Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors

Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors
Author: Denise Low
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 149621515X

Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors presents Dodge City ledger-art images and biographies that document a Native perspective at the cusp of reservation life in 1879.

Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors

Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors
Author: Denise Low
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1496223012

A 2021 Kansas Notable Book Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors presents the images of Native warriors—Wild Hog, Porcupine, and Left Hand, as well as possibly Noisy Walker (or Old Man), Old Crow, Blacksmith, and Tangled Hair—as they awaited probable execution in the Dodge City jail in 1879. When Sheriff Bat Masterson provided drawing materials, the men created war books that were coded to avoid confrontation with white authorities and to narrate survival from a Northern Cheyenne point of view. The prisoners used the ledger-art notebooks to maintain their cultural practices during incarceration and as gifts and for barter with whites in the prison where they struggled to survive. The ledger-art notebooks present evidence of spiritual practice and include images of contemporaneous animals of the region, hunting, courtship, dance, social groupings, and a few war-related scenes. Denise Low and Ramon Powers include biographical materials from the imprisonment and subsequent release, which extend the historical arc of Northern Cheyenne heroes of the Plains Indian Wars into reservation times. Sources include selected ledger drawings, army reports, letters, newspapers, and interviews with some of the Northern Cheyenne men and their descendants. Accounts from a firsthand witness of the drawings and composition of the ledgers themselves give further information about Native perspectives on the conflicted history of the North American West in the nineteenth century and beyond. This group of artists jailed after the tragedy of the Fort Robinson Breakout have left a legacy of courage and powerful art.

Women and Ledger Art

Women and Ledger Art
Author: Richard Pearce
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 125
Release: 2013-06-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0816599823

Ledger art has traditionally been created by men to recount the lives of male warriors on the Plains. During the past forty years, this form has been adopted by Native female artists, who are turning previously untold stories of women’s lifestyles and achievements into ledger-style pictures. While there has been a resurgence of interest in ledger art, little has been written about these women ledger artists. Women and Ledger Art calls attention to the extraordinary achievements of these strong women who have chosen to express themselves through ledger art. Author Richard Pearce foregrounds these contributions by focusing on four contemporary women ledger artists: Sharron Ahtone Harjo (Kiowa), Colleen Cutschall (Oglala Lakota), Linda Haukaas (Sicangu Lakota), and Dolores Purdy Corcoran (Caddo). Pearce spent six years in continual communication with the women, learning about their work and their lives. Women and Ledger Art examines the artists and explains how they expanded Plains Indian history. With 46 stunning images of works in various mediums—from traditional forms on recovered ledger pages to simulated quillwork and sculpture, Women in Ledger Art reflects the new life these women have brought to an important transcultural form of expression.

Ledger Narratives

Ledger Narratives
Author: Michael Paul Jordan
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2017-09-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 080616073X

The largest known collection of ledger art ever acquired by one individual is Mark Lansburgh’s diverse assemblage of more than 140 drawings, now held by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and catalogued in this important book. The Cheyennes, Crows, Kiowas, Lakotas, and other Plains peoples created the genre known as ledger art in the mid-nineteenth century. Before that time, these Indians had chronicled the heroic achievements of their warriors and chiefs on rock, buffalo robes, and tipi covers. As they came into increasing contact with American traders, the artists recorded their experiences in pencil and crayon drawings on paper bound in ledger or account books. The drawings became known as ledger art. This volume presents in full color the Lansburgh collection in its entirety. The drawings are narratives depicting Plains lifeways through Plains eyes. They include landscapes and scenes of battle, hunting, courting, ceremony, incarceration, and travel by foot, horse, train, and boat. Ledger art also served to prompt memories of horse raids and heroic exploits in battle. In addition to showcasing the Lansburgh collection, Ledger Narratives augments the growing literature on this art form by providing seven new essays that suggest some of the many stories the drawings contain and that look at them from innovative perspectives. The authors—scholars of art history, anthropology, history, and Native American studies—touch on such themes as gender, social status, sovereignty, tribal and intertribal politics, economic exchange, and confinement and space in a changing world. The Lansburgh collection includes some of the most arresting examples of Plains Indian art, and the essays in this volume help us see and hear the multiple narratives these drawings relate.

Howling Wolf and the History of Ledger Art

Howling Wolf and the History of Ledger Art
Author: Joyce M. Szabo
Publisher:
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1994
Genre: Art
ISBN:

"Ledger art is the term used to describe Plains Indian drawings and paintings on paper from the second half of the nineteenth century because they were often made on ledger paper readily available from military outposts. Howling Wolf is arguably the single most important ledger artist to emerge from the anonymity of this period. The Southern Cheyenne warrior was not only an extremely skilled artist, he was also the only Plains artist known to have created ledger art in all three phases of the art form: the pre-reservation era, the years from 1875 to 1878 when Indians of the southern Plains were confined at Fort Marion in Florida, and the reservation period. Howling Wolf's drawings while he was a prisoner at Fort Marion and those he made upon returning to the reservation were known, but this book presents the first in-depth examination of his previously undiscovered work from before his incarceration. The author shows ledger art to be a significant record of cultural attitudes of Plains Indian artists at a time when their societies were in great upheaval. She examines the works of art not only as historic documents but as visual statement reflecting the time, place, and society in which they originated. In contrast to the belief that ledger art was a stagnant form adhering to tradition, the author presents ledger art as a dynamic and inventive means of expression."--Book jacket.

Peace and Friendship

Peace and Friendship
Author: Stephen Aron
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2022-07-08
Genre: Indians of North America
ISBN: 019762278X

For over 35 years, the dominant histories of the American West have been narratives of horrific conflicts. As dark and as bloody as western grounds have often been however, there were also important episodes of concord, instances of barriers breached, accords reached, and of people overcoming their differences as opposed to being overcome by them. Peace and Friendship highlights the instances of cohabitation, deepening our understanding of how the West came to be: through colonization, violence, misunderstanding, and, surprisingly, at times, peace.

Indian Wars Everywhere

Indian Wars Everywhere
Author: Stefan Aune
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2023
Genre: America
ISBN: 0520395395

References to the Indian Wars, those conflicts that accompanied US continental expansion, suffuse American military history. From Black Hawk helicopters to the exclamation "Geronimo" used by paratroopers jumping from airplanes, words and images referring to Indians have been indelibly linked with warfare. In Indian Wars Everywhere, Stefan Aune shows how these resonances signal a deeper history, one in which the Indian Wars function as a shadow doctrine that influences US military violence. The United States' formative acts of colonial violence persist in the actions, imaginations, and stories that have facilitated the spread of American empire, from the "savage wars" of the nineteenth century to the counterinsurgencies of the Global War on Terror. Ranging across centuries and continents, Indian Wars Everywhere considers what it means for the conquest of Native peoples to be deemed a success that can be used as a blueprint for modern warfare.

Riding Shotgun

Riding Shotgun
Author: Kathryn Kysar
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2008-10-14
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0873516966

With honesty and extraordinary self-knowledge, 21 accomplished authors illuminate the mother-daughter relationship--intimate, complicated, loving, and flawed--with humor and clarity.

House of Grace, House of Blood

House of Grace, House of Blood
Author: Denise Low
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2024
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0816553580

"An innovative collection of docupoetry, Houses of Grace, House of Blood weaves images and documents from the 1782 massacre of pacifist Delawares in Gnadenhutten, Ohio into poems that explore contradictions: settler colonists and Indigenous perspectives; violence and reconciliation; body and spirit; history and silence. Ultimately, these poems not only reconstruct an important historical event, they put pressure on the archive, asking us to question not only what is remembered, but how history is remembered-and who is forgotten from it"--