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Art and Autoethnography: Frank Day and the Uses


of Anthropology
Rebecca J. Dobkins

aidu Indian artist Frank Day


(1902-1976) was the first major
self-taught California Indian painter to
depict tribal traditions in a Western narrative art
form (Fig. 1). In a 1975 recording Day explained his
motivations: "Once in a while I take up color and
paint a little bit because if I do not do this, all things
will be forgotten."1 In the last two decades of his life,
Day created over 200 paintings and seventy-five
hours of audiotaped narratives interpreting his
people's traditions and oral history. In thefinalyear
of his life, after many years of being the subject of
others' interviews, Day interviewed himself in a series of recordings. He spoke not only of his paintings
and the Maidu traditions they interpreted, but of
his childhood, the homeland of his people, and the
problems California Indian people faced. In one of
the tapes, he explained why he felt his work was important: "One of the reasons I'm doing this, to make
these things clear, [is] that one day it may be used
for a good purpose. It's going to shoot all of your
imaginations of what a California Indian is, because ou don't know it. You don't know much about
'em, unless you are one....The hardest part is how
the suffering is because you'd have to be born like
one."2
The son of a traditional Konkow Maidu leader,
Frank Day grew up speaking his native language
and learning traditional ways from his father in
their village of Berry Creek in north central California. Yet, from childhood, Frank also experienced
the massive changes of his times, beginning with
federal Indian boarding school at age six. After his
father died in 1922, Day left California and spent a
decade or more traveling throughout Indian country to observe, as he put it, "how the other people
lived then and how they lived today."3 Following
this sojourn, he returned to California and, after a
serious farm accident around 1960, began painting,

at first as a means of rehabilitation. Ultimately,


Day took up Maidu subject matter in his art and became involved with a number of anthropologists
who supported and promoted his work. In addition,
Day played an important role in the early 1970s in
the revitalization of central California Indian dance
traditions by teaching a group of younger Indian
people about Maidu dance. Day's students continue
to perform today as the "Maidu Dancers and Traditionalists." By the time of his death in 1976, Day had
won the attention and respect of the state's Native
American art world.
One of the many questions to emerge from the
story of Frank Day and his art is: What was Day's
relationship to and understanding of anthropology?
Day's intertwined history with anthropologists is
striking: he sought them out, and they him. Even
before he began painting, he wrote the Department
of Anthropology at the University of California at
Berkeley in the 1950s, requesting that someone
come to record his stories. Later, around 1960,
armed with a few paintings, he took it upon himself
to visit the California State Indian Museum in Sacramento, where he met anthropologists Francis
(Fritz) Riddell and Norman Wilson who encouraged
him by supplying art materials. And of course, in
the early 1960s there was a crucial relationship
with a Sacramento anthropologist, Donald Jewell,
who helped get Day's painting career off the ground
by promoting his work and by tape-recording Day's
explanations of his work. What was going on here?
What were the dynamics of those relationships, and
to what extent was the artwork influenced byor
resistant tothe outsiders' expectations? This paper explores Day's work as "autoethnography," in
order to better understand not only this individual
artist's impulse to "shoot your imaginations"
through the visual arts but also to suggest ways to
approach the work of other Native American artists

Museum Anthropology 24(2/3):22-29. Copyright 2001 American Anthropological Association.

23

who have similarly been concerned with the


self-documentation of culture in visual form.
I first want to examine the kind of anthropology
that Day, and many other self-taught native artists,
would have come into contact with even as late as
the 1960s. The dominant paradigm in anthropology
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at least among American anthropologists
studying American Indian cultures, was that of salvage ethnography. Its goal was the reconstruction
of a pre-contact "ethnographic present," salvaged
from the memories of individual informants. Anthropologists fanned out across North America with
the aim of finding those informants who could remember the days before the arrival of the white
man. Informants, who were selected in part for the
perceived authenticity of their traditional cultural
knowledge, worked with anthropologists to create a
snapshot of the past. The anthropologist transformed this oral snapshot into written form, the ethnography. Ethnographies were usually composed
in the present tense, effectively suggesting that native cultures were timeless and ahistorical.
In recent decades, cultural anthropology has
subjected itself to much-needed self-scrutiny and
these key constructs of anthropological representationthe salvage paradigm, the ethnographic present, and the idea of authenticityhave been
criticized for many reasons (e.g., Clifford 1988, Fabian 1983, Rosaldo 1989). These constructs contributed to the representation of Native American
cultures as timeless and static yet as being somehow inauthentic when native people borrowed
from, or improvised upon, aspects of the non-native
cultures enveloping them. Further, both the methodology and mode of representation employed by
salvage ethnographers ignored the power dynamics
between native and non-native groups.
Today, anthropology looks at culture as a process, not as a static, bounded entity that can be
somehow separated from historical and social contexts. The emphasis is now upon culture's fluid nature and upon the interactions between different
groups of people, with a keen awareness of the
power relations shaping those interactions. Memory itself is understood not as a mere recollection of
the past, but as a narrative constructed about the
past in the present. Culture, memory, and history
all are understood to involve subjective interpretation. Thus, the old modes of representation in anthropology have not only been criticized, but largely

abandoned. However, while the salvage paradigm


has been rightly criticized as being ahistorical, most
critics have neglected to consider how and why
ethnographic informants participated in its making, and what stakes they may have had in reconstructing the past. These issues are my primary
concern here. In what ways did Frank Day and
other self-taught artists borrow from and interact
with these modes of anthropological representation? What motivated them to create, in essence,
their own forms of visual ethnography?
In addition to Frank Day, as has been noted,
other Native American self-taught visual artists
worked outside of educational institutions and art
schools yet within the stylistic conventions of Western representational art forms. Although institutional art training has strongly influenced the
direction of some twentieth-century native artists,
particularly in the Southwest and Oklahoma, Native American art history is dotted with untrained
individuals who took up visual media in order to depict the traditions of their people in generally realist styles. Frequently, these artists were supported
in their efforts by some intermediary, often an anthropologist or teacher.
These idiosyncratic artists have not been adequately studied, and a thorough survey is beyond
the scope of my efforts here. To give a sense of the
range of such artists, I'd like to briefly review the careers of three better-known ones: Jesse
Cornplanter (Seneca), Earnest Spybuck (Shawnee), and Peter Pitseolak (Inuit).
Jesse Cornplanter (1889-1957) began sketching at age 11 or 12. With his sister Carrie, Jesse sent
sets of drawings to a collector associated with the
Museum of the American Indian in New York, who
encouraged the young Cornplanters. While his earliest works from childhood are scenes of life as he experienced it in his upstate Seneca community, later
he began reconstructing the past. Often, he had observed the activities he depicted, but he put his subjects in the dress and settings of an earlier time.
Eventually, in 1938, Cornplanter published, with
the help of white patrons, an illustrated book, Legends of the Longhouse.

Like Cornplanter, Earnest Spybuck


(1883-1949) was also drawing and painting from an
early age. Growing up in Oklahoma, Spybuck began
drawing while attending the Shawnee Boarding
School, but never received form al art instruction. At
age twenty-seven, he met anthropologist M.R. Har-

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MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 24 NUMBER 2/3

1. Frank Day with two of his paintings, Toto Dance at


Bloomer Hill (at left) and Before the Burning, 1973. Collection of Herb and Peggy Puffer. Photograph by Robert
Schell, courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California.

rington who was in Oklahoma on a collecting trip for


the Museum of the American Indian. Spybuck
showed Harrington some drawings, and the anthropologist convinced him to paint a series of watercolors dealing with the cultural and religious life of his
people. The finely-detailed paintings depict seasonal dances, ceremonies, games, and sweat lodge
practices, most of which Spybuck likely witnessed
and/or participated in (Callandar and Slivka 1984).
Peter Pitseolak (1902-1973) was an Inuit artist
from Cape Dorset who worked in several media over
the course of his lifetime. Pitseolak started his artistic career under the patronage of a Hudson s Bay
Company t r a d e r who was himself an artist.
Pitseolak began in 1939 with watercolors, crafting
portraits, self-portraits, and family scenes. Then in
the 1940s, he took up photography. His photographs were often posed; as Nelson Graburn has
put it, he tried to "get things right" by creating accurate, idealized cultural depictions (Graburn 1997,

personal communication). He even posed whole scenarios, such as hunting and fishing sequences and
persuaded his subjects to act out such activities. A
book of his photographs, with his explanatory texts,
was published after his death (Pitseolak and Eber
1975). In the latter part of his career, he took up
graphics (prints and drawings) that illustrate some
of the same subjects as his photographs, but also depicted themes from the past and from mythology
which could not be posed.
Frank Day and these seemingly isolated artists
have several things in common: first, they were
committed to recording tribal traditions (as observed or as reconstructed from memory, and often
idealized); second, they employed a realistic style
based not on their own graphic arts traditions, but
rather on what are generally understood to be the
conventions of Western narrative painting and
drawing (and in Pitseolak's case, photography); and
third, they did not have institutional art training
nor were they centrally involved in the Indian art
market, although outsiders (anthropologists, traders, or other collectors) played a role in their careers.
In the past, many of the scholarly assessments
of such artists have focused on the extent to which
their arts are either "assimilated" to Western representational traditions, or alternatively, are "authentic" expressions of native cultural traditions.
They have been labeled "assimilated" (Graburn
1993:177; cf. Brody 1971) because they work in media and styles derived from Western art traditions
rather than indigenous pictorial traditions. On the
other hand, this art has been argued to be "the 'true
Indian style of painting" (Archuleta and Strickland
1991:86), because the artists were considered isolated from the expectations of the Indian art market
and its patrons, and so were not forcing themselves
to adhere to what the market deemed to be "traditional Indian style." And finally, some anthropologists have dismissed the work of these artists as
"inauthentic" if any of their depictions or statements failed to conform to the ethnographic record.
Many observers have focused on just this issue in
Day's art and, perhaps realizing how authenticity'
was privileged, Day himself stressed the authority
of his vision.
I have found myself dissatisfied with measuring how much these arts adhere to or diverge from
native or Western representational and cultural
traditions. Instead, it seems much more interesting

25

2. Whirlwind at Bloomer Hill by Frank Day, 1973. Oil on canvas, 24x30 in. Collection of Herb and Peggy Puffer. Photograph courtesy The Heard Museum. This painting depicts a tale passed down in Day's family of a great whirlwind
that once destroyed a ceremonial roundhouse at Bloomer Hill in present-day Butte County, California. According to
Day, the two men pictured neglected to properly give thanks to the spirits and so their possessions were scattered and
destroyed.

to ask how these arts reflect the power-laden cultural exchanges in which the artists and outsiders
were engaged. So, the question then becomes, not is
this art "assimilated" or "authentic " but what were
the contexts of its production? What motivations
did the artists have in creating such works and how
does this art reflect the culturally complex world
these artists found themselves in?
The concept of "autoethnography" helps in this
analysis. Literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt has
coined the term autoethnography to refer to cultural expressions in "which colonized subjects un-

dertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer's own terms" (1992:7, italics
in original). Produced by those who have themselves been the subjects of ethnographies,
autoethnographies are verbal and/or visual texts
that have been used by indigenous people to represent themselves to others. These texts borrow from
dominant modes of representation such as the ethnography, which was created by Europeans to represent others to themselves. Pratt argues that
autoethnography is the result of processes of exchange between subordinated and dominant

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MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 24 NUMBER 2/3

3. Activities around a Maidu Roundhouse by Frank Day, 1964. Oil on canvas, 24 x 72 in. Collection of Lyle R. Scott.
Photograph by M. Lee Fatheree, courtesy Oakland Museum of California.

groups. Both sides select and invent from materials


transmitted to them from the other, although this
process is characterized by asymmetrical power relations.
In thinking of Frank Day as an autoethnographer, we can see how his approach mirrored elements of salvage ethnography. He set out to
reconstruct a pre-contact past and had the conviction (as did the anthropologists around him) that
knowledge about this era would be lost if someone in
his generation did not record it. Although Day early
in his artistic career experimented with painterly
subjects such as still lives and scenes from his travels in the Southwest, he quickly came to focus on
Maidu subject matter and most particularly on the
Maidu past rather than contemporary reality (Fig.
2). While Day himself had not experienced the
pre contact past of his paintings, he had heard
about it from elders who spoke of the time "before
the coming of the white man.' Day asserted that
his knowledge of Maidu traditions and his depictions of them were authentic. Day believed that the
Maidu language "is the basis of what the Maidu people are," 5 and through his knowledge of the language he had knowledge of culture. He talked about
his art as a translation of the Maidu language, as a
visual rendering: in his paintings, he was "just
translating the language, the Maidu language, and
putting it up on a chart." These ways of representing culturereconstructing the past through memory and oral tradition, associating authentic Indian

culture with the timeless pre-contact past rather


than present intercultural reality, and emphasizing language as an embodiment of culturewere
understood by the anthropologists with whom Day
communicated. For Day, the appropriation ofthe idioms of anthropology's salvage paradigm resulted
in getting his message heard at a time when few
California Indian artists were recognized by the
public.
So while on one level we may think of Day and,
by extension, the other artists above, as being influenced by anthropologists, we can also think of them
as appropriating the tools of anthropology. We can
see how this transcultural dynamic played out in dimensions of Day's life experience. In Days childhood, his home region was visited by ethnographers
Roland Dixon of the American Museum of Natural
History, Charles Wilcomb of the Oakland Public
Museum (whose collections became part of what
now is the Oakland Museum of California), and
John Hudson of Ukiah for Chicago's Field Museum.
The latter two fieldworkers collected directly from
Day's father Billy. So, very early on, Day likely had
some familiarity with anthropologists and the notion that collecting information and material culture was valuable to them. At age twenty-two, Day
set off to visit, as he called it, "the land of other
tribes," with a clear notion of seeking information
about how other Indian people lived, taking a role
not unlike that of an ethnographer Perhaps this exposure to the differences and similarities among In-

27

dian people heightened Day's own sense of Maidu


distinctiveness.
In 1952, Day contacted the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Anthropology to
ask that someone come to record his songs and stories. Then-undergraduate Bernard Fontana (now a
professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Arizona) responded, producing a short wire
recording.7 After he began painting around 1960,
Day took the initiative to go to the California State
Indian Museum to inquire whether anthropologists
there were interested in his work. One, Francis
(Fritz) Riddell, tried to work with Day as an
ethnographic informant, but gave up the effort after
he found that Day's information about traditional
Konkow Maidu village sites and names contradicted information from other informants. Another
anthropologist, Norman Wilson, also recognized
Day's tendency toward embellishment, but found
Day's art fascinating and valuable as art. It was anthropologist Donald Jewell, an instructor at a Sacramento community college and a practicing
archaeologist, who really took Day under his wing.
Jewell met Day in the summer of 1961 while doing
ethnographic and archaeological survey work in the
Feather River canyon area, Day's home territory,
which was soon to be flooded by the completion of
the Oroville Dam.8
Jewell and Day hit it off and each benefitted
from the other. Jewell got ethnographic data from
Day, and through Jewell, Day gained an audience
for his knowledge. Jewell arranged for Day to visit
area college classes and to exhibit his work in various venues. From the tapes Jewell made of his sessions with Day, it is clear that they discussed
particular topics such as legends and myths and
then Frank would work on painting them. Day says,
for instance, on one tape, "this is the sixteenth one
on the plans we had before."9 Yet, Jewell didn't seem
to be dictating what Day painted; Frank was too
strong-willed for that. As an example, on another
recording Jewell interrupts Frank during a general
discussion of a painting to ask him to tell the specific
story associated with it. Frank responded: "Well,
wait a minute. That's just what I'm trying to get
at,"10 and proceeded on with his original train of
thought.
In the last years of Day's life, 1973-1976, it was
an art trader, Herb Puffer of Pacific Western
Traders in Folsom, California, not an anthropologist, who brought Day's work to a wider audience,

and who facilitated the formation of the Maidu


Dancers, the group that Day taught to dance. Even
though not an anthropologist, Puffer continued the
documentation of Day's work and made many tape
recordings of Day's explanations of the stories reflected in his paintings. Perhaps still not content
that enough was documented, in 1975 Day acted as
his own ethnographer and taped the series of recordings referred to frequently in this article.11
What insights about processes of representation do we gain by looking at Frank Day and other
self-taught native artists as autoethnographers?
Representation, as a process which acts to define
the subjects represented, has had an enormous role
in constructing power relations in colonial contexts.
The representation of indigenous cultures and traditions as primitive has long served to justify their
marginalization. It follows, then, that one of the
first steps by which native people challenge these
power relations is by attempting to regain control
over the production of cultural images of themselves. Frank Day made a crucial step toward regaining this control in his creation of artistic images
which, to him, "translated" Maidu-ness and asserted the validity of the Maidu past against its
prior misrepresentations.
Day and other self-taught artists have in effect
appropriated aspects of anthropological representation, and invented their own versions of ethnography which were visual, oral and performative in
form. Rather than merely being passive participants in anthropology's salvage paradigm, they literally used anthropologists and the ideas they had
about reconstructing the past to retrieve and preserve indigenous traditions. Thus, the worth of
these traditions was affirmed in relation to dominant traditions. Significantly, their artwork championed native cultures during times of transition
and loss for Indian people. Yet, precisely because
these earlier indigenous worlds had been shattered,
the artists' claims to authenticity could never be
completely verified and those very claims at times,
as in Day's case, led to some degree of criticism from
their own communities.
I want to close by examining a densely-packed
image that encapsulates Day's autoethnographic
efforts. Activities Around a Maidu Roundhouse
(1963, Fig. 3) depicts a snapshot of Maidu life as
imagined in the past yet projected as documentary
realism, signaled by a cutaway perspective that allows the viewer to see both interior and exterior ac-

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MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 24 NUMBER 2/3

tion. All of the activities depictedhunting,


gathering wood, making tools and ceremonial regalia, playing musicare unlikely to have occurred at
the same time. Such a depiction is similar to earlier
modes of ethnographic representation in which the
reader might be introduced to a culture through a
description of a "day in the life of a village," a day
that never couldVe taken place in actuality. The
classic example of this in the ethnographic literature is Margaret Mead's lyrical description of a Samoan village in Coming ofAge in Samoa.
Although all the activities in the painting couldn't have possibly transpired at once or in precisely
the manner depicted, the painting does document
an ephemeral art form rarely portrayed, acorn
mush drawing. Day explained the decorations on
the horizontal beams of the roundhouse as being abstract symbols of abundance and good fortune.
These symbols, made with a paste of acorn mush,
were a mode of representation used by the Konkow
Maidu in precontact times and as recently as the
1910s, when Charles Wilcomb collected an example
from a roundhouse in Sulfur Springs, California.12
Whether Day rendered these symbols as they were
by earlier Konkow people is unknown, but the
painting is an example of how he creatively used his
art to portray the past as he understood it.
In this and other paintings, Day was asserting
his vision of the Maidu past, a vision built upon
what he had been told and what he imagined. He
borrowed the tools of anthropology when they were
useful to his broader project of making the world of
the Maidu known to outsiders. As an artist, his creative vision did not always conform to anthropologists' expectations of authenticity. His
autoethnographic project succeeded, however, in
large part because his art was not merely
ethnographic. It is the work's imaginative and visionary qualities that deeply stir us and leave lasting impressions. Day's art has an emotional
immediacy that ethnography alone simply doesn't
have. Day's autoethnographic creations go beyond
the strictly documentary to, as he said, "shoot all of
your imaginations of what a California Indian is."

Notes

1.

Quotation from recording made by Day in 1975


(LA186 series, tape 1, University of California at
Berkeley Language Laboratory).

2.

Quotation from recording made by Day in 1975


(LA186 series, tape 7, University of California at
Berkeley Language Laboratory).
3.
Quotation from recording made by Day in 1975
(LA186 series, tape 4, University of California at
Berkeley Language Laboratory).
4.
Quotation from recording made by Day in 1975
(LA186 series, tape 9, University of California at
Berkeley Language Laboratory).
5.
Quotation from recording made by Day in 1975
(LA186 series, tape 5, University of California at
Berkeley Language Laboratory).
Quotation from recording made by Day in 1975
6.
(LA 186 series, tape 9, University of California at
Berkeley Language Laboratory).
Interview of Frank Day by Bernard Fontana, March
7.
29, 1952. Catalog number 24-137, Hearst Museum of
Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley.
8.
This account of Day's early experiences with anthropologists is based upon interviews I conducted with
Francis (Fritz) Riddell, Lyle R. Scott, and Norman
Wilson in 1993. The discussion of Donald Jewell's experiences with Day is compiled from his book on
Konkow folklore (Jewell 1987), newspaper accounts,
and taped interviews Jewell conducted with Day that
were given to me in 1993 by Ian and Patricia McGreal,
Jewell's friends and collectors of Day's art.
Quotation from recording of Day made by Donald
9.
Jewell in 1963 (tape 6). Tapes in possession of the author.
10. Quotation from recording of Day made by Donald
Jewell in 1964 (tape 1). Tapes in possession of the author.
11. The series of recordings Day made of himself in 1975
is now held in the University of California at Berkeley
Language Laboratory as the LAI86 series.
12. This acorn mush drawing, executed on a wooden shingle, is in the collection of the Oakland Museum of California, catalog number H16.2378.
References

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1988
The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century
Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Cornplanter, Jesse
1938 Legends of the Longhouse. Philadelphia:
Lippincott.

29

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Rebecca J. Dobkins is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Curator of Native American Art at
Willamette University, Salem, Oregon.

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