On Art

...Ironically, it was during Ghost Dance observances on the Sioux reservations in South Dakota that one of the most brutal Indian massacres had occurred In late December 1890, a battle broke out at Wounded Knee between the Army and a harassed and poorly armed tribe of Sioux attempting to make their way to the Bad Lands The soldiers opened fire on an encampment of women, children and old men, then butchered them as they fled The dead were not buried until New Year's Day, when the frozen bodies were tossed into an open pit Many of them were naked Souvenir hunters had stripped them of their prized Ghost shirts...

...Herded onto reservations??their warring and hunting parties over, their religious practices falling into disuse??the tribal craftsmen were reduced to producing items for the tourist trade They soon learned that the tourists would accept shoddy workmanship Here and there, agents would encourage them to keep up their old craft traditions but, Feder points out, the Indians themselves came to prefer gaudy commercial materials The Navahos began coloring their blankets with aniline dyes rather than natural ones Northwest Coast dwellers redid then-old ceremonial masks and sculptures with bright new commercial house-paints It is to Feder's credit that he doesn't romanticize the red man...

...One of the most beautiful items in the show is the Arapaho Ghost...

...The coming of the white man and his trading posts seems to have opened up the Indian economy, providing a kind of upward mobility for clan members who had been unable to promote themselves under the old regime This revived the potlatch system and created a new demand for art work??a last burst, it seems, of conspicuous artistic consumption Eventually, though, the white man's civilization drove the Indians further away from their villages and closer to the canneries and trading posts The potlatch was gradually abandoned, and in 1921 the Canadian government outlawed it (Feder, unfortunately, does not explain why ) After the ban was lifted by a new Indian Act passed m 1951, potlatch-mg enjoyed a mild revival but, according to Feder, the practice is now quite dead Today only a few carvers trained under the old apprenticeship system remain...

...Sociology plays a large part in Feder??s discussion of the various Indian crafts, since tribal life afforded little or no place for European concepts like art-for-art's-sake Nearly all native products were functional and utilitarian, the idea of purely decorative art being alien to Indian culture In general, Feder notes, the more affluent societies had the most extensive art forms Tribes like the Haida and Tlingit, living on the Pacific shore or along coastal rivers with an abundant supply of fish and game, had the leisure to develop a strong arts-and-crafts tradition, making their elaborately carved house posts, grave markers and totem poles among the most staking of Indian works The Northwest Coast dwellers even evolved to the stage where certain members of the society were regarded as artists or, at least, as artisans trained under an apprenticeship system Though their lives were much more difficult, the agricultural societies of the Southwest, like the Hopis and Zunis, developed similarly strong craft traditions The Plains Indians, however, led a nomadic existence following the migratory buffalo herds and lavished then attention on only the most necessary items that could be taken with them on their long treks Costume seems to have had an overweening importance to the Indian, both for its prestige value and tor vanity's sake As in nature, the male was the showier of the species, entitled to the most brilliant plumage A wamor or brave might devote hours to his personal toilet before an important ceremony or simply before showing himself off around the camp It was considered de rigueur for a squaw to outdo her neighbors in the decoration of her husband's beaded moccasins, shirts and leggings The white man introduced commercial glass beads??they replaced the porcupine quills used in an earlier form of embroidery??is well as metal tools that made carving easier These were among the few benefits, together with the horse, booze and a number of civilized diseases, that the Indians were to receive from their adversaries...

...The show, handsomely installed in the Whitney's spacious fourth floor galleries, is comprised of 314 items by 57 North American tribes, ranging from Iroquois war clubs to a strapping 12-foot-tall Nootka house post out of the Pacific Northwest In his handy, well-illustrated catalogue for the exhibition (Praeger, 156 pp , $5 00), Feder notes that his selection of the material was determined by his own esthetic preferences rather than any attempt to give a representative view of specific native crafts All of the objects??beaded cradle boards, ceremonial costumes, carved headdresses inlaid with shell, painted war shields, wooden totem figures??have been drawn from the two centuries (roughly 1700-1900) following the Indians' contact with the white man...

...Feder has also written a much more detailed account of the regional tribes and their artworks for a large coffee-table volume, American Indian An (Abrams, 447 pp , $30 00 until December 31, $35 00 there-after) Beautifully illustrated in color and black and white with additional examples not included in the show, it is one of the most useful luxury books brought out for the Christmas trade...

...Norman Feder...

...curator of American Indian and Native Arts at the Denver Art Museum and guest-director of the Whitney show, has done an invaluable service m assembling this stunning, comprehensive collection Mounted under the auspices of a prestigious art museum, and coming at a time of renewed interest in the Indian's role in American culture, it should permanently alter our concept of American art history...

...Dance shirt, made of hide, painted an eerie twilight blue and spangled with stars It was used in ceremonies observing a religion of the dispossessed promoted by a Paiute warrior after he had a visionary experience Spreading rapidly among the Plains Indians, it taught that they must live in peace with the white man and do no harm, that soon he would disappear from the land, and that then all the Indian dead would return to live in a paradise on earth The more often the Ghost Dance was performed, it was claimed, the sooner the millenium would arrive In time, the religion acquired some local peculiarities The Sioux, for example, believed that the ghost shirt made its wearer impervious to the white man's bullets...

...Still, among the tribes of the Northwest Coast a peculiar social custom emerged whereby a man's social status, his right to use particular clan symbols and lead certain religious dances, was based on his financial ability to sponsor important feasts At these ceremonies, called potlatches, handsomely decorated gifts were liberally distributed to members of other tribes and clans whose function was to bear witness to the host's privileges Even if a man were of noble ancestry and had the best family connections, he had to validate his rank by giving the most lavish potlatch and erecting the most expensive totem pole...

...On Art AMERICA'S FIRST ARTISTS BY JAMES R MELLOW Like a large lump of unassimilated culture, the exhibition Two Hundred Years of North American Indian Ai t has settled into the Whitney Museum until January 9 Not that this continent's indigenous craftsmen have gone entirely unrecognized, but until now art historians have tended to concentrate on pie-Conquest Mexico and South America with an occasional nod at better known Northwest Coast dwellers such as the Kwakiutl and Haida Between these outposts there remained a great number of tribes whose characteristic products were considered the proper domain of anthropologists, ethnologists and museums of natural history...

...The Whitney exhibition is a testimonial to the strengths of Indian art Most tribes display a remarkable ability for what is now called assemblage, the use of unconventional materials the Eskimo and Tsimshian masks, for example, combining wood with metal, feathers, bits of abalone shell and animal hair Simpler articles??like the sleekly carved stone prpebowls of the Sioux and Objibwa dolls??have the kind of formal authority one might expect in thoroughly contemporary work Many of the ceremonial masks are ingeniously designed the Harda "opening mask," for instance, carved in the form of a bird which opens up to reveal a second, human mask, or the Kwakiutl "echo mask" with its eight interchangeable mouthpieces If the painting styles seem limited in range??usually abstracted animal forms or stick-men engaged m battle or hunting??they nonetheless have a marvelous mcrsiveness...