cactus fruit. Yellows were mostly yellow ocher but could also be made from bison gallstones or wolf lichen. Green came from copper carbonate or dried green algae. Blue came from earth or even duck excrement. These natural pigments were dried and ground with stone mortars. Each color was stored separately in its own hide pouch.