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

Karl Bodmer, Máhchsi-Karéhde, Mandan Man, 1834.

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Practicing Art History on the Middle Ground
If one is to analyze the visual and material production of the Fort Clark studio, then, one has to practice an art history that accounts for the conditions and dynamics of the Middle Ground. This art historical practice must incorporate three distinct characteristics. Firstly, it must operate on the level of the local.‍[21] Middle Ground politics were negotiated not in empires’ distant and cosmopolitan official centers, but through the face-to-face interactions within its territories, specifically in its Native villages and non-Native trade forts. This means that visual and material culture of the Middle Ground, even if imported from distant locales, was actively defined within local microcosms. A peace medal, for instance, might formally represent the US government through the classical symbols of an eagle, a shield, arrows, and an olive branch, but this historical visual coding of the power of the nation-state did not necessarily resonate with, or mean anything at all to, the medal’s owners.‍[22] Instead, the giving of these medals performed local work.
Secondly, an art history of the Middle Ground is relational. Medals bound their gifters and recipients. Gifting a medal created a temporary or fictive kinship between giver and receiver; it locked both parties into the terms and obligations of conditional friendship.‍[23] Such friendship was often expressed in familial terms: it was common among many Native communities to refer to fort, military, or government leaders as “Father” or “Grandfather” in formal address, as such names invoked the expected character, actions, and duties of a father or grandfather.‍[24] Fictive kinship was a widespread practice across Native North America, used to create temporary alliances across parties—even enemy ones—for purposes of trade, military action, or peace; only later were kinship practices adapted to the pays d’en haut and other post-contact situations.‍[25] A relational art history of the Middle Ground is attentive to these ways in which bound parties relied on exchange and gifting to express social expectations and obligations.
Finally, an art history of the Middle Ground is culturally flexible—it moves between the epistemologies and ontologies of its multiple peoples.‍[26] At least two distinct interpretive frames were operating at any given time, around any particular social practice, in the pays d’en haut.‍[27] A peace medal embodied diplomatic overtures from a centralized non-Native government but was used locally to bind Native and non-Native parties into mutual relationship and obligation. Native society dances at forts were both performances that non-Native audience members such as Wied-Neuwied might view and record in ethnographic terms, and the contractual expression of extended kinship and its duties. Yet co-creation and creative misunderstandings constantly blurred such stark distinctions between these parties and purposes: societies changed dance content for fort performances, rendering ethnographic readings incorrect, while fur traders who had married into Native families might themselves participate in village dances or rituals along literal, rather than temporary or fictive, kinship lines. An art history of the Middle Ground fluidly moves between multiple possibilities and positionalities.‍[28]
These three characteristics—local, relational, and culturally flexible—are illustrated by the name bestowed upon Bodmer by Máhchsi-Karéhde (Flying War Eagle), a young Numak'aki warrior.‍[29] After dark on a particularly cold evening, Máhchsi-Karéhde stood locked outside Fort Clark. He called to Bodmer from outside the gates, “Káma-Kapúska! Káma-Kapúska!” In response, the fort watchmen let him in. Máhchsi-Karéhde then proceeded to the Europeans' quarters and spent the night, likely on a pile of furs in front of the fire. He returned for his full-length portrait the next day (fig. 3).‍[30] On the one hand, the name that Máhchsi-Karéhde gave to Bodmer—Kapúska, or “Forcefully Makes Marks”—translated Bodmer’s painting activities into local terms, notably verbs of action.‍[31] The use of káma, a term of endearment like “dear” or “friend,” was also relational, and Máhchsi-Karéhde seems to have called on the obligations of friendship—in this case, for shelter—in a form that both the fort’s guards and the Europeans recognized. In turn, Máhchsi-Karéhde seems to have acted on the mutuality of such obligations, as he sat for his portrait the next day.
Both players were also culturally flexible, as they met the desires of the other—shelter, a portrait on paper—in the others’ terms. This does not mean they acted out of selfless concern for or a deep understanding of the other: it is quite possible that Máhchsi-Karéhde was only thinking about surviving a night that had reached at least twenty degrees Fahrenheit below zero, and that Wied-Neuwied and Bodmer only let the young man into their quarters to be in a better position to add his portrait to their collection. In fact, portrait painting seems to have subsequently increased the social obligations of visits and gifts between the Europeans and each respective sitter, an aspect of the Middle Ground that Wied-Neuwied sometimes deeply resented.‍[32] But all concerned were locked in complex relationships, as demonstrated by the giving of the name Káma-Kapúska, and an art-historical practice must be sensitive to this fact. In the second half of this article, I demonstrate what an art history of the Middle Ground looks like.