“The Grand Robe” (circa 1800-30), made by an artist from a Central Plains tribe. CREDIT COURTESY PATRICK GRIES AND VALÉRIE TORRE / MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY
Talk about an epic show. Let’s go:
Moving Pictures
Plains Indian Art at the Metropolitan Museum.
It began with horses and ended in massacre. The zenith of the cultures that are celebrated in “The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky,” a wondrous show at the Metropolitan Museum, lasted barely two hundred years. It started in 1680, when Pueblo Indians seized the steeds of Spanish settlers whom they had driven out of what is now New Mexico. The horse turned the scores of Plains tribes—river-valley farmers and hunter-gatherers who had used dogs as their beasts of burden—into a vast aggregate of mounted nomads, who ranged from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Rio Grande into Canada, hunting buffalo, trading, and warring with one another. The era ended with the killing of more than two hundred Lakota men, women, and children by federal troops at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890. Meanwhile, epidemic smallpox and other alien diseases took a toll far beyond that of military violence. The official census of 1900 found only a quarter of a million Native Americans in the entire United States. What ensued is a story of reservations—including the immaterial sort, which trouble the mind. But there’s an ameliorating epilogue of revivals and transformations of Plains heritage.
Organikos 