Subject: wic'âša 'shirt wearer' warrior

Culture: Lakota Sioux

Setting: Plains wars, northern Great Plains 1862-1890

* Metropolitan Museum of Art > Americas

"Ledger Drawings

Men of the Great Plains long recorded their histories in images inscribed on rock or painted on animal-skin robes and tipis. The pictorial chronicles usually proclaimed personal exploits -- heroic battles, triumphant hunts, visionary experiences -- but they also preserved family and tribal histories. During the nineteenth century, as whites first arrived and then settled into the Plains, Native men began to draw their chronicles on the pages of the ledger books used by arriving traders and military men for accounting. During the 1870s, when numerous Plains warriors were imprisoned, many drew narratives in ledger books of specific events from their lives. Individual deeds that validated rank, position, and abilities were included in the narrative images. The small jewel-like drawings, often extremely inventive and executed with exquisite artistry, not only reveal the traditions of the Plains but also, poignantly, illustrate historical events that transformed those traditions forever."

* Carnegie Museum of Natural History > Alcoa Foundation Hall of American Indians

"Here Sitting Bull wears a buffalo-horn headdress like the one above. The drawing tells the story of Sitting Bull taking an Assiniboine captive during a battle in 1857." ...

* Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology > Wiyohpiyata - Lakota Images of the Contested West