In this essay, I have put forward the notion that portraits made within Middle Ground spaces have to be understood as co-created products of Middle Ground relations. This notion relies on the presence of multiple cultural frameworks in the interpretations and uses of such portraits. I have worked to demonstrate such a presence through an art historical practice that is local, relational, and culturally flexible. The resulting case study reveals the ways in which local Native residents brought their own specific visual languages and cultural practices to the Fort Clark studio over the winter of 1833–34. Shared cultural behaviors, such as the obligations of fictive kinship, also emerge as important influences on the processes of portrait painting, commissioned object making, and exchange.

Middle Grounds such as that found at Fort Clark in the early 1830s proved to be quite fragile in the face of US expansionist processes of the nineteenth century. To return to my metaphor of portraiture as calumet    , it is important to note that even as calumets retained their power to bind parties across Middle Ground spaces in the first half of the nineteenth century, the young American republic began to call on this influence and its symbology for their own purposes. The reverse of the Jefferson peace medal, for instance, included a pipe stem crossed with a hatchet above a pair of hands entangled in a handshake (fig. 16). The represented pipe was a pared down reference to the calumet—a confusion of the elaborate calumet stem (see fig. 2) with those of everyday pipes and their often shared act of smoking. By the end of the nineteenth century, these simplified pipes were the “peace pipe” trope of literature and film—one that ran parallel to the continued use of calumets and their various ceremonies among Native communities.

The roots of this stark diversion of the calumet into parallel uses and meanings among Native and non-Native peoples can be seen among American Fur Company (AFC) documents of the 1830s. The AFC institutionally hosted the Europeans’ two-year tour of North America, and Wied-Neuwied collected a “certificate of good behavior” while at the AFC outpost of Fort McKenzie that depicted an elaborate calumet in the bottom left corner (fig. 17).‍[63] AFC trader Kenneth McKenzie had recently been using the certificates to reward Native leaders and warriors who showed loyalty to his fur trade posts. The seeds of the patriarchal relationship that developed between the US “father” government and those the government viewed as dependent and accommodating Native “children” by the end of the nineteenth century are apparent on McKenzie’s certificate, as the European in top hat exhorts his Native compatriot to “offer [the white man] food and conduct him on his road” in order to “always find friends in your time of need.” Such language requests Native resources with only a vague promise of friendship in return, a radical distortion of the mutual bindings and exchanges that constituted the Middle Ground.

Yet Wied-Neuwied also collected an oral account of the contract between Fort McKenzie and the local tribes. Narrated verbally through a ka-ka of the Siksika, Pikuni, or Kainah (Blood) tribes, the oral treaty invokes “a firm and lasting peace” that will be testified to when the involved parties meet and “smoke the calumet in friendship and security.”‍[64] The treaty was sealed when the present Native leaders assented that it had “conform[ed] to all ancient customs and ceremonies, etc.” and had “observ[ed] the due mystical signs enjoined by the Grand Medicine Lodges.”‍[65] In this remembering of what bound fort and Native peoples together, the calumet retained local and relational meanings, even as it joined players across vast differences.

Like calumets, portraits—like those created at Fort Clark—could later be employed within colonial projects that perverted their original meanings. As such objects traveled to distant locales, the potential disconnect from their original intents, purposes, and contexts allowed various agents to rewrite these objects’ associated meanings and shared uses and obligations.‍[66] These rewrites still shape today’s scholarship with regard to Native material cultures and histories.‍[67] An art history of the Middle Ground     works to bring the original local, relational, and culturally flexible contexts of such material culture to the fore, challenging our inherited mythologies as we continue to move and write toward a decolonized future.