Ross Frank was a teenager when he first saw the 19th-century ledger drawings of Plains Indians. These were three scenes of derring-do acquired by his art-dealer father. Two were drawn by a Lakota Sioux man named Swift Dog, who had fought at the Battle of the Little Big Horn as one of Sitting Bull’s band. The third was by Red Hawk and was said to have been taken off a dead warrior at the massacre of Wounded Knee.
Then, as now, Frank was struck by the stories and by the beauty and immediacy of the drawings—responding with a gut-level “that’s cool.” Later, he would grow to appreciate the drawings’ historical significance. But what he found equally compelling was that they were in fact pages ripped out of a book, the disarticulated parts of a greater whole.
BLACK HAWK: A statement by the daughter of William Edward Caton, Indian trader at the Cheyenne Agency in Dakota, was bound into the book and recounts the events of 1880-8: “Black Hawk, Chief Medicine Man of the Sioux was in great straits that winter, having several squaws and numerous children dependent upon him. He had absolutely nothing, no food, and would not beg. Father knew his condition; he also knew that Black Hawk had had a wonderful dream. So he asked him to make pictures of the dream, offering to furnish paper and pencils, and to give him 50 cents in trade at the store for each sheet he brought in.” The book sold at Sotheby’s in 1994 for $387,500.
For more than a decade now, Frank, 48, has been working to preserve
Plains Indian ledger books intact. An associate professor of
ethnic studies at UCSD and a specialist in Native American
history and
culture, Frank has been building a virtual, public collection
of the endangered books through the Plains Indian Ledger Art
(PILA)
Project. Ledger drawing flowered in the northern and southern Great Plains
from about 1860 to 1900. A transitional art form, it corresponds
to and was partly shaped by the destruction of the buffalo herds
and the forced relocation of tribes to reservations.
Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa and other Plains
Indians known for their pictographic artistry turned to new
materials in the
middle of
the 19th century. They switched from bone and stick brushes to
pencils, crayons and occasionally watercolors, and from the now-scarce
buffalo hide to muslin and paper. They sometimes used sketchpads,
but most often standard-issue ledgers, lined accounting books that
could be readily obtained from traders and Indian agents or taken
as booty during raids.
Ledger drawing initially continued in the established pictorial
convention of painting on buffalo skins. The exclusive province
of men, these were public records of male achievement and focused
on feats of daring and valiance, battles and sacred visions. The
drawings were a way for a man to attain status, Frank explains,
simultaneously “building and validating the power and stature
of both the individual and the tribe.” The stories—both
the original experiences and their depictions—were treasured
and owned, Frank says, in much the same way that a piece of property
is owned and can be passed on to a relative.
The style and themes of the drawings changed as the old ways
of life disappeared—and with them, Frank says, the traditional
avenues of male accomplishment. Scenes began more often to depict
hunting, ceremonies, courtship and the minutiae of daily doings.
Candace Greene, an ethnologist with the Smithsonian Institution’s
National Museum of Natural History, has been studying Plains Indian
ledgers for more than 25 years. She notes that the range of themes
extended beyond warfare in part because the ledgers were a more
private medium. What’s on buffalo hide—on a robe, say,
and quite literally on your back—your mom-in-law might see,
Greene points out. But you could show your book to whomever you
chose.
“A lot of behavior that previously had been taking place only in
verbal ways took pictorial expression,” Greene says. “Success
with the ladies” crops up as a theme. And jokes, both sly
and slapstick, make a
frequent appearance.
Whether driven solely by the tragic settlement of tribes in reservations
or in combination with the relative privacy afforded by books,
the expanded repertoire of ledger art makes for a remarkable
testament.
The drawings hold a tremendous amount of information, Frank
says. They are rich with detail (sometimes down to the make
and model
of U.S. Cavalry guns), which researchers can use to corroborate
or, more critically, disrupt and enlarge the standard Anglo narrative.
Even though some of the drawings were made while the men were
held in prisons or re-education schools and some were produced
with
the explicit intent of trading for money or other necessities,
they were by and large created from within the culture and for
native use. The ledger books recorded history from an Indian
point of view during a time when most Plains peoples were still
not literate.
“We’re often told indigenous people don’t have their
own history—but [in the ledgers] that’s obviously not
true,” Frank says. “Ledger art tells you very clearly:
It’s always been more complicated.”
The ledgers also powerfully contradict stereotypes. The humor
evident in some of the drawings—falling off a horse, for example,
or being shot in a non-heroic place—challenges the image
of the Stoic Indian. As Candace Greene puts it, “Ledger art
is very good at communicating humanity.”
Tom Haukaas, a contemporary Lakota Sioux artist who has been
part of the recent revival in ledger-style drawing, agrees.
There’s
been a longstanding public hunger for the testosterone-driven tale “and
a market for anything that looked of war,” Haukaas says,
and while some of the ledger drawings fit that description, others
plainly do not.
One of the important features of Frank’s ledger work, says
Haukaas, “is that it shows more of a totality—it shows
us as human because it shows more aspects of our lives.”
The PILA Project had its beginnings in the summer of 1994,
when art dealers at a Sotheby’s auction bought the Pamplin
Cheyenne/Arapaho Ledger. Their intention was to resell it piecemeal,
but before
that could happen, Frank arranged for Denver’s Visual
Information, Inc. to professionally scan the 94-page book cover
to cover, free
of charge. Then in October of the same year, another ledger
came on the market—a bound volume of dream drawings,
laid down in the harsh winter of 1880-81 by Black Hawk, chief
medicine man
of the Sioux. Again it appeared the book would be dismantled
and so Frank arranged for it to be digitally preserved.
Both books, however, remained intact. But by scanning and
then placing them online Frank has assured that they will
always
be accessible as complete ledgers, no matter what happens
to them.  PAGE2
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