Hundreds of Native nations lived in North America, with their own languages, beliefs and arts. In Art History I you met the Ancestral Puebloans and other ancient cultures. This lesson looks at four traditions of the 1800s and early 1900s, a time of great upheaval, when many nations were forced from their lands. Their arts continued, changed and are still made today.
Northwest Coast: totem poles
On the Pacific coast of what is now British Columbia and southeast Alaska, Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka'wakw and other nations carved tall poles from single trunks of red cedar. A pole displays a family's crests (animals and beings linked to its history, such as Raven, Eagle, Bear and Killer Whale), records events, honors the dead or welcomes guests. The carving uses a style that scholars call formline: flowing outlines that swell and narrow, ovoid shapes and U-forms, usually in black and red. Poles are not worshipped; they are more like family histories carved in wood. Cedar decays in the wet climate, so poles are recarved and replaced, as at Sitka National Historical Park in Alaska.
Looking closely: a Navajo chief's blanket
Describe. A wide wool blanket with bold horizontal stripes of black, white and dark blue, and red diamond and half-diamond shapes at the center, the corners and the middle of each side. Analyze. The design is symmetrical in both directions, so when the blanket is wrapped around the shoulders, the diamonds line up across the back and front. The weave is tight and fine. Interpret. Navajo (Diné) weaving was done by women, on upright looms. "Chief's blankets" were costly trade goods, prized by leaders of other nations such as the Ute and the peoples of the Plains, not worn only by Navajo chiefs. Collectors group them into "phases": stripes alone, then stripes with bars, then diamonds, as here.
Key idea
Ledger art and Pueblo pottery
On the Great Plains, artists of the Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa and other nations had long painted brave deeds and important events on buffalo hides. As the buffalo were nearly wiped out and nations were confined to reservations, from about the 1860s artists drew with pencil, crayon and ink on the lined pages of account books, called ledger art: scenes of ceremonies, hunting, courtship and the changing world around them. In the Southwest, Pueblo potters built pots by hand from coils of clay, without a wheel. At San Ildefonso Pueblo, Maria Martinez (1887 to 1980) and her husband Julian developed a black-on-black ware around 1919: polished shiny black and matte black designs on the same pot, made by smothering the fire so smoke turned the clay black.
Common mistake
Why it works
Worked example: Name the tradition
- Lined paper with columns of numbers is an account book, a ledger.
- Plains artists drew on ledger pages from about the 1860s, after buffalo hides grew scarce.
- Riders and ceremonies are typical subjects.
Answer: Plains ledger art.