SOTHEBY'S SELLS WARSHIRT FOR $2,658,500

The key story here is from http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=47506.  Art Daily and Art Journal are my most dependable sources of information about the arts and museum world.  They often include stories about artifacts and related fields like anthropology and paleontology.

These so-called warshirts are interesting to think about as art objects in terms of design, but also in terms of the niche they occupy among artifacts.  They are actually more like ceremonial shirts or parade shirts and might be accompanied by leggings, which in later years to reflect Euro tastes, might be matched in pattern and or colors.  Some shirts have detachable sleeves and/or open armpits, sort of like modern outdoor wear meant for heavy exertion, but useful if you're sitting on a horse in the sun waiting for a parade to start.  Like this small sculpture between Bob Scriver and I at the opening of the Whitney Gallery expansion of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in the Sixties:

Probably many people don't think about the use and antiquity of these often spectacular garments.  If they are decorated with glass beads, they are necessarily post-white contact.  Quill work would be the earlier version, but if the quills are dyed with something other than a local substance, they would be post-contact again.  I always liked the story of the woman in modern times who produced vivid quill work, using porkies picked up as roadkill along the highways.  Her dye source was a handful of crepe paper thrown into a pot of boiling quills.  The hide itself could also be colored with plants or minerals or fungus.  Bright yellow was a favored color.  Blue or green might suggest storms, thunder, magic, power.  White comes from deposits of kaolin in places where the white clay can also be made into pots. 

Sometimes they are made of coarse wool, red or navy blue, that also had to come with traders.  Many depictions of prairie Indians in the early days show long shirts ending above the knees and worn with only a breechclout, if that.  The length might be related to sort of hide used.  Women, of course, wore a longer version and probably not so fancy.  The strips of beading are usually worked separately and then sewn on.  Jessie Schultz, one of the later wives of James Willard Schultz, was instrumental in getting the Museum of the Plains Indian built in Browning, Montana, as a craft center for the creation of such garments to sell.  She insisted that Blackfeet always did geometric patterns while Cree did floral patterns.  I only know from experience that working with the small units of color that are beads, it's natural to create a geometric and possibly repetitious pattern, especially if working on a woven base.  But Cree floral near-embroidery on black velvet is quite different.

The long fringes are said to carry water off, dripping it.  In days before such attachments were for ornamental purposes, it would be easy to pull off a thong to tie things up.  Ermine (winter weasels, never summer hides) were attached to dangle and so were actual scalps, which probably led to the idea of war shirts, but they were often imitated with horse hair or just human hair, no scalp attached.

Several years ago I noticed these shirts were showing up in the Manitou Auction that accompanied the C.M. Russell Ad Club benefit auction in Great Falls in March.  The prices exceeded those of most of the paintings.  It's an open question whether planning and creating such a shirt would be more or less dependent on skill and persistence than a high quality painting.

Sotheby's Sets New Auction Record for American Indian Art with War Shirt that Sells for $2,658,500

Oglala Sioux Beaded and Fringed Hide War Shirt. Est. $250/250,000. Sold for: $2,658,500. Photo: Sotheby's.

NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s set a new record for a piece of American Indian Art at auction when an Oglala Sioux Beaded and Fringed Hide War Shirt which once belonged to the famous and celebrated Sioux Chief, Black Bird sold to an anonymous buyer for $2,658,500 (est. $250/350,000). The War Shirt led the sale which totaled $4,809,503. This was comfortably over the high estimate and the highest ever total for a various owner sale in this category (overall est. $2.8/4 million). Two determined telephone bidders battled for several minutes before auctioneer Hugh Hildesley brought the hammer down. In addition to the provenance, the shirt is made all the more remarkable by the existence of photographs showing it being worn by its original owner. Photographic documentation of an artifact as important as the Oglala Sioux Shirt is very rare. In this case though, several images exist of Chief Black Bird wearing the shirt, providing an important insight to its history and to the life of the Chief who was one of the most documented Native Americans of his generation. End This photo is Shortie White Grass, head of the Buffalo Dung Band in 1899.  Shortie was a true warrior, but the intertribal warfare was mostly before 1880.  I do not know whether he actually wore this shirt into battle.  The photo was taken by Walter McClintock and is part of the Glacier National Park Archives.  It appears in William Farr's indispensable book of photos called "The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882-1945." Bob Scriver used one of these shirts on the cover of "The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains."  His informant, probably John Hellson, told him that the ermine skins meant the man was a Medicine Bundle keeper and that the round pattern on the chest depicted the sun and the arrows he gave the people.  The oval spots with squiggly tails that are drawn directly on the hide are said by some to depict tadpoles, indicating water power, and by others to represent scalps, since this is supposed to be a war shirt.  Some early shirts have real scalps, or imitations made of horsehair or human hair, no skin attached. I count eight shirts and three full-suits in the collection.  Six belong to the "war shirt" genre and the others are simply buckskin shirts embellished with quills or beads.  Two of the suits were worn specifically by Bob Scriver, one made for him in the Thirties when he was the leader of the All-Indian band, and the other commissioned by him for ceremonial events in the Fifties.  (He was white, but also the school band teacher.)  I've been told that not all of these shirts and suits were retained by the Royal Alberta Museum, but when they were sent back across the border, they were intercepted by border officials who conveyed them to the Montana Historical Society, who "repatriated" them to well-placed members of the Blackfeet Tribe.  I have no confirmation of this, but it's pretty typical of how artifacts travel.

ROGUE ANTHROS: John Hellson and Adolph Hungry Wolf

One of the useful characteristics of rogue anthropologists is their clandestine modes of operation, so this blog is violating a few unwritten rules. But that is the nature of blogs and probably the dynamic that makes some people afraid of them. They are not accountable to any funding or otherwise controlling agency like an institution or publisher. In a way, I’m joining the rogues. This will probably eliminate me from consideration by many of the small new publishers who are replacing the old tweedy Manhattan and Boston publishers. They’re gone anyway. The new publishers tend to be “nice ladies,” some of whom pulled themselves out of real trouble by struggling through school where they learned respect for authorities. Rogues put them into a state of panic.

Anyway, the two rogues I’m going to discuss are about my age and people I know. They despise each other. John Hellson is a half-dozen years older than 71 and Adolph Hungry Wolf might be a little younger. Both of them showed up on the Blackfeet Rez in Montana in the Sixties, not long after I did, and both of them were drawn to Bob Scriver, who often acted as an interlocutor between the outside world and the rez where he was born. John, Adolph, Bob, and I are all white, which makes us politically incorrect from birth because of the post-colonial rule that only the indigenous can write about the indigenous. (Bob was the only one of us born on the rez.) It was a useful rule for breaking up the colonial practice of ransacking cultures under the guise of “salvage anthropology,” the idea that the cultures were disappearing so “scientists” were justified in collecting artifacts, stories, and ceremonies in order to preserve them. The rogues were not so scientific and not affiliated with any institutions, but maybe because of that they acquired huge amounts of “stuff.”

Both married Blood Blackfeet women (“Blood” the tribal subdivision) from excellent families so they had unique access that by-passed the usual taboos as well as the suffocating forces of both the reservation itself, which constantly tries to present itself as more virtuous, more deserving, more missionary-responsive than they might actually be -- as well as more pleasing to publishers, universities and museums.

The problem was how to make a living. One way was Adolph’s method which was self-publishing. The Good Medicine books that he and his family produced are invaluable. He was especially alert to photographs, the old kind mounted on cardboard that are called “cabinet” photographs. They are meant to be held and “read” with long scrutiny. Finding some of these in a suitcase he bought at an auction, he carried them everywhere with him and whenever he found old-timers, he'd ask them to “read” and interpret for him. Then he put the information on the back. He is an educated man who values history. ALL his info is now available in four volumes he self-published, expecting shouts of joy and honor. Instead, he discovered that the world had changed radically in the last fifty years. http://goodmedicinefoundation.com/media/books1.html

The nineteenth century world of James Willard Schultz, George Bird Grinnell, and even John Ewers is no longer of much interest to young people. The gray-headed white people who used to obsess over all that horse-and-feather stuff is thinning out fast. Now the cutting edge of Blackfeet anthro research is academic indigenous people and those closely associated with them (like white profs married to Blackfeet: consider Rosalyn LaPier and Dave Beck at the U of Montana; or the people who cluster around Darrell Kipp and Jack Gladstone). With modern technology like GPS or molecular analysis, these people find ancient campsites, begin to sift through the archives of Hudson’s Bay or the Roman Catholic Church, translating the first earliest letters “home,” breaking through into a far more elegant and detailed account of early days even before the horse.

Repatriation, the law returning every artifact and skeleton to the tribe where it originated, created a huge opportunity for clandestine profit from artifacts in much the same way as Prohibition made alcohol worth criminal attention. This change did not affect Hungry Wolf so much as it did John Hellson, who had been surviving by brokering objects. The glorious beaded buckskin suits had intrinsic value of their own because they were beautiful. But there was a lot of stuff that was just floating around -- no one knew what it was or cared very much except the very old people who remembered what it meant, not least because they were keyed into a close sensory knowledge of the land and animals as it was before the fence and the plow. These two guys -- who “lived the life” -- picked up that often religious information. They were not cynical. They LOVED this culture. Adolph still lives in a log cabin with a creek for a water source. His computer is run by a solar panel. Otherwise, no electricity.

Evolution happens when one portion of the population is separated -- usually geographically -- and in that niche evolves in a different way. Then later it may reunite with the main body and make a contribution to the gene pool. The great NA political furor over who had enough proper provenance to study Indians has obliterated far more worthy issues and separated Hellson and Hungry Wolf from the mainstream. Anyway Indian tribal identity is NOT determined by genetics, but by provenance: who was your grandmother? It only goes back to first official white contact, though whites were in the West almost as soon as the continent was discovered -- think of Spaniards bringing the horse. Hellson or Hungry Wolf are almost directly European, not even in America long. John is from Cornwall, England. Adolph is from California but his folks are Austro-Hungarian.

All that is old news. The problem that is now presented is how to recognize and preserve the undisciplined work of these two rogues: Adolph orderly and in plain sight (mostly), the other dubious enough to land Hellson in prison. Out of the blue Hellson called me a day or so ago. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. He was weaving the same old sorcerer’s spell that captured Bob Scriver in the Sixties, unbroken until he stole some of Bob’s artifacts while he was supposed to be curating them. Today’s accredited and honorable researchers, in particular the indigenous ones, have nothing but scorn for the rogues. As far as they’re concerned, the work is contaminated, even toxic. And yet part of the advantage these adventurers had was that they were willing to explore the taboo, the sexual that had to be written about in Latin, the unsuspected and imperceptible to other white outsiders and some red insiders.

INDIAN ARTIFACTS: INTANGIBLES

Earlier in this series I talked about Uhlenbeck and his collection of linguistic material, which he took (without removing) in the form of stories and later analyzed for grammar and structure. He did not publish books of stories for popular consumption like the many versions of Napi stories. (See Monday, October 02, 2006, “WHO TELLS THE TALE.”) Nor was he an anthropologist looking for information about how to hunt buffalo or make horse gear. Another kind of person who loved the early Piegan and recorded their lives was the artist, like Sharp, Schreyvogel, or -- of course -- Charlie Russell.

By now the scientific study of native peoples has specialized in a dozen ways. The study of the plants, which was Walter McClintock’s original training and government assignment, was much of the information ending up in “The Old North Trail” as well as the only published book by John Hellson. (Ethnobotany of the Blackfoot Indians. Canadian Ethnology Service Paper No. 19. 1974 $81.90, "used" at Amazon as I write.) Blackfeet Community College has a faculty member who is also a tribal member and who runs a geodesic dome greenhouse on the campus. For a while he raised sweetgrass to sell. (It’s harder to find these days -- it’s ALWAYS hard to find -- because it requires human tending, if only by being burned over, and the old-timers who used to watch and thin the patches are gone.) More recently Mr. Fish decided it was more important to come into the early 20th century practice of urging people to grow kitchen gardens. Considering diabetes, he’s undoubtedly right. People are aware of the Amazonian jungle being touted as the source of miracle drugs and suspect that old people’s knowledge of medicinal drugs has somehow been taken.

Most people would think of sweetgrass braids as NA “herbs”, which can be bought online at http://www.siyehdevelopment.com/heritage.html They are nice to tuck into a linen cupboard like lavender. I grow my own and use it to smudge as a kind of prayer discipline, which is close to making magic of the ordinary lives of a specific people rooted in a circumpolar ecology. (In some of the Eurasian contexts, sweetgrass is thrown under rugs to scent the house.) When one becomes closely familiar with a culture, shared similarities are as likely as singularities. None of these scientific and semi-scientific bodies of information are what most people would think of as “artifacts,” though that’s what they surely are. To be apparent to most people they need the “value added” layer of scientific or historical interpretation.

A man contacted me on the email because he was writing a novel in which there was a long passage about a Blackfeet man’s ancestors going to war. He wanted my advice about equipment and strategy. I’m hardly any kind of expert, but he rejected all my suggestions about where to go that would be more reliable. Then he said that when he was writing, he liked to play music but he couldn’t find anything inspiring while writing this part. I suggested Jack Gladstone, but he rejected Jack on grounds that he was too modern and too adapted to white men. (I’m not so sure.) I suggested Kenny Scabby Robe’s Black Lodge Singers, who had just won “best” in the national competition among drum societies. He rejected them on grounds that they were too screechy. (Traditional singers sing falsetto.) He wasn’t really that fond of romantic Indian flute music either. I figured he was hopeless and recommended the Grand Canyon Suite.

In fact, there is quite a body of symphonic concert music “inspired” by Indians. Most recently offered is the gorgeous oratorio by Rob Kapilow, “Summer Sun Winter Moon” on the topic of Lewis & Clark, which has a libretto by Darrell Kipp. (It was on PBS as part of Native American Month alongside a documentary about a champion Blackfeet girl’s basketball team.) It’s very beautiful, not particularly based on Blackfeet songs, and about the advent of whites as much as the endurance of indigenous peoples, with the scenery dominating the humans.

Bruno Nettl is far more the discriminating and technical collector of music. If you look at http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Blackfoot_music#encyclopedia, you’ll find a sketch of his conclusions about the early music which were much derived from recordings collected by earlier people. Nettl’s book is called “Blackfoot Musical Thought,” which tells you right there that is not going to be “stooping” to think of the autochthonous as being simplistic or instinctive in some primitive way.

He points out that Blackfeet music is vocal plus percussion, which occasions require song, what the internal structure is likely to be. Songs are quite patterned in terms of setting the theme, repeating at certain points, and associating the songs with specific animals or actions in ceremonies like Bundle Opening. By the time you’ve read Nettl’s book, you will not be able to sing the songs, but you will think of them in quite a different way. For instance, in old times there were evidently no songs specifically for children except “mice songs” that were associated because of being small. But the Blacklodge Singers have recorded a rousing modern American-subject fusion version called “Kids Pow-Wow Songs” which celebrates cartoon animals like Mighty Mouse. I’ve played that so many times I’ve almost learned it. “Ohmigosh! It’s Mighty Mouse!” The words are English but the style and structure are classic Blackfeet.

The most generous and thoughtful thing about Nettl is that he sent his collection of historical recordings back to the reservation to be put into the care of the Piegan Institute, purely Blackfeet. They immediately set about transferring the material to disc, translating what was said, asking remaining old-timers (notably Joe Old Chief) to comment, and so on. This blast from the past was revelatory and often set everyone laughing because the comments in Blackfeet by bystanders were understood. Patient wives, waiting while their husbands recorded songs for which they were paid “per song,” urged their men to think of more songs. “We need the money!” they reminded. Piegan Institute’s goal is to recover the Blackfeet language. Many on the rez would not understand the jokes.

Faught’s Blackfeet Trading Post (http://www.browningchamber.com/faughts.html) has a major section devoted to Native American music.

Such intangibles as music or ethnobotany or language or stories are not addressed by NAGPRA though they can just as surely be stolen and marketed. If John Hellson had stuck to plants, he would not have served jail time. When dealing with Blackfeet ceremonial materials, John himself would say, the songs and prayers that carry the “power” of the objects are as valuable as the objects themselves. Both will crumble in time if not kept alive by active use, and yet using them means that over time they will drift away from their roots, acquire deviant variations, and become detached from the lives on the prairie that produced them. It is irresolvable, a human condition.

INDIAN ARTIFACTS: JOHN HELLSON

Here comes a story at the opposite extreme from the Uhlenbeck’s, one I can only tell now because a confirming article showed up through Google. I had to pay $4 to get a copy from the New York Times, but I already knew the information. I was just afraid to use it for fear of a libel case.

In the Sixties in Browning, Montana, I was married to Bob Scriver, a sculptor of Western subjects, including the Blackfeet. He was born in Browning in 1914, probably one of the first white babies, grew up there, taught school and led bands there, opened a taxidermy shop, then a museum, and finally became well-known as one of the best and most authentic of the Cowboy Artists of America. He was also a member of the National Sculpture Society at a time when cowboy artists were normally ghettoized. In the end he died there in Browning.

While I was with Bob, and I mean lying alongside him one morning on waking, he described a dream. It was a dream meaning that he should become the Keeper of a Thunder Pipe Bundle. In those days most people weren’t aware of such a thing, not even many of the tribal members, esp. the younger ones. We knew because a man named John Hellson had been stopping by with his wife, Diane, a beautiful young woman from a prominent Blood family, and their kids, bright-eyed, smart little guys. He had introduced Bob to a whole new class of artifacts, Sacred Bundles, very different from the fancy beaded parade gear that most people in Browning admired. In fact, when Bob was leading the Indian Band, he wore a buckskin beaded suit he had paid a woman to make for him. It was not sacred.

Sacred Bundles didn’t mean a whole lot until you knew the story behind them. The last few of the old people who kept them were careful not to talk about them, even though an example of one of the Thunder Pipes hung in the Museum of the Plains Indian on the edge of town. John explained it all. Bob was entirely captured by these ideas. He was not a strong Christian, but he was very much of the “place” which is the essence of autochthonous culture.

John was about the same size as Bob, a Brit with intense blue eyes and a beard. He told us he was a pugilist in Cornwall, which was why he had no teeth. He had that kind of square, confrontive build and manner. Somehow his credentials and employment were a little mysterious, but that wasn’t unusual among the steady procession of people who had mysteriously acquired a great deal of knowledge and a certain number of artifacts. He was intense, eloquent, and seductive. On Feb 5, 2006, I put his photo in my blog. He did NOT like his photo to be taken.

John guided Bob through the acquisition of Tom Many Guns’ Medicine Pipe Bundle. Tom had been an informant for anthropologists and was still an active member of the Bundle Opening ceremony every spring, but he was aging, had a tendency to be thirsty, and was rumored to be selling little pieces of the Bundle contents. Bob wrapped on a blanket, took along a regular Blackfeet smoking pipe, presented himself to Tom with other gifts plus money, and eventually that Bundle was transferred to us in the traditional Indian Way. Richard Little Dog was the ceremonialist. A lot of money changed hands, a good deal of it going to John Hellson as the broker. John had had many Bundles transferred to himself.

I want to emphasize that for our part we were totally sincere and respectful. The only person who was cranky about the ceremony was Tom Many Guns’ wife, Margaret, who was used to the ceremonial status. The others were agreeable, or so it seemed. This was fifty years ago. The present Bundle Keepers were children. The Sacred Bundles in Bob’s artifact book, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains” are from John Hellson, with a few exceptions. They were acquired after Bob divorced me in 1970. They are extremely controversial and all have been put back into tribal custody by the Royal Alberta Museum.

In September, 1981, John was sentenced for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of irreplaceable anthropological treasures from the University of California's Lowie Museum. Normally such thefts are hushed up. I’ve talked to more than one Blackfeet who boasted about stealing from exhibits at the Montana Historical Society, which denies such acts vehemently. There were always thefts from Bob Scriver.

The article went on, “The museum's management refused to follow the usual practice of close-mouthed acceptance of such thefts, Mr. Norick said, and school authorities insisted that Mr. Hellson be prosecuted. The Alameda County district attorney's office accepted a plea bargain arrangement under which Mr. Hellson pleaded guilty to possession of stolen property and received the two-year prison sentence. No other prosecutions are pending.”

The article said, “He presided over the carrying off of $500,000 worth of artifacts. This week he received a two-year prison sentence.” His marriage was over. And the article said, “The Lowie Museum's problem has elements in common with theft problems at art museums, where charges of improper trading and other actions against the museums' interests have also been made against curators and directors in several institutions.” This was also allegedly true of Mike Kennedy, the director of the Montana Historical Society in the Sixties, but I haven’t found any documentation. I’m just remembering.

The point is that some artifacts collectors are plainly and frankly thieves -- ferociously informed and sometimes with good credentials, fueled by greed, enabled by insiders and I mean insider members of the tribes as well as white opportunists. I could name a dozen but would be well-advised not to without proof.

When I wrote the biography of Bob Scriver, “Bronze Inside and Out,” I tried to locate John Hellson, even though I knew that when Bob was organizing his artifact book by photographing all the work he was selling to the Royal Alberta Museum and actually paid John to curate the artifacts, even knowing he’d just gotten out of jail for stealing, John rewarded him by stealing three or four pieces of Bob’s he could get into his pocket, including a grizzly claw necklace. Bob realized it, put out the alarm, located a few pieces in the SW, and sent a police officer named Rooney to bring them back. There was a warrant for Hellson’s arrest which expired when Bob died in 1999.

What has recently renewed interest in John Hellson is the case against a Montana fellow named Brubaker, who stole books and pages from libraries. The two of them, now in their seventies, were traveling together until Brubaker was arrested. He’s now serving a thirty month sentence. But that’s not about Indian artifacts. It’s about books.