Centering Native American Belongings in Settler Paintings, c. 1900

In the Early Reservation period of the American West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white settler artists collected Native American Belongings to use as “props” for their paintings. In intermedia translation, materials which many Indigenous epistemologies understand as animate relatives become flattened as “objects” or “artifacts.” In paintings’ circulation in settler spaces, as Nancy Anderson shows, “artifacts” reinforce viewers’ belief in painters’ “accuracy,” “authenticity,” and “documentation” of Native American culture and life in the West.

This frame permits settler painters representational power allowing them to putatively own the Belongings and their meanings. But the Native American Belongings that settler artists acquired do not necessarily acquiesce to appropriation and objectification as relics, artifacts, or props. While Native American Belongings are trafficked by settler paintings, this paper asks, how are the Belongings also traveling through these representations, their epistemologies intact? Looking at paintings by DeCost Smith and Charles Russell, who collected in Lakota and Blackfeet territories, and the extant Belongings they render, this paper explores epistemologies and voices that inhere.

As Chickasaw curator heather ahtone, Narragansett curator Lorén M. Spears, and Karuk scholar Carolyn Smith show, material Belongings inextricably possess community knowledge, pointing to epistemologies fundamentally distinct from settler society. Re-examining settler art through the lenses of Native American art history, Native American and Indigenous studies, and Indigenous knowledge-sharers centers Indigenous perspectives embedded in Belongings and interprets representations of Belongings as a contest of epistemologies and of multiple makers, opening rhizomatic new stories about taking and making.