Pictures and power: The historical anthropology of Iroquois painting, A.D. 1600--2000

This dissertation examines the relationship between pictures and power in the history of Iroquois or Haudenosaunee painting from A.D. 1600--2000. The central analytical units are Iroquois artists (painters), indexes (pictures), prototypes (subject matter), and audiences. Through a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and historical, visual, and archaeological research using primary and secondary sources, Iroquois painting is described through time, and situated within shifting socioeconomic worlds, which include extensive autonomous territories in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and reduced, confined territories of Indian Reservations/Reserves in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because of the colonial contexts in which the documentation of Native American cultures and societies transpired, histories of Native American visual expression have received little attention. The evidence for Iroquois painting during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was mainly recorded by Europeans and Euro-Americans who often held little regard for these depictive practices. This disregard extended into the nineteenth century, when Iroquois painting was classified as pictography, and situated by unilinear evolutionists as an inferior form of writing practiced by "savage" and "barbarian" peoples. For most of the twentieth century, Iroquois painting was rejected as an "inauthentic" expression of Indianness, while simultaneously rejected as art. This treatment of Iroquois pictures by non-Natives has produced a substantial record of expressive and subjective Native agency, but at the same time has hidden or repressed this record beneath layers of historical discursive practices.;The dissertation suggests three distinct periods of Iroquois painting since European contact. The eighteenth and seventeenth century evidences widespread, public, intercultural practices of painting on human bodies, trees, bark, and leather. The nineteenth century is marked by a near-total absence of Iroquois painting. Iroquois painting returned in the twentieth century, especially towards the end. From a formal perspective, enormous discontinuity is demonstrated across these three periods. But from a Native perspective, there is a functional continuity to these diverse genres of painting: conveying and constituting specifically Native identities and experience. As markers of identity, Iroquois pictures are inscribed power relations of social and cultural memory. To trace their history is to describe cultural transformation and post-colonial Native survivance.