Read an Excerpt
Earth Songs, Moon Dreams
Paintings by American Indian Women
By Patricia Janis Broder St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1999 Patricia Janis Broder
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-5972-2
CHAPTER 1
ANNIE LITTLE WARRIOR
Plains
CEREMONY
Annie Little Warrior's Ceremony is one of the earliest images of Plains Indian life by an American Indian woman. This painting depicts a ritual dance in a Plains Indian camp. Only women are in attendance at this ceremony. Although the participants in the ritual — the dancers and the drummers — all are men, over forty women form a large square around the dancers. Annie Little Warrior must have documented a ceremony attended by the Women's Society. In all four directions, at the outer edges of the painting are tipis. Women in ceremonial long dresses and shawls stand by the tipis and walk toward the ceremonial square. A large American flag is planted inside the square proclaiming that the scene is set in the postcontact world that Annie Little Warrior knew.
In the center of the square, a chorus of four male singers sits around a large drum which they play to accompany their singing. Two of the dancers carry tomahawks, while another carries a war club and the fourth rolls a hoop. As the war club, the tomahawk, and hoop (the hoop is the symbol of the universe and God's eternal rule) are carried by performers in the War Dance, it is probable that Annie Little Warrior has painted a War Dance in which the women are praying for the success of men in warfare. It also is probable that this is a Cheyenne ceremony, for only Cheyenne men wore headdresses with the feathers extending straight upward.
Annie Little Warrior's work shows considerable sophistication, as she is able to portray the women from all four sides and the men dancing and seated around the drum. All figures are identical in size, and although their costumes are unique, the figures have no individual features. It is clear that Annie Little Warrior wished to document the daily and ritual life of her people in a world that was rapidly changing. Her work includes scenes of both contemporary life and past days — social gatherings, a feast, a buffalo hunt, and women leading horses with a travois. Historically in Plains Indian society, women's painting was limited to decorative design; here is a clear break with tradition.
ANNIE LITTLE WARRIOR
Plains
TRAVOIS — MOVING CAMP
Annie Little Warrior chose as the subject of this painting the movement of a Plains Indian camp using travois. Centuries after the Spanish introduced the wheel to the Plains Indians, these migratory people continued to use the travois as their principal means of transporting possessions from one location to another.
The travois is an A-shaped rack, built of two poles far enough apart at one end to attach an animal that would drag across the ground whatever was attached to the opposite end. Before the Spanish introduced the horse to the American Indian, the narrow end of the travois was attached to the collar of a dog. As dogs could drag only about fifty pounds, the adoption of horsepower gave the Plains Indians the ability to haul larger loads great distances. Thanks to the horse-drawn travois, the Plains Indians could have larger tipis, as tipi poles could be lashed together to form the frame of a travois.
In Plains Indian society, it was the responsibility of the women to move the children and all family possessions. It was women's job to bundle and unpack all personal belongings, plus tipi covers and buffalo robes, as well as to lash and unlash the travois. Women had the ability to take down and put up tipis in only a few minutes.
Annie Little Warrior has painted a procession of six horse-drawn travois. Although all of the horses are saddled, four of the six women are on foot leading the horses. One woman rides a horse and uses a lead line to guide an attached horse that is dragging a travois. Her daughter is seated on the travois horse. Another woman rides a travois-hauling horse, her daughter walking behind. The rider's legs are close to the horse's side so that the travois poles cover her legs. In the top left of Little Warrior's work, a brave and his son, followed by a dog, lead the procession, while two braves leaning on staffs follow behind. Although the braves wear the traditional Plains Indian dress, including feathers atop their heads, one carries a gun, which underlines this European contribution to the Plains Indian world.
The women wear traditional long dresses and moccasins and their hair is in braids. All of Little Warrior's images are two-dimensional and the figures all are in profile. Following the tradition of Plains Indian skin painting, there is neither background, foreground, nor landscape elements. There is no indication of location, season, or time of day. Among the Indian figures, men are the largest and children the smallest. Little Warrior carefully selected the poses of women and the horses, and she suggested motion by the positions of their feet.
Annie Little Warrior's name is at the bottom of the painting, written in a script that suggests someone with more sophisticated writing skills may have added the name. The acknowledgment of an individual artist is a tradition brought to the Indian world by the white man. In traditional Plains Indian society, those with artistic skills drew images or painted as an anonymous contribution to their people. The Plains Indian women traditionally used their skill to decorate domestic and ritual objects; there is no record of an individual recognized as an artist. As the signature is a prominent part of Little Warrior's artistic creation, it is evident that her identity as an artist had considerable significance. The signature reads: "Miss Annie Little Warrior," a European classification of this Plains Indian woman.
CARRIE CORNPLANTER
Seneca
INDIAN WOMAN POUNDING CORN
The watercolor paintings of Carrie Cornplanter are among the earliest known representations of traditional Native American life by an American Indian woman. Cornplanter, a young Seneca woman, was born in the 1880s. She is the older sister of Jesse Cornplanter, a Seneca author, illustrator, and painter as well as an important member of the Seneca community. He was chief of New Town, a village of the Snipe Clan; Ritual Chief of the Longhouse; and head singer of such major Seneca ceremonials as the Great Feather Dance. Carrie and Jesse were the last descendants of the Seneca leader, Cornplanter, who achieved renown in the days of George Washington.
In the traditional Seneca world, women occupied positions of great importance. Women owned the houses, fields, and crops, and all property, titles, and rights passed through the female line. All clans were divided into lineages. A lineage was a core of mothers, sisters, and daughters who comprised a "Longhouse family." Each Seneca village was a cluster of one hundred Longhouses. A matron, an older woman admired for her qualities of leadership and diplomacy, was the head of each lineage. Men held all official positions in the tribal government. Although they were the tribal chiefs, or sachems, women maintained control of the government because the matrons of each lineage chose the sachems, evaluated them, and, on occasion, warned the sachems of their errors. If necessary, the matrons asked the council to dispose of an unsatisfactory sachem, and when a sachem died, they selected his successor.
Among the primary duties of the matron was the coordination of the economic activities of the female members of her clan. Matrons organized and directed the women's work in the field and determined their contribution of food to public festivals and to charity. Traditionally, Seneca men cleared the land, while women prepared the land for planting, planted, cared for, then harvested the crops, and cooked the harvested food. Women also controlled the distribution of cooked food. Men never asked for food. When a husband returned home, regardless of the hour, his wife set a predetermined meal in front of him.
In precontact days, men provided food from the hunt and fishing, while women cultivated the fields and provided food collected in the wild. However, during times of war and during the period following white settlement in Seneca territory, the Seneca men concentrated on trapping and bartering beaver pelts for guns and ammunition. This change resulted in a shortage of game, which upset the balance of food production. Women, therefore, had to increase food cultivation.
The primary crops cultivated by Seneca women were corn or maize, squash, and beans. In years of prosperity, surplus crops were divided and stored for future use. Cornmeal was the primary ingredient of most Seneca cooking. Women's important contribution in providing food for the Seneca people was ritualized and celebrated in song and dance at the Green Corn and the Harvest Festivals.
In Indian Woman Pounding Corn, Carrie Cornplanter has painted an all-important chore of Seneca women, the production of cornmeal. Cornplanter depicts the traditional method of using a dumbbell-shaped pestle and a vertical log mortar to pound the corn. Cornplanter's woman stands next to a fire over which a pot is suspended. Although this work is not dated, Carrie Cornplanter completed the majority of her paintings in the period from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth century.
Cornplanter's painting gives the viewer a glimpse of her Seneca community, the Cattaraugus Reservation. On the left, in the distance, is a Seneca log house and a woman pounding corn in front of the house. Over the horizon a coming storm gives the women a sense of urgency in completing their work. Cornplanter included a Seneca brave striding into the area where a woman is working. It is interesting to compare his naked-to-the-waist dress, which includes feathers in his hair, with the woman's Victorian costume, a dark ankle-length dress with long sleeves and a ribbon tying back her hair.
LOIS SMOKY (1907–1981)
KIOWA FAMILY
Lois Smoky was truly a pioneer American painter. One of the first Indian women to participate in a formal art education program, Smoky was one of five Kiowa artists featured in Kiowa Indian Art, the first book on American Indian painting. She also was a participant in the first nationwide museum tour focused on American Indian paintings. Born in 1907 near Anadarko, Oklahoma, Smoky was the descendant of generations of hunters and craft artists. She was the grand-niece of A'paitan, the last chief of the Kiowas.
Smoky was first encouraged to paint by Susie Peters, field matron at the St. Michael's Mission School in Anadarko. Peters, who taught many young Kiowa art students, believed that her protégés deserved training that she couldn't provide. She showed examples of their work to Oscar Jacobson, director of the art department at the University of Oklahoma, who recognized talent in Lois Smoky's work, as well as in the work of four other young Kiowas, Stephen Mopope, Monroe Tsa Toke, Jack Hokeah, and Spencer Asah. In 1923 he arranged for Edith Mahier, a professor of art at the University of Oklahoma, to give them instruction and criticism. Following Jacobson's instructions, Mahier encouraged them to "use no models, but draw from the memory of what they have seen and heard at the firesides and in the tipis of their camps." The five young Kiowa artists lived in a large house near the university, which Smoky's parents rented for them.
In 1928 the paintings of the Five Kiowas won acclaim as the most interesting part of the American entry at the International Congress of Folk Arts in Prague. The following year, Jacobson authored a book on Kiowa painting, Kiowa Indian Art. This book, which included a folio of thirty-two full-sized color reproductions of paintings by the Five Kiowas, was published by C. Szwedzicki in Nice, France. Following publication of his book, Jacobson arranged for the exhibition and sale of paintings by the Five Kiowas in art museums across the United States and in Hawaii. In 1950, Jacobson wrote a second book and folio of American Indian paintings, American Indian Painters, which included the work of major American Indian painters from across the United States. Lois Smoky's painting Mother and Babe was included in the 1950 edition. In his preface to this book, Jacobson wrote of the Five Kiowas:
The truly modern phase of modern Indian art began with the Kiowas, who are Plains Indians. They were the first to be able to develop their art without losing the essential elements of their tradition. They enriched it with a personal expression; they breathed life into the rigid and impassive figures of the past. They possess an extraordinary natural flair for color and for composition.
LOIS SMOKY (1907 – 1981)
Bou-ge-tah (Coming of the Dawn) • Kiowa
LULLABY
Traditionally, in the Plains Indian world, narrative painting was the domain of men, who painted figurative images on tipis and on skins which served as historical narratives, calendars, and winter counts. Women painted symbolic designs on crafts and clothing. For centuries craft arts and clothing were the domain of the Kiowa female. Lois Smoky was the first Kiowa woman to cross this historical barrier and follow a path of individual creativity. She again broke with tradition by becoming a participant in the Jacobson group of Five Kiowas. She was the first Plains Indian woman to work as a professional painter, exhibiting and selling her work at museums and local shops.
From the start, her male colleagues did not accept Smoky. Jacobson recalls:
While the first five Kiowas were in the university, there was noticeably, among the men, a certain resentment toward Lois for participating in such an unlady-like activity. The resentment found expression in several, small, unkind annoyances to her, even to the extent of mutilating her work.
Smoky worked with the Kiowa group for only a year before yielding to cultural and personal pressures. Her place in the Kiowa group was taken by James Auchiah. Smoky married, raised a family, and stopped painting.
During Smoky's lifetime, she completely lost her identity as a painter. For decades, the group known as the Five Kiowas was thought to be five men. Smoky was indeed one of the original Five Kiowas as documented by Jacobson. It is her work, not that of James Auchiah, that was published in Jacobson's 1929 volume, Kiowa Indian Art. In recent years, the work of Smoky has been rediscovered and rightfully appreciated. She now has taken her rightful place as the pioneer mother of Plains Indian painting.
During her brief artistic career, Smoky's favorite subject was the Kiowa mother and child. She came from a family in which generations of women had been celebrated for their skill in beadwork. In Lullaby, Smoky painted detailed images of the beautiful Kiowa beadwork of the cradleboard, the moccasins, and the mother's traditional two-piece buckskin dress, which is also distinguished by elegant beadwork.
TONITA PEÑA (1893 – 1949)
Quah Ah (White Coral Beads) • San Ildefonso Pueblo
PREPARING BLUE CORN, ca. 1930
Tonita Peña was the first woman from a Rio Grande Pueblo to paint the daily and ceremonial life of her people. Born in 1893 at the San Ildefonso Pueblo to Vigil and Navidad Peña, she was baptized Maria Antonia Peña. The third of four children, young Tonita attended the San Ildefonso Day School from 1899 until 1905. There, at age eight, she first was introduced to painting when an innovative teacher, Esther B. Hoyt, gave her students wax crayons and suggested that, since they all participated in Pueblo dances, they should think of dancing and recreate their thoughts in color.
One day a visitor to the day school, Dr. Edgar Hewett, a professor of archeology at the University of New Mexico and director of the School of American Research in Santa Fe, admired the crayon drawings of young Tonita Peña, furnished her with watercolors and papers, and encouraged her to paint the events of daily life at the pueblo. Her first watercolor images included women making and painting pottery, winnowing wheat, grinding corn, and dancing on feast days. Years later, Tonita Peña told artist Pablita Velarde: "I drew little figures and he liked them so I drew lots of them. I painted pictures of everything I could think of. I don't know what he did with them, but anyway he paid me money for them and kept me in paint and paper."
When Tonita was twelve years old, following the deaths of her mother and sister, her father decided to send her to Cochiti to live with her aunt and uncle, Martina Vigil and Florentino Montoya. In 1895 Maria Martinez, the renowned San Ildefonso potter, praised Martina Vigil, calling her the finest of present-day potters. Florentino Montoya won fame as a painter of pottery. The move was difficult for Tonita because she was away from her home and lifelong friends and because the people at Cochiti spoke Keres, a language different from the Tewa language spoken at the San Ildefonso Pueblo. As she adapted to life at a pueblo with new customs and rituals, she learned pottery making from her aunt, pottery painting from her uncle, and she continued to find joy in narrative painting. Many years later, her son, the artist Joe Herrera, remembered his mother telling him that whenever she included images of pottery in her paintings, they were copies of pots she had made and decorated.
For a short time, Tonita Peña attended St. Catherine's Indian School in Santa Fe; however, in 1908, when she was fourteen years old, her aunt and uncle called her back to Cochiti, for they had arranged for her to marry Juan Rosario Chavez. A year later she gave birth to a daughter and three years later a son. That year, her husband died and Tonita returned to her studies at St. Catherine's. The following year, however, her aunt and uncle arranged for Tonita to marry Filipe Herrera, and in 1920, the couple had a son, Joe. Later that same year, Filipe was killed in an accident at the iron mines where he worked.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Earth Songs, Moon Dreams by Patricia Janis Broder. Copyright © 1999 Patricia Janis Broder. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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