Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
23
24
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
26
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.
27
28
Notes
1.
2.
29
Fabian, Johannes
1983
Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its
Object. New York: Columbia University Press
Graburn, Nelson H.H.
1993
Ethnic Arts of the Fourth World: The View from
Canada. In Imagery and Creativity: Ethnoaesthetics and
Art Worlds in the Americas, eds. Dorothea S. Whitten and
Norman E. Whitten, Jr, 171-204. Tucson: University Of
Arizona Press
Pitseolak, Peter and Dorothy Eber
1975 People from Our Side: An Eskimo Life in Words
and Photographs. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Rebecca J. Dobkins is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Curator of Native American Art at
Willamette University, Salem, Oregon.