0:11
My name is Ramsey Weeks. I work here at the National Museum of the American Indian as one of the cultural interpreters, part of the education department here. Originally from the Assiniboine Nation, and I’m here today to talk a little bit about the tradition of ledger art.
0:28
And right here on the table we have a beautiful piece of ledger art, a very modern piece but done using that very old tradition. Ledger art, quite simply, is that process of telling stories with pictures. So in this one we actually have a picture of a buffalo hunt happening. We have the Native People here actually chasing those Buffalo. We can even tell the particular location that this is happening, with the black hills in the background. So this is happening in South Dakota. We can even tell directional movement of the buffalo with the prints over here, the hoof prints. So the hunt is actually moving this way. The goal of this is actually to be hunting that white buffalo, the white buffalo being sacred. The one who actually got the hide would be held in a lot of honor. So you can really get a lot of cultural information from just the pictures here. This particular piece of ledger art is actually done on a deer skin.
1:40
These designs over here, while they look an awful lot like the sun design are actually - they can be described in different ways. They can be seen as a directional symbol, they can slo be seen as a symbol of medicine. So that holy power.
2:00
When you actually know the communities quite well - and this would show how well an individual knows the communities - the horses are actually painted very differently, and that painting on the horses would actually tell you who those individuals are. So you can tell, if you are in the community, who is actually on this hunt and who is going to be getting that white buffalo.
2:24
This is just one tradition of the ledger art. I actually have here an image of another piece of ledger art. This is called a winter count. It is also telling stories with just the pictures alone. The winter count, though, is actually a history book. This history book covers 71 years of history, starting in 1800, going out to 1871. So you read this book in that spiral pattern, each one of those symbols represents one year of history and that most important event during that year’s time.
3:03
Right here, in 1801, there was actually an outbreak of smallpox. You can see the outline of that man with those red dots on him. Right next to him, that horse shoe, in 1802, was the first successful horse raid in the community. This one is actually coming from the Dakota community, from the Minnesota area.
3:30
And as we continue on around, it’s not just those horrid events like smallpox, measles, but there would also be celestial events recorded. Right over here, for example, we have the moon, the stars around the moon, and what’s really hard to see here are teeny tiny dots. Now here the red dots don’t represent smallpox (star don’t get smallpox). They represent falling stars. So this was actually a meteor shower, one of the largest of the century.
4:05
You can also record people’s names with this one. So this design right here is actually a crow - that big black bird. Sticking out of the big black bird is an arrow. This was actually the year that the war chief, Big Crow, died in battle. So you can get even that specific type of information. So that’s also that tradition of ledger art, used in a different way, also used to tell stories to tell that history using just the pictures alone to keep the story.