Buffalo Dancer: The Biography of a 19th-Century Print by Karl Bodmer

FAIN: FEL-257163-18

Kristine Kay Ronan
Unaffiliated independent scholar

Preparation of a book-length study on the history and reception of an image by Karl Bodmer from 1834, Mandan Buffalo Dancer, that influenced American and Native American art.

This project follows Swiss expedition artist Karl Bodmer’s Mandan Buffalo Dancer (1834) across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originally created in Indian Territory in 1834, Bodmer’s portrait of a Numak'aki [Mandan] benók óhate [buffalo bull society] leader subsequently traveled in and out of various historical and cultural contexts, forms, and genres. Treating this image’s journey as a biography, I track “Mandan Buffalo Dancer” across both Native American and non-Native settings to develop the first book-length study that bridges American and Native American art histories and Native studies. Detailing how this story’s various agents used print, I argue that: 1) 19-century systems of racial oppression emerged in part through the very mechanics by which print operates; and 2) Native communities simultaneously formed an alternative history of print that eventually fed Native political activism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Associated Products

“The Five Village Alliance and Numak'aki Buffalo Robes, 1781–1837” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “The Five Village Alliance and Numak'aki Buffalo Robes, 1781–1837”
Author: Kristine K. Ronan
Abstract: This paper presents my findings regarding Numak'aki [Mandan, now Nu'eta] painted buffalo robes from the Five Village Alliance period (1781–1837) along the Upper Missouri River. Closely looking at materials and designs, a pattern emerges that suggests these robes bore cosmological imagery that was then overlaid with political meanings during the Five Village Alliance, a political and military agreement between five earthlodge villages of Numak'aki and neighboring Minitari [Hidatsa] peoples that emerged after the smallpox epidemic of 1781. Utilizing ka-ka (elder) interviews from the 1830s and 1910s as well as historical Nu'eta language, this paper advocates for a “local art history” (Fred Myers, Painting Culture) that seeks to understand historical Native-made objects through the terms and beliefs of a specific local community. In contrast to the dominant iconographic methods of Native art history, where a symbol has a singular interpretation and political possibilities have been ignored, this paper analyzes these robes as creative material records that bear the marks of specific Native historical experience and practice. Created during a period of massive historical change and survival pressures, Numak'aki robes potentially visualized the political and social creativity, flexibility, and adaptation that underwrote Native survivance and the Alliance itself.
Date: 05/17/2018
Conference Name: NAISA Annual Conference 2018

"Painting Print: N. C. Wyeth's Illustrations for The Last of the Mohicans (1919)" (Book Section)
Title: "Painting Print: N. C. Wyeth's Illustrations for The Last of the Mohicans (1919)"
Author: Kristine K. Ronan
Editor: Jessica May and Christine B. Podmaniczky
Abstract: This exhibition catalog contribution uses the endpaper illustration for The Last of the Mohicans as a starting point for an examination of N. C. Wyeth’s depictions of Native Americans. Viewing the work within the context of contemporaries such as Frederic Remington, George de Forest Brush, and E. I. Couse, this essay considers how print media played a role in authenticating a generalized Native culture for American audiences, far removed from the material and social realities of Native communities.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1055263692
Primary URL Description: WorldCat
Secondary URL: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300243680/n-c-wyeth
Secondary URL Description: Yale University Press
Publisher: Yale University Press
Book Title: N. C. Wyeth: New Perspectives
ISBN: 9780300243680

"On the Perils of Being Folk in the Age of Pop" (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: "On the Perils of Being Folk in the Age of Pop"
Abstract: This talk develops the notion of "undisciplining," or the refusal to order or resolve art through the tools of art history (based on the work of Darby English), in relation to largely marginalized artists of color from the 1960s.
Author: Kristine K. Ronan
Date: 02/28/2019
Location: LACMA

"Writing Native/American Art History: A Foray into Undisciplining" (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: "Writing Native/American Art History: A Foray into Undisciplining"
Abstract: This talk tackles the problematics of writing Native American art history as an intellectual discipline, through the work of Luseino artist Fritz Scholder.
Author: Kristine K. Ronan
Date: 03/07/2019
Location: The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA

"Pop Goes the Archive: Revisiting Fritz Scholder's Indian Kitsch (1979)" (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: "Pop Goes the Archive: Revisiting Fritz Scholder's Indian Kitsch (1979)"
Abstract: This talk explores the 1979 Indian Kitsch photo essay of Luseino artist Fritz Scholder, arguing that the project must be understood within the long continuum of Native portraiture across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Author: Kristine K. Ronan
Date: 03/21/2019
Location: University of Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA

Káma-Kapúska! Making Marks in Indian Country, 1833–34 (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Káma-Kapúska! Making Marks in Indian Country, 1833–34
Author: Kristine K. Ronan
Author: Allan McLeod
Abstract: Over the winter of 1833–34, the Numak'aki (Mandan) war chief Mató-Tópe (ca. 1784–1837) visited the painting studio kept by Swiss painter Karl Bodmer (1809–93) at Fort Clark, a trading post in what is now North Dakota, fifty-five times. This project argues that this shared studio space and its activities are an extension of the Middle Ground, or the cultural arena co-created by Native and non-Native peoples on the French frontier. The Numak'aki name that local warriors bestowed upon Bodmer (Kapúska, or “Forcefully Makes Marks”) demonstrates this co-creation by describing the artist’s practices through a Numak'aki lens, rather than a Western one—a testimony to the co-operation of two distinct cultural systems within the Fort Clark studio. The project’s digital platform then models this argument in presenting the project’s related archives through both Native and non-Native frameworks.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn19/ronan-on-kama-kapuska-making-marks-in-indian-country-1833-34
Primary URL Description: Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, vol. 18, no. 2 (Autumn 2019).
Access Model: open access

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