It was only a day after the Europeans had arrived at Fort Clark and settled into their quarters that Mató-Tópe and a delegation of other Native leaders arrived to look at Bodmer’s portfolio of portraits, as discussed at the outset of this essay. As recorded by Wied-Neuwied, Mató-Tópe “recognized several of [the sitters].” Mató-Tópe and Péhriska-Rúhpa then arrived two days later and again spent time viewing Bodmer’s extraordinarily detailed works.
It is important to unpack Mató-Tópe’s act of recognizing portrait sitters, long before the paintings left Indian country, because such recognition did not necessarily occur through Bodmer’s skilled hand at Western-style mimesis. The portrait of Kiäsax, for instance, featured a familiar resident of the Awatíkihu (fig. 13). A Pikuni (Piegan) warrior, he had married a Minitari woman, and the couple lived in the Third, Fourth, or Fifth Village. Bodmer had painted Kiäsax aboard their steamer while headed northward to Fort Union in June 1833 (the summer before the Europeans were stranded at Fort Clark on their return south), and Kiäsax seems to have responded to the session by gathering plants for Wied-Neuwied’s botanical collections.[46]
Later, in the close quarters at Fort Clark, Mató-Tópe’s recognition of Kiäsax would have come through likeness, yes, but also through various material culture elements evident in the portrait. Native viewers would have recognized the metal cross and Diné (Navajo) First Phase chief’s blanket as trade items from distant locales. They also would have recognized that the young man had taken on the Minitari practice of dividing his long hair into multiple clay-smeared twists that were then gathered in the back, a tribally specific outward sign that, in the case of Kiäsax, would have potentially declared his military allegiance to his adopted kin and tribe.
Likeness-as-mimesis has been given extraordinary power in contemporaneous sources on 1830s portraiture in Indian country, whether in accounts of the stylistic change among Plains artists after Bodmer’s visit, the advertising language Wied-Neuwied employed once back in Europe to describe Bodmer’s work, or the letters home from George Catlin, who claimed for himself a great “magic” through his ability to capture his Native sitters’ likenesses.[47] These interpretations all rely on a Western notion of likeness-as-mimesis: the closer in likeness that a portrait is, the more skilled the artist and the more admired the work. Yet Native recognition of the “magic” in Indian country portraits did not come through an artist’s ability to convey likeness but through the subject’s presence-in-absence.[48] In Native cultures, to be in the presence of an object made by Grandfather is to be in the presence of Grandfather himself.[49] Through presence-in-absence, an object becomes the associated person, extending the referenced person across space and time.[50]
A host of Native practices operated within this framework. The sacred bundle histories kept by various Plains tribes, for instance, were bundles of presence-in-absence, whereby each contained element—a bone, a feather, a skull, and so on—served as the trace of the person, past or present, who had contributed that element.[51] When a ka-ka, or keeper, narrated a bundle in their keeping, they then recounted each of these persons and the connected moment that had motivated the contribution; when they prayed to the bundle, they spoke to all those connected with it, asking them to intervene or act.[52] Each element of the bundle became a presence, even in the original contributor’s absence, and that presence was believed to hold the power to act. Such presence-in-absence was carried by the physical traces or remainders of the referenced person.
A portrait for which an individual sat could carry these traces and their presence-in-absence as much as the bundles and Native-made objects they may have made in their lifetime. When Mató-Tópe, Péhriska-Rúhpa, and other Native leaders crowded into the Fort Clark quarters in early November 1833, then, it is entirely possible that the men thought of Bodmer’s array of portraits along the lines of a bundle—not one that held spiritual significance or tribal histories, the way local ones did, but one that carried the presence-in-absence of warriors like Kiäsax to other Native villages and fur trade forts as the Europeans traveled, eventually taking them “to Europe.”[53] Such a notion would not value a portrait along the lines of mimetic likeness, but on whether or not the portrait effectively carried their trace, their presence-in-absence, across both space and time. For Awatíkihu warriors in particular, the notion of sending one’s presence-in-absence to distant locales overlapped with local ideas of leadership and rights, as detailed in the next section. These ideas suggest that sitters in Bodmer’s studio used Western-style portraiture as a means for mobile political claims on their own behalf—a major motivation for pursuing the artistic co-creation of portraiture.