The Bison: American Icon

January 28, 2012 – May 25, 2012

Few animals conjure the power and symbolic presence of the North American bison. Whether painted on a tipi or an artist’s canvas, minted on a nickel, or seen grazing in Yellowstone National Park, the image of the bison stirs in us deep loyalties to the North American landscape. Wild and fundamental, the bison is a familiar part of our shared heritage.

The exhibition opens with a primary mystery: For thousands of years until the early 1860s, there were tens of millions of bison roaming the plains of North America. By 1890, there were fewer than 300.  What happened? Centered on this question, The Bison explores the “before” and “after” of the bison’s dramatic decline. It also shows how the bison’s seeming extinction was ultimately averted by conservationists. In charting this positive outcome, the exhibition explores the many ways that the bison’s identity was transformed yet again into a symbol of America and a popular image.

For Bison: American Icon, we chose to add artifacts.   Loans of thirty-two artifacts from Plains Indians were negotiated with the Field Museum in Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  Both institutions have been enthusiastic and cooperative in working with us to choose artifacts that complimented the exhibit and each other’s loans. 

With these loans, this exhibit will be the largest traveling exhibit of Plains Indian bison culture ever shown in the region. Tribes represented in the exhibit will include Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Kiowa, Crow, Lakota and Mandan.   The artifacts include tool kits made of bison and used to process bison; painted war shields and covers made of bison, 19th century model tipi’s made of bison, flywhisks made of bison tail and skate blades made of bison ribs.

No one piece better embodies the story of the bison and the native plains people than the large embroidered Buffalo Robe made by Sak-wi-ah-ki (Earth Woman).  The robe has collected by Charles H. Stephens, an illustrator who had been a student of Thomas Eakins at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts.  Stephens spent about four months on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana in 1891.  He acquired the robe from Dr. John E. Jenkins, the physician on the reservation.  The purchase price was a painting that Stephens did of Jenkins’ wife.  Jenkins had received the robe as payment for medical services rendered to Joseph Kipp, the trader on the Agency.  Joe Kipp was the son of James Kipp and Sak-wi-ah-ki (Earth Woman), a Mandan born in 1803.  Earth Woman was the daughter of Mato- Topa (Four Bears), the famous chief of the Mandan, painted by both Karl Bodmer and George Catlin in the 1830s.  She and James Kipp, who ran the trading post among the Mandan, married in 1821. As a young girl Earth Woman knew Sacagawea (Bird Woman) and retold many of her stories of her expedition with Lewis and Clark. Her father, Mato-Topa, had met with Lewis and Clark.  After James Kipp died, Earth Woman lived with her son Joseph and ultimately moved with him to the Blackfeet Agency.  She lived in a cabin on Kipp’s ranch where she lived in the “old style” of her people, producing beaded and quilled objects.  It was Earth Woman who produced this bison robe with the quilled decoration running the length of the backbone.  The piece was made in the 1880s (perhaps a bit earlier, but not any earlier than the late 1860s which saw the introduction of chemical dyes for the trade…the quills are all dyed using chemical dyes).   All-in-all, the piece makes for a very rich and detailed story encompassing many of the major figures in the history of native/Anglo relations throughout the 19th century.