One way to understand portraiture at Fort Clark, and within the larger Middle Ground context, is through the calumet, an elaborately decorated and ceremonially powerful smoking pipe (fig. 2). On January 15, 1834, Mató-Tópe stopped by the Fort Clark room on his way to an adoption ceremony that was to be held at the nearby Numak'aki village of Nuptadi (Second Village). There, a “medicine son” would be adopted and “the medicine pipes” would be danced.

Adoption in the neighboring Awatíkihu (Five Villages) that surrounded Fort Clark happened through the calumet.‍[13] Calumets were common among Missouri River peoples as a means to create the adoptive kin relationships needed for trade. A typical trade event lasted for days and could occur between hostile parties, as long as the calumet was invoked, to create a temporary connection:

Exchange events typically began with advance messengers giving notice to a host community that a group planned a trading visit. Following a period of preparation on both sides, the host community extended an invitation to enter the village and feasts were held, along with a council to fix prices. After several days the calumet ceremony itself was held, cementing a fictive kinship relationship between leading men of each group, and by extensions [sic] their followers, both men and women. The event concluded with social dances, dancing for gifts, and gambling. Goods changed hands at each step of this complex process.‍[14]

As exceptionally effective tools for binding parties together, calumets later became a central feature of the pays d'en haut and the shared customs of the French fur trade.‍[15]

The specific shape and purpose of the January ceremony attended by Mató-Tópe is unknown, but the prevalence and continued use of the calumet in tribally specific ways is important, as it testifies to its continued power among various Native peoples to bind parties together across the nineteenth century. Prior to the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, for instance, what the Oglala Lakota know as Hunka wands were potentially still used for the “making relations ceremony” to bind the participating intertribal warriors together.‍[16]

Portraits of the frontier acted as metaphorical calumets. They bound their sitters and makers together within relational contexts that were flexible enough to retain their local meanings, even as they crossed cultural divides. Their exchange moved material objects into new hands. Portraits came with obligations—and they paved the way for other types of exchanges to take place.

Understanding the works of the Fort Clark studio as metaphorical calumets differs dramatically from previous interpretations of these works. Native American art history, modeled on formalist and iconographic methodologies, has focused on decoding the depicted material culture or framing a process of non-Native (Western-based) influence and change.‍[17] Top-down ethnographic and ideological readings have dominated American art history, which has often codified nineteenth-century portraits of Native peoples through their later inclusion in non-Native “Indian Galleries,” or large collections of portraits and Native-made objects displayed in museological, commercial, or state spaces.‍[18]

Yet the later migrations and uses of portraits on which much art historical analysis has been built are not equivalent to either the portraits’ moments of making or the exchanges and interrelationships in which they were born.‍[19] By focusing on spatially and temporally distant uses of Native portraits, dominant interpretations rehearse narratives of manifest destiny, often rendering their Native sitters without agency.‍[20] These readings have attended to issues of power, but they do not present a methodology attentive to the presence and complexities of Native historical thought, languages, persons, and cultures. Paying attention to the Middle Ground and its exchange patterns requires the development of a multilayered art historical approach, one large enough to encompass the various forms of mark making found in Indian country in the 1830s.