This diary briefly provides some context into the history of non-Indian depictions of Indians. In addition, it includes the story of Mary Edmonia Lewis, the first American Indian and first African-American woman sculptor to achieve fame.
The American Indian's portrayal in media claims descent from two archetypes that are centuries old: the barbarous, bloodthirsty heathens from Puritan account, (which never seems to depict Puritans themselves as blood-lusting) and the sentimental, noble savages found in Romanticism and similar cultural movements. Sometimes, both co-exist in the same product (The Last of the Mohicans).
The Indian Problem was raised and answered not only by the Washington political establishment but also by actors on the frontier. Missionaries, settlers, governors and the military all shaped the course of Indian policy. The Problem itself is, 'extermination, or assimilation?', and the answer varied with the attitudes of the day, and serves as an underlying theme in American art and writing.
With African-Americans, American Indian peoples were usually perceived as the opposite of (white) American people in about every way, and that meant that their fate was opposed to American progress: what we call Manifest Destiny. Paul Michael Rogin, who taught political science at UC Berkeley until his death in 2001, discussed this dilemma, also noting the shared destinies of African-Americans and American Indians in the middle of the 19th century:
The Compromise of 1850, a last effort to preserve the Jacksonian political system, admitted California to the Union as a free state. "expanding the area of freedom," in Jackson's term for taking Mexican territory, failed to benefit not only the slaves in Texas and the fugitive slaves in the North, but western Indians as well. California Governor Peter H. Burnett predicted, in his 1851 annual message, "That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct"... Like the transportation and hyperexploitation of slave labor in the new world, which killed millions upon millions o fIndians and blacks, the seizure of Indian land belongs to the history of slave and capitalist production.
After 1850, abolitionists were making huge leaps forward in how the idea of America and its culture related to African-Americans. What's usually forgotten is that abolitionists were also some of the first real advocates for American Indian rights. Ralph Waldo Emerson, himself somewhat ethnocentric, nonetheless created a litany of "American attributes" containing "Negroes" and "Indians", one of the first inclusions of racial minorities in American identity. The consequences of extermination policy were becoming clearer, with massacres and the wholesale removal of southeastern tribes, decimated on the Trail of Tears, with American Indians already wiped out from most of the northeast. Concurrently, a sort of nostalgia and longing for a less industrialized America took root. Radicals took advantage of this unease to create sympathetic portrayal of minorities in art.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had already created Hiawatha, the ultimate archetypal Indian. After the civil war, Mary Edmonia Lewis, with a politically informed vision, fostered a renewed romanticism towards the Indian, as a reaction to brutality on the plains:
From Wikipedia:
Mary Edmonia Lewis (ca. July 4, 1845–September 17, 1907) was the first African American and Native American woman to gain fame and recognition as a sculptor in the international fine arts world. She was of African American, Haitian and Ojibwe descent.
Educated at Oberlin College, Mary Edmonia Lewis found recognition as an artist before the end of the Civil War. A 20-year old, female, educated, Black and Indian artist in a white, male-oriented intellectual world, Lewis enthralled high-brow America. Abolitionists praised her 1864, 24-inch bust of Union hero Robert Gould Shaw. The choice of Shaw befit the political mood: Shaw had died the year prior while leading the all-black 54th regiment. Lewis' star ascended precipitously.
Abolitionist Lydia Mary Child described Lewis as exceptionally strong-willed, writing in a letter that, "What she [Lewis] undertakes to do... she will do, though she has to cut through the heart of a mountain with a pen knife." Child proved a complex figure in Lewis' life, both mentoring Lewis, promoting her, and controlling the agency of the artist as her patron. Child disapproved of Lewis' Forever Free, which had been sent over from Italy where Lewis studied at the time. It was Elizabeth Peabody who intervened, saving Lewis' career from possible disaster. Peabody felt an imperative to change history and promote "colored" artists. But Child disagreed with the pace and quality of Lewis' work, and Lewis' fierce ambition, instead urging Lewis to focus on her study of European classics. She wrote, "I should praise a really good work all the more gladly because it was done by a colored artist; but to my mind, Art is sacred... and I do not think it either wise or kind to encourage a girl, merely because she is colored, to spoil good marble by making it into poor statues." Child noticed momentous pressure among the abolitionists--noblesse oblige.
Lewis continued to rise in prominence leading up to the 1876 Centennial Exposition, where her art was featured. In 1877, she painted President Grant's portrait. Within ten years her work fell from favor, along with Lewis' neoclassical genre, and Lewis became forgotten by the public through her death in 1907.
The theme of Indians disappearing, that began with Longfellow, picked up frequency in the middle 19th century. From Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History's Black and Indian Subject, by Kirstin Pai Buick:
Tompkins H. Matteson's The Last of the Race (1847), for example, shows a small group of Native Americans literally at the edge of their world, where land meets water, with no options except resignation to their fate. In sculpture, Ferdinand Pettrich's, The Dying Tecumseh (1856) and Erastus Dow Palmer's Indian Girl, or The Dawn of Christianity 1856 also reinforce the cultural ideology and tradition of the vanishing American, one disappearing through death and the other through conversion to hristianity. Alternatively, when not resigned to their fate, Native Americans were depicted as impediments to civilizations. In works such as John Mix Stanley's Osage Scalp Dance (1845), Indians are depicted as murderous barbarians, terrorizing a pioneer mother dressed in white and her half-naked child. Such images of Indians share much in common with Longfellow's portrayal of them in Miles Standish.
Lewis built on the narratives of Longfellow and created a very popular number of Hiawatha sculptures, including "at least four versions of The Marriage of Hiawatha," one of which is now owned by Bill Cosby. There were subtle differences between pieces.
Indian women at this time are depicted as racially ambiguous, and posed and dressed in a way that reflects both the noble savage ideal and the standards of modesty in Western society:
The Marriage that is in the Evans collection, dated to about 1868, shares with its Cosby Marriage counterpart a number of similarities -- Minnehaha's left arm crosses in front of her body and supports a drage of fabric from her cloak; a geometric design boarders the material of her skirt; her skirt discreetly covers her knees in both versions; and the top of Hiawatha's togalike garment is bunched over his belt. Furthermore, Minnehaha's face in the earliest Marriage is not distinguishable as Native American and thus matches the faces of Minnehaha in the extant examples of the Wooing and the ethnographically indeterminate faces of Native American women as represented by artists such as Erastus Dow Palmer in Indian Girl, or The Dawn of Christianity and Hiram Powers in The Last of the Tribes
Buick explains that, despite the differences in the series, "[e]ach rendering of The Marriage of Hiawatha provides a perfect visual accompaniment to the [drum-rhythm] verses of the narrative poem."
"From the wigwam he departed,
Leading with him Laughing Water;
Hand in hand they went together,
Through the woodland and the meadow,
Left the old man standing lonely
At the doorway of his wigwam."
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha
Besides Mary Edmonia Lewis, a star-studded list of abolitionists branched into art, writing and activism to advocate for the rapidly dwindling Indian peoples of the west.
It wasn't until after the Civil War that the golden age for Hiawatha interpretations began; it lasted from 1865-1875 and was the age in which Edmonia Lewis worked. Lewis, together with other artists, resurrected Longfellow at a time of increased activism for some kind of cultural and political resolution to the "Indian Problem." In postbellum America, those activists such as Lydia Maria Child, William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, and Wendel Phillips (all supporters and patrons of Lewis), who had temporarily suspended their efforts on behalf of Native Americans during the war, turned their attention once more to the issue. Formerly the mouthpiece for abolitionism, the National Anti-Slavery Standard was now geared toward the struggle for Native Ameircan rights, specifically the mistreatment of the Western Plains Indians under ruthless white settlers, territorial governors, Indian agents, and the military...
Ultimately, these earlier advocacy efforts did not surpass popular opinion, and failed.
In [an] article, Phillips noted three impediments to real reform: popular indifference, the "selfish greed and bloodthirstiness" of white men on the frontier, and political intrigue. He warned, "We shall never be able to be just to other races, or reap the full benefit of their neighborhood till we 'unlearn contempt.'"
The Arts and Crafts Movement began in the 1860s, lasting 50 years and it changed how Americans thought about functional objects like pottery and baskets. Washoe artist Dar So La Lee was one of those artists whose work became sought after at the turn of the century: her work is pictured here. Atsidii Sání, recognized as the first Navajo silversmith, passed on a new tradition to his four sons. Modoc war-leader Scarfaced Charley carved furniture. Their work and that of other Indian artists, especially traditionalists, did not typically receive high recognition until after the turn of the century, with the artists either dead or in their 80s and 90s.