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

Karl Bodmer, Mató-Tópe, Mandan Chief, 1834.

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Fort Clark as a Studio
While Bodmer’s work is most often associated with the traditional work of an artist’s studio, the other functions of the Fort Clark space—workshop, commissioning house, and gallery—all occurred first; it took nearly a month before warriors began to arrive at the Europeans’ room to sit for their portraits.‍[54] Sitters decided on their own dress and appearance; there is no evidence that either Wied-Neuwied or Bodmer interfered with sitters’ decisions on how to appear for their portraits at Fort Clark. The Middle Ground contexts of the forts could produce visible cross-cultural elements, which in turn reinforced fort and tribe or band contracts and relationships: soldats (soldiers, or Native men hired as rotating fort police), for instance, donned non-Native hats or jackets, and chiefs wore peace medals over hide shirts.‍[55] Fort Clark sitters, however, wore nearly all Native dress for their various portraits.
The sitters’ choice of dress is important because it illustrates the co-creative forces operating within the portraits from Fort Clark.‍[56] Such choices often visually retold one’s coup counts. Plains warriors orally repeated these coup counts at public performances and private society gatherings and rituals. It is clear from various accounts that Mató-Tópe delivered oral narrations of his coups to non-Native visitors at Fort Clark; Wied-Neuwied recorded a version in his very first description of the man on November 9.‍[57] Mató-Tópe also visualized these accounts using Native mark-making practices on his own as well as in commissioned hide paintings.
Portions of these coup counts were then repeated when Mató-Tópe sat for his half and full portraits (see fig. 6, fig. 14). In both he wears a carved and painted wooden knife, a symbol of the blade that Mató-Tópe had been brave enough to grab barehanded in his duel with a Tsitsistas (Cheyenne) chief (see fig. 11). Visible in the half portrait are the six carved and painted coup sticks that Wied-Neuwied asked Mató-Tópe to copy (see fig. 11). Such wooden coup sticks appear in the specific depictions of Numak'aki warriors in Plains winter counts, and may have been one of the ways that enemies of the Awatíkihu identified Numak'aki warriors on the battlefield (fig. 15).
Within a Plains tribe, coup marks defined a warrior. In a 1911 interview, for instance, Minitari warriors Tseca Matseítsi and Butterfly accounted for each member of their Mi'maúpaki (Stone Hammer) society cohort through their accumulated coup marks of kills, wounds, strikes, and horses shot in battle, while the two men struggled to answer their interrogator’s questions about their friends’ exact ages.‍[58] In the tightly woven social structures of Awatíkihu villages, as previously discussed , a warrior was known by his deeds, and these deeds were in turn the claims he must have to be a leader, such as village war chief or society leader—both of which were positions that Mató-Tópe held at the time of the Europeans’ visit.‍[59] But among the Numak'aki, only a warrior had the right to his coup marks, in either visual or oral form.‍[60] One had to do one’s own telling.
Sitting for a portrait, then, was a way of duplicating one’s honors through the hand of a kapúska , a habitual mark maker, who would carry and tell of those deeds far beyond the village plaza. This use of portraits on the part of Native participants reflects the co-creation involved in the genre itself, whereby sitters actively affect their artistic portrayal.‍[61] To think of a Native warrior or leader posing within a co-creative process casts him as an agent, one who “gets himself portrayed; he participates in what, for him, is an act of self-portrayal, or self-presentation, or self-representation. To pose is by definition to portray oneself.”‍[62]
For a leader like Mató-Tópe, portraits continuously declared his deeds as they traveled, making and remaking his claims for leadership not only within the Awatíkihu, but to those trading partners, enemy peoples, and non-Native institutional representatives who might come upon Mató-Tópe’s presence-in-absence in the decades to come. Portraits counted coup. In this way, portraiture of the Middle Ground fulfilled local requirements and understandings of leadership.