The ledgers are paradoxically
both too valuable and not valued enough. Made of cheap and fragile
pulp, some books molder in the homes of unsuspecting inheritors.
Some end up in the trash. (The Ewers Ledger, now part of the PILA
database, was fished out of the rubbish bin by the son-in-law of
an aging colonel.) When books do surface, they may be auctioned
off whole for tens of thousands of dollars and end up in private
hands. They could also be dispersed in the art market, where a
single page can go for anything from $1,000 to $20,000. “The project equalizes the playing field,” Haukaas emphasizes. “It
allows people from all over, Indian and non-Indian, access to materials
they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.”
The project also functions as a long-overdue lesson. “Native
art,” Haukaas says, “is pretty foreign in its own country—Americans
know more about Amish quilts than native art.” A scholar and psychiatrist as well as artist, Haukaas also notes
the ledgers “have great currency in Indian life”—serving
not only as a “wellspring” of artistic inspiration, but
also as “a source of cultural renewal.”
Frank estimates there are some 200 ledger books still extant. But
because they are scattered throughout the U.S. in institutional and
private collections, there are numerous logistical and organizational
challenges to their study. The PILA Project aims to overcome these
challenges and provides a simple interactive research platform for
scholars of all stripes—from dedicated academics to drop-in
tourists.
The project currently comprises 419 plates in eight ledger books,
with many more books in various stages of preparation for display.
The latest addition is the Zotom Ledger, which was produced by a
Kiowa at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Fla., during the infamous,
extralegal detention of 72 Plains Indians there from 1874 to 1878.
These drawings are among those to first capture Indian impressions
of Anglo culture.
Recently, the project has partnered with Robert Wright Gallery
of Escondido, Calif., to sell museum-quality reproductions
of the PILA
ledger drawings. The reproductions are printed by the Indian-owned
company, Hi Rez Digital Solutions, an outgrowth of another Frank
project, the Tribal Digital Village. The limited-edition prints
are also being sold on the PILA website and proceeds go back
into the
project. Frank is also collaborating with Lynda Claassen, director of UCSD’s
Mandeville Special Collections, on an application for National Endowment
for the Humanities funding. He hopes to ensure the preservation of
at least 40 more books.
The ledgers are not books in the familiar sense. They are mnemonic
and symbolic devices, Frank says, for orally resuscitating the complex
elements of an event. Entire stories are often encapsulated on a
single page but it is still important to try and keep pages together. “A page taken out of context doesn’t begin to tell you as much
as the whole,” says Greene, of the Smithsonian, because the
ledgers were shared among friends and the interaction of multiple
artists is often represented in a single book. With as many seven
different contributors, the Fort Reno ledger, Frank says, is a good
example of this. Some of the drawings are clearly a kind of snickering
commentary on others. A modern-day analogy to a ledger might be a blog; it has a single
primary author but is often crucially supplemented by community
inputs. Preserving the ledger books is not only about saving
an important
historical voice, but potentially a whole conversation.
Inga Kiderra is with the UCSD University Communications Office
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