The 19th century was the worst of times for American Indians. Populations were decimated by war, poverty and illness. Tribes that were often traditional enemies were herded together onto reservations where government policies encouraged suppression of their language and culture. Legends and traditions were neglected and forgotten. Artifacts got lost, abandoned, sold. The past was dying along with the people.
But Indian people did survive. Some carried their stories with them for decades while others searched for the remnants and artifacts that would bring those long-ago days to life. Such is the tale behind "From Our Ancestors: Art of the White Clay People," an unusual show of more than 40 American Indian objects -- traditional clothing, moccasins, beadwork, story cloths -- on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts through March 7.
What distinguishes "Ancestors" from more generic exhibitions is that all the objects were made by one small tribe, the A'aninin, and their close neighbors in northern Montana, the Blackfeet, Cree and Nakoda. Some even can be traced to individuals whose lives and stories are still part of tribal lore. That particularity brings a human poignancy to things that might otherwise seem to be just impressive antiques.
"Native American art history is still a very young field and there's so much left to do with it," said MIA associate curator Joe Horse Capture, an A'aninin tribe member who discovered the objects in museum and private collections throughout the United States and Europe.
Included are a rare buffalo-hide shield festooned with eagle feathers, a wool dress decorated with rows of elk teeth, elaborately fringed and beaded shirts, a pair of moccasins covered in colorfully dyed porcupine quills. The star is a wall-sized muslin "war sheet" covered with hand-drawn pictographs recording the battle exploits of 10 warriors, including the curator's great-great-grandfather. On loan from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the war sheet has never been exhibited before. Documents explaining it were only recently found in an archive in Berlin.
Personal pilgrimage
Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the show has been something of a pilgrimage for Horse Capture, who worked on it sporadically for more than five years. The idea originated with his father, George P. Horse Capture, a consultant to the National Museum of the American Indian and the first curator at the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo.
The common name of the A'aninin tribe, Gros Ventre, derives from an ancient misunderstanding. As Joe Horse Capture tells it, the A'aninin were a small but restless tribe that in the late 1700s lived near a waterfall on a river, close to what is now southern Saskatchewan. Their name means "white clay people," and most likely refers to a river mud with which they decorated themselves on ceremonial occasions. In the sign language gestures used with traders, they identified themselves with vertical gestures down their chest to signal that they lived near a waterfall. But traders saw the gesture as meaning "big belly" or "gros ventre," in French. The tribe's home is now the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in north-central Montana.
