Kama-Kapuska! Making Marks in Indian Country, 1833-34

Ronan, Kristine K.; McLoed, Allan

Publication

Kama-Kapuska! Making Marks in Indian Country, 1833-34

Ronan, Kristine K.; McLoed, Allan

Publisher

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide

Date

2019

Abstract

Over the winter of 1833�34, the Numak'aki (Mandan) war chief Mat�-T�pe (ca. 1784�1837) visited the makeshift painting studio kept by Swiss painter Karl Bodmer (1809�93) at Fort Clark, a trading post in what is now North Dakota, a total of fifty-five times. These visits illustrate the multiple activities of Bodmer�s studio over these snowbound months: hosting sitters, commissioning Native artists, and serving as a gallery where Native visitors viewed finished works and a workshop where local warriors completed their own projects. This project argues that Bodmer�s shared studio space and its doings are an extension of the Middle Ground, or the cultural arena co-created by Native and non-Native peoples on the French frontier, as defined by historian Richard White. The Numak'aki name that local warriors bestowed upon Bodmer (Kap�ska, 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 distinct cultural systems within the Fort Clark studio. Examining the portraits and exchanges of Mat�-T�pe�s activities in the Fort Clark studio through a framework of co-creation expands interpretations beyond the iconographic, ethnographic, and ideological readings that dominate previous art historical accounts. This argument and application are modeled in the project�s digital platform itself, which interweaves the project�s archives of text and image in both linear (Western) and rhizomatic (non-Western) structures simultaneously. The scholarly essay of Part 1 is supported by the textual descriptions of day-to-day life and exchanged objects as recorded by Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied (Part 2), a sample exhibition of what Mat�-T�pe and others may have viewed when they visited the Fort Clark studio (Part 3), and a presentation of Numak'aki themes and persons (Part 4). The latter re-orders the evidence of Part 2 through Native concepts, practices, and historical figures.