Truth vs Perspective
I took the first early morning train at 4:50 am from Washington to New York. When I arrived at the DC Amtrack station, it was absolutely still and empty.
Washington DC Amtrack Station at 4:00 am
On the train ride to New York, I noticed all the ways we have divided and resourced the landscape.
Coming out of the new Moynihan station (at Penn Station) in New York, I was overwhelmed by the cocophany of sounds and energy. I always loved the vibration of New York, but this time, perhaps because of the isolation of the pandemic, it felt overwheming, and it took me a few hours to adjust. But eventually I did, and I walked from my hotel in Chelsea all the way up to the NY Historical Society on the upper west side.
New York Historical Society
There, I had a 2:00 appointment to meet Emily Croll, the Deputy Museum Director, to look at about a dozen Hudson River School drawings and an oil sketch that are normally in storage. She walked me through a few locked doors to a conference room, and she wheeled in a cart with a stack of matted images.
Asher B. Durand, Black Mountain from the Harbor Islands, Lake George, New York, 1874
Asher B. Durand, Study of Two Trees, Bolton, Lake George, New York, 1863
Looking at a Bierstadt oil study of individual Native Americans (below), I asked Emily about the relationships between the Hudson River School painters, especially Bierstadt, and the Indigenous people they drew and painted. Did the HRS painters interact with Native Americans as if they were curious natural elements in the landscape, or did they interact with them as equal humans, person-to-person? It is a question I have not yet been able to answer, and I think it is an important one. Bierstadt must have asked Indigenous individuals to pose for him. He noted all their individual characteristics, studied their clothing, wrote their names below each portrait. What was he thinking about them? Did he care in some way for them and their situation?
Albert Bierstadt, Five Portraits of North American Indians, 1859, National Historical Society
The next day, my sister and I went to the MET to look at their Hudson River School collection, and it only deepened my questions about these painters’ human, intellectual and conceptual relationships with Indigenous people who had experienced genocide and the loss of their land to “manifest destiny.”
Albert Bierstadt, Study of Native Amerian Leaders Made at Fort Laramie, 1859, Metropolitan Museum of Art (the MET)
In addition to another oil study of Native Americans by Bierstadt at the MET, this one on public display in the galleries (image above), I also took a close look at The Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak. According to the gallery title cards:
“In early 1859, Bierstadt accompanied a government survey expedition, headed by Frederick W. Lander*, to the Nebraska Territory. By summer, the party had reached the Wild River Range of the Rocky Mountains in present-day Wyoming…”
“… at a time of tense relations between the Lakota (Teton Sioux) and the United States government. He made vivid field sketches of the Indigenous peoples he encountered there, including this powerful dipiction of four Native leaders whose names he inscribed below each portrait. The figures in this study may have inspired the artist’s representation of Indigenous men at lower-right in his major painting The Rocky Mountians, Lander’s Peak…which also resulted from this trip…”
“…Painted in New York after Bierstadt’s return from these travels, this work advertised the landscape as frontier destined to be claimed by White settlers, according to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. This belief that Americans were the divinely ordained “masters” of the continent systematically ignored-with dire consequences-the presence of Indigenous populations, such as the Soshone peoples dipicted in the foreground.”
*According to Wikipedia: “The United States government employed [Lander] on transcontinental surveys to select a route for a Pacific railroad. Later he undertook a survey for the same purpose at his own expense and was the only man of the party to survive. He constructed the overland wagon route in the face of great difficulties and constant hostility of the Indians. (My note: the truth was the opposite - the Native Americans were suffering “constant hostility” from the U.S. government/colonists/white supremacists.) After its completion in 1859, the Lander Road became popular with wagon trains as an alternate route from Burnt Ranch in the Wyoming Territory to Fort Hall in the Oregon Territory. His expedition to survey the Lander Road in 1859 included artists Albert Bierstadt, Henry Hitchings, and Francis Seth Frost, who photographed, sketched, and painted some of the earliest images that people could see of the West.”
Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863
Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, detail: bottom right
Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, detail: bottom center
Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, detail: bottom left
I was surprised to come across an initiative at the MET, Native Perspectives, through which (according to the program’s website) “contemporary Native artists and historians have been invited to respond to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Euro-American works in the American Wing's collection.” The Native perspective is completely different than the museum’s curitorial perspective. As I experience it, the Native perspective is directly linked to what the land means spiritually, which is the living experience of all beings. The Euro-centric perspective is about ownership, conquest, resource, and power - completely disconnected from spirit. The Native Perspective program is a start, but I don’t think it is enough, because it presents the Native voice as an alternative view, instead of the primary view - as a perspective instead of as truth. That is why the website is better than the gallery experience - the website leaves out the Euro-centric perspective completely.
The Native Perspective for The Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak was written by artist Kay WalkingStick - who is of Cherokee heritage. Her paintings focus on the American landscape and its metaphorical significances. You can visit her website here. Her perspective seems to suggest that Bierstadt was sympathetic, and that his idealized version of the scene was pointing out exactly what would soon be lost.
“Young and eager to see and draw the western United States, Bierstadt joined Colonel Frederick W. Lander's 1859 survey expedition to the Nebraska Territory. He separated from Lander's caravan in the Wind River Range (in present-day Wyoming) to make oil studies of the mountains, animals, and Indigenous people. Painted in New York, the finished work here is a composite based on drawings, photographs, and oil sketches. However, it is not a picture of a specific place, but an idealization of the romance of the American West. The Shoshone village in the foreground bustling with family life represents the old ways, which Bierstadt knew would not last: the bison were being decimated and with them the traditional lifeways of the Indians.”
Below is an example of how the Native Perspectives are presented, here with a painting by John Frederick Kensett of the Hudson River (the river was named Muhheacanituck by the Mohicans).
John Frederick Kennsett, Hudson River Scene, 1857
“To me, every bend in the Muhheacanituck (Hudson River) is a beloved view. It is a fertile, life-giving place where Mohican ancestors cultivated bountiful harvests and enjoyed tranquil canoe journeys downriver to exchange news, game, and other gifts with their Munsee kin. It is a sacred landscape from which our surviving community continues to derive pride and meaning. It is our namesake, the Muhheacanituck, the waters that are never still. It is home.
The fort's presence is a reminder of the colonists' need to defend lands that were not their home. Today that tension is still present even if the forts are not. Every day we confront this truth as we work to protect burial places and other sacred sites. The theft is still unresolved.”
—Bonney Hartley (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican)