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Káma-Kapúska! Making Marks in Indian Country, 1833–34

Mató-Tópe, Bear Claw Necklace, 1833.

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Fort Clark as a Commissioning House
Mixed in with the list of workshop projects at Fort Clark were object commissions issued by Wied-Neuwied. On November 24, 1833, Wied-Neuwied asked Mató-Tópe to finish a bear claw necklace for him, providing additional elements purchased from the fort store (fig. 10).‍[40] Mató-Tópe returned the completed item on January 8, 1834. A week later, Wied-Neuwied commissioned Mató-Tópe to make duplicates of his carved hair sticks (fig. 11). Commissions may have been a standard practice between fur traders and Native artisans, as Bodmer had visited Síh-Chidä and Mató-Tópe in Mít uta hako'sh in late December and found the latter painting a hide robe for Michel Bellehumeur, an Ojibwe interpreter stationed at Fort Clark.‍[41] And like the workshop alterations between warrior drawings and sittings for Bodmer’s executed portraits, commissioning went in both directions: in early March, Mató-Tópe requested a drawing of an eagle from Wied-Neuwied.
Commissions like these tested Middle Ground participants; they demonstrated whether or not a given participant knew the expectations and obligations that came with their Middle Ground involvement. As Wied-Neuwied records in his first entry describing Mató-Tópe, the painter George Catlin had been a poor gift giver in the required exchange for a painted robe. When Mató-Tópe returned Catlin’s paltry proffered items, saying he would instead gift the robe to Catlin, he was refusing to entertain Catlin on the Middle Ground: gifting on the part of Mató-Tópe meant that no exchange occurred and that the related kinship obligations were therefore not initiated. Such failures in the required exchange customs of the Middle Ground could have a profound impact on one’s subsequent reputation. One evening at Fort Clark, Charbonneau, an independent fur trader and translator who resided in Amatihá (Fourth Village), related stories of Duke Paul Wilhelm of Württemberg, a European visitor to the Missouri River region in the 1820s, using similarly stingy terms, as “he accepted sugar and coffee and did not give anything in return.”‍[42] Wied-Neuwied wrote that Württemberg had a bad reputation “here and there” along the Missouri as a result.
Like the portraits produced at Fort Clark, commissions were both expressions and products of Middle Ground relationships. This means that an exchanged object’s significance is not only in the material thing exchanged, but also in the behaviors of exchange that surrounded it. Prior to being asked to complete the bear claw necklace, Mató-Tópe spent the night in front of the Europeans’ fire. Such visits often produced knowledge for Wied-Neuwied’s notebooks, but they also involved tobacco, food, and a bed for guests.‍[43] Sometimes visitors brought specimens for Wied-Neuwied’s collections. While Wied-Neuwied’s surviving collections of objects and recorded knowledge are usually understood in ethnographic terms, their work and significance in Indian country included their creation and enforcement of Middle Ground fictive kin relationships and obligations.
In this way, the whitewashed room at Fort Clark came to mimic the open doors expected of Native leaders in the villages. Numak'aki peoples knew a village leader as a numakshí (“man-to-be-good”) or miti ko-mne-ka (“one who is the village door”). Leaders were expected to be generous, playing host at any time, with food always at the ready. This hospitality was extended to Bodmer at the Numak'aki earth lodge of Dipäuch (Broken Marrow), where Bodmer constructed a complex sketch of the lodge interior over the course of the winter (fig. 12).‍[44] Pots of food are visible by the central firepit, as are the women kin of Dipäuch who were responsible for meal preparation. By the spring of 1834, when food was running desperately short, Mató-Tópe and Péhriska-Rúhpa extended their roles as village leaders and providers to the residents of Fort Clark, gifting meat to the emaciated Europeans.‍[45] Bodmer and Wied-Neuwied mirrored the role of the numakshí as they worked at Fort Clark, hosting and feeding their many visitors in a demonstration of their facility with the proffered terms of the Middle Ground.
24 November 1833
Mató-Tópe got up early; however, he left his buffalo hides in the room for us [to deal with]. . . .
Later I gave Mató-Tópe a necklace of bear claws to take along, which he will finish for me. I bought an otter skin and blue glass pearls in the store for added decoration. Furthermore, I gave him colors and a piece of paper [so that he could] paint for me one of the skirmishes he [had] participated in. Mr. Bodmer also gave him several colors.