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Káma-Kapúska! Making Marks in Indian Country, 1833–34

Karl Bodmer, Kiäsax, Piegan Blackfeet Man, 1833.

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A Sample Exhibition
On November 9, 1833, only one day after Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied and artist Karl Bodmer had arrived at Fort Clark, Numak'aki numakshí Mató-Tópe and other Awatíkihu leaders spent time looking at portraits     that Bodmer had completed elsewhere in the trio’s travels. Wied-Neuwied noted that Mató-Tópe recognized several of the depicted individuals. A viewing was then repeated on November 11. In addition, numerous subsequent studio visits by Awatíkihu residents and their friends involved “watching Mr. Bodmer” or admiring portraits, any of which may have offered an opportunity to see previously painted works.[1]
These viewings meant that Bodmer’s portraits performed important work among Native audiences before they ever left Indian country with the artist. To provide a peek into this work, this sample exhibition presents a small selection of eight portraits that Fort Clark guests may have seen. These eight are drawn from the surviving portraits painted by Bodmer on the journey to or at the American Fur Company (AFC) Forts Union and McKenzie, the next stops upstream from Fort Clark and possible destinations for Awatíkihu residents via AFC steamboats. Due to the movement of Native peoples among AFC posts, these eight were potentially recognizable to viewers at Fort Clark. Kiäsax, for instance, had hitched along on Bodmer and Wied-Neuwied’s trip upstream and had posed for his portrait in late June 1833.[2] A Pikuni (Piegan) man who had married into the Minitari community, Kiäsax would have been recognized     by the Fort Clark visitors in November 1833. Kiäsax in turn would have potentially recognized other sitters from Fort Union. The same was true for any other Awatíkihu leader who had traveled to Fort Union or dealt with the Fort Union Native communities for trade or hunting.
Painted at the same time was another widely known leader, Tasságä, a man who had boarded when the steamboat had stopped for a group of six Assiniboin warriors who had appeared on the bank of the Missouri.[3] Wied-Neuwied notes that “all who had been at the Yellowstone knew him,” and he joined the crew and passengers for full passage to Fort Union. The group had been hunting in the region for quite some time, and roaming hunting parties like this meant warriors of distant Native communities may have encountered each other on a semi-regular basis as food sources became more difficult to find.[4]
Once at Fort Union, Bodmer and Wied-Neuwied persuaded a variety of Native men to pose for them, although a number refused. The fort’s interpreter specifically introduced Wied-Neuwied to Noapéh (Troop of Soldiers), who posed for Bodmer on June 28, 1833.[5] Noapéh seems to have been a very popular figure at Fort Union, as the sitting was interrupted multiple times by his wife, child, and friends who came to call Noapéh away to other duties. On the center of Noapéh’s hide shirt is a large quilled rosette, whose design is specific to Assiniboin communities; the same also identifies the community of the anonymous warrior painted by Bodmer the next day.[6]
Pitätapiú, a very young Assiniboin warrior, was depicted     with a bow-lance and painted shield, items that would have told Awatíkihu viewers that the young man had both “found his god” and been elected within his óhate (society) to ka-ka (keeper) status.[7] Pitätapiú explained to Wied-Neuwied that the white package fastened to his shield served as his hó'pini (“to be holy”), and it is possible that Awatíkihu viewers would have recognized the strength and type of hó'pini that protected the young man on the battlefield.[8]
The last three portraits included here were all painted at Fort McKenzie, which Wied-Neuwied and Bodmer reached on August 9, 1833. A group of chiefs formed a rough reception party upon the steamboat’s landing, and three of them later posed for Bodmer: the Pikuni (Piegan) chiefs Nínock-Kïäiu (Bear Chief) and Mehkskéhme-Sukáhs (Red Bull), and the Kutenai chief Hómach-Ksáchkum (Kutenai Old Man).[9] The reputation of Mehkskéhme-Sukáhs as a troublemaker who was not well liked by either fort personnel or the fort’s associated Native communities had preceded the portrait making; it is possible that such reputations carried across the entire chain of AFC portages, perhaps making some Native leaders in distant locales known by deed before they were seen via portrait.
Fort Clark as a Gallery
It was only a day after the Europeans had arrived at Fort Clark and settled into their quarters that Mató-Tópe and a delegation of other Native leaders arrived to look at Bodmer’s portfolio of portraits, as discussed at the outset of this essay. As recorded by Wied-Neuwied, Mató-Tópe “recognized several of [the sitters].” Mató-Tópe and Péhriska-Rúhpa then arrived two days later and again spent time viewing Bodmer’s extraordinarily detailed works.
It is important to unpack Mató-Tópe’s act of recognizing portrait sitters, long before the paintings left Indian country, because such recognition did not necessarily occur through Bodmer’s skilled hand at Western-style mimesis. The portrait of Kiäsax, for instance, featured a familiar resident of the Awatíkihu (fig. 13). A Pikuni (Piegan) warrior, he had married a Minitari woman, and the couple lived in the Third, Fourth, or Fifth Village. Bodmer had painted Kiäsax aboard their steamer while headed northward to Fort Union in June 1833 (the summer before the Europeans were stranded at Fort Clark on their return south), and Kiäsax seems to have responded to the session by gathering plants for Wied-Neuwied’s botanical collections.‍[46]
Later, in the close quarters at Fort Clark, Mató-Tópe’s recognition of Kiäsax would have come through likeness, yes, but also through various material culture elements evident in the portrait. Native viewers would have recognized the metal cross and Diné (Navajo) First Phase chief’s blanket as trade items from distant locales. They also would have recognized that the young man had taken on the Minitari practice of dividing his long hair into multiple clay-smeared twists that were then gathered in the back, a tribally specific outward sign that, in the case of Kiäsax, would have potentially declared his military allegiance to his adopted kin and tribe.
Likeness-as-mimesis has been given extraordinary power in contemporaneous sources on 1830s portraiture in Indian country, whether in accounts of the stylistic change among Plains artists after Bodmer’s visit, the advertising language Wied-Neuwied employed once back in Europe to describe Bodmer’s work, or the letters home from George Catlin, who claimed for himself a great “magic” through his ability to capture his Native sitters’ likenesses.‍[47] These interpretations all rely on a Western notion of likeness-as-mimesis: the closer in likeness that a portrait is, the more skilled the artist and the more admired the work. Yet Native recognition of the “magic” in Indian country portraits did not come through an artist’s ability to convey likeness but through the subject’s presence-in-absence.‍[48] In Native cultures, to be in the presence of an object made by Grandfather is to be in the presence of Grandfather himself.‍[49] Through presence-in-absence, an object becomes the associated person, extending the referenced person across space and time.‍[50]
A host of Native practices operated within this framework. The sacred bundle histories kept by various Plains tribes, for instance, were bundles of presence-in-absence, whereby each contained element—a bone, a feather, a skull, and so on—served as the trace of the person, past or present, who had contributed that element.‍[51] When a ka-ka, or keeper, narrated a bundle in their keeping, they then recounted each of these persons and the connected moment that had motivated the contribution; when they prayed to the bundle, they spoke to all those connected with it, asking them to intervene or act.‍[52] Each element of the bundle became a presence, even in the original contributor’s absence, and that presence was believed to hold the power to act. Such presence-in-absence was carried by the physical traces or remainders of the referenced person.
A portrait for which an individual sat could carry these traces and their presence-in-absence as much as the bundles and Native-made objects they may have made in their lifetime. When Mató-Tópe, Péhriska-Rúhpa, and other Native leaders crowded into the Fort Clark quarters in early November 1833, then, it is entirely possible that the men thought of Bodmer’s array of portraits along the lines of a bundle—not one that held spiritual significance or tribal histories, the way local ones did, but one that carried the presence-in-absence of warriors like Kiäsax to other Native villages and fur trade forts as the Europeans traveled, eventually taking them “to Europe.”‍[53] Such a notion would not value a portrait along the lines of mimetic likeness, but on whether or not the portrait effectively carried their trace, their presence-in-absence, across both space and time. For Awatíkihu warriors in particular, the notion of sending one’s presence-in-absence to distant locales overlapped with local ideas of leadership and rights, as detailed in the next section. These ideas suggest that sitters in Bodmer’s studio used Western-style portraiture as a means for mobile political claims on their own behalf—a major motivation for pursuing the artistic co-creation of portraiture.