Steven L. Grafe

Striking color images depict traditional lifeways and the pain of imprisonmentDuring the 1870s, Cheyenne and Kiowa prisoners of war at Fort Marion, Florida, graphically recorded their responses to incarceration in drawings that conveyed both the present reality of imprisonment and nostalgic memories of home. Now a leading authority on American Indian drawings and paintings examines an important collection of these drawings to reveal how art blossomed at Fort Marion.The Silberman Collection is an unusually complete group of images that illustrate the artists' fascination with the world outside the southern plains, their living conditions and survival strategies as prisoners, and their reminiscences of pre-reservation life. Joyce M. Szabo explains the significance of this preeminent collection, which focuses on seven of the prisoner-artists - most notably Zotom and Making Medicine. Through a selection of 120 striking color images, Szabo shows how each artist creatively recorded his experiences.Szabo compares the artists' various styles, examines repeated themes to show how each artist approached the same subjects, and considers the distinctiveness of these drawings as representing the emergent culture of Fort Marion. She also surveys how Fort Marion art has been collected since the late 1870s and describes Arthur and Shifra Silberman's approaches to collecting.Although other books have considered the Fort Marion artists, this is the first to examine their works in such analytical and comparative detail. Art from Fort Marion: The Silberman Collection captures a unique visual form of Native expression.

The remarkable photographs in Peoples of the Plateau capture the lives of Pacific Northwest Indians at the turn of the twentieth century - and at a turning point in their own history.The Columbia River Plateau, in the interior Pacific Northwest, was populated for centuries by the Umatilla, Walla Walla, and Cayuse Indians. By the late nineteenth century, after the U.S. government had confined these peoples to a single reservation, their lives began to change irrevocably. Major Lee Moorhouse, a businessman and former militia officer, served as an Indian agent during this period. Believing that the Indians he encountered were a ""dying race,"" Moorhouse was driven to collect their artifacts and, for posterity, take their photographs.Although he was not a professional photographer, Moorhouse produced more than 9,000 glass-plate negatives, one-third with Indians as his subjects. Although his works to some degree reflect a stereotypical view, they are an invaluable aid for tribal researchers and historians because they identify their subjects by name.This book marks the first major examination of Moorhouse and his work. Featuring eighty exquisite plates, it not only showcases Moorhouse's extensive photographs but also tells the story of the man - about whom little is known - and of the world in which he lived and worked.