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

Karl Bodmer, Síh-Chidä, Mandan Man, 1833.

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Fort Clark as a Workshop
Before anyone sat for a portrait in Bodmer’s studio at Fort Clark, warriors arrived to the whitewashed single-room house built for the trio of Europeans in order to draw their own.‍[34] On November 13, 1833, Síh-Chidä (Be-Yellow Feather) came with a group of warriors to look at Bodmer’s drawings and portraits. He then sat down at Bodmer’s table, claimed a sheet of paper and colors as his own, and proceeded to draw portraits of Bodmer and Wied-Neuwied.‍[35] He came to draw again on the evening of the sixteenth, staying the night to finish the picture in the morning; Bodmer then gave the young man supplies, and Síh-Chidä returned with more drawings on the eighteenth.‍[36] It was only on December 5 that the Europeans convinced Síh-Chidä to sit for a portrait (fig. 4); the warrior then stayed through the afternoon to complete another set of portraits of Wied-Neuwied and Bodmer.‍[37]
Likewise, Mató-Tópe completed several drawings himself before sitting for a single portrait. On November 24, Wied-Neuwied and Bodmer gave supplies to Mató-Tópe, who returned with a drawing of war deeds a week later (fig. 5). Mató-Tópe stayed to watch Bodmer at work through the rest of the morning. He returned again on December 8 and 10 to watch Bodmer work. He finally sat for a portrait on January 17 (fig. 6), then drew another drawing of war deeds for Wied-Neuwied on February 26 and 27 (fig. 7).
What is clear from these dates is the movement between roles for a number of warriors, between being the sitter and being the mark maker. And while past interpretations have read a unidirectional non-Native artistic influence on the Native work from the Fort Clark studio, the workshop ingenuity of the warriors may have been inspired by each other, or from their gazes at their peer sitters in Bodmer’s works.‍[38] Take, for instance, the second war deed drawing of Mató-Tópe (see fig. 7). Mató-Tópe portrays himself with the lances of two societies in which he was a member. To be a keeper of the lance often meant that one had leadership roles within the society, and Mató-Tópe seems to have performed this role when he led the Society of the Half-Shorn Heads into the plaza of Fort Clark for a dance on the third of April. Did Mató-Tópe include his lances in his drawing because he was moving toward realism, as past scholars have claimed? Or was he instead using Native visual languages and modeling his self-depiction on the earlier portrait of Pitätapiú, an Assiniboine warrior who posed with the lance of his warrior society, as well as his personal shield and medicine (fig. 8)?‍[39]
The war deed drawing displays the co-creation processes at work in the Fort Clark studio. While the media of paper and watercolor they used were Western artistic tools, the mark making spoke the local Plains visual language of battle honors and rights. Depictions of the self were not made for the purpose of capturing likeness but rather for recording a lifetime of deeds and events. For example, warriors recorded their coup counts, or battle honor marks, through formulaic schemes of representation that were painted onto clothing or hides. The coup marks belonging to Red White Buffalo, for instance, record a number of Numak'aki–specific warrior marks for horse raids and war parties, tallying heroic deeds such as capturing horses and killing enemies (fig. 9). Such deeds, accumulated over time, then qualified one for leadership. If Bodmer went about creating likenesses, then, so too did Mató-Tópe and Pitätapiú, through their displays of the material culture objects associated with their leadership, a means of making claims for their previous warrior deeds and personal qualities of strength, ho'pini (loosely translated as “medicine”), and bravery on the battlefield. Workshop experimentation and its aftereffects should be understood in relation to the patterns, rules, and purposes of this long-established local visual vocabulary.