A collection of never-before-published, nineteenth-century art by two young Native American warriors imprisoned by the Army in 1875, along with seventy others, contains more than fifty full-color pen-and-ink drawings.
A frequent writer on Native American issues, Viola is curator emeritus for the Smithsonian.
Ledger art has traditionally been created by men to recount the lives of male warriors on the Plains. Often, old store, military, bank or municipal "ledger: paper sheets were the only paper available. Those sheets most often were already used ...lines of dates, numbers, information of no interest to the artist. Now we (or I) see it as a secondary memorialization of the time the art was done. So, those used ledger sheets were what got used for a "canvas" when rock walls, caves and the older traditional ways of memorializing events were no longer available to "captive" or reservation natives.
1998 - 132 pages