What does genocide look like? A plaintive, pathos-filled exhibition at David Nolan Gallery of 87 Native American ledger drawings — named after the ledger books that the artists appropriated as material for their work — from the 19th century offers an answer. Many of the drawings were made in a prisoner-of-war camp in St. Augustine, Florida, where dozens of members of the tribes of the Great Plains were incarcerated amid a brutal U.S. military campaign of relocation and displacement. The drawings depict, with a simplicity that belies their sophistication, heartrending scenes of imprisonment, isolation, and forced assimilation as well as glorious celebrations of a way of life outside the prison walls that was already receding into oblivion.

“Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865–1900” has been beautifully organized by genius obsessive Donald Ellis, a Vancouver-based private dealer who showed a handful of similar drawings at the 2017 Frieze Art Fair. The current exhibition is timed for Master Drawings New York in the hopes that curators might rectify the inexplicable and disappointing arm’s-length stance the art world has so far adopted toward this work. (Much of this work is found in ethnographic and natural-history museums and libraries.) The drawings may appear crude, featuring blank or ruled backgrounds that have been decorated with colored pencils — people, horses, and tepees. Encouraged by the prison’s commander, who attempted to assimilate these warriors by cutting their hair and stripping them of their traditional clothes, they drew these pictures to sell to whites and eke out a living. But what they made is visionary art, incorporating the traditions of semi-nomadic tribes, such as hide-painting, all under a sophisticated system of narrative and space.

Start in the gallery with the Fort Marion drawings, where you can see two hallucinogenic pictures of the trains that brought nearly 80 Native Americans to their new “home” in St. Augustine. One was made by Nokkoist (Bear’s Heart) when he was 25. (He died at 31 from tuberculosis contracted probably from colonists.) Another drawing by Bear’s Heart features a landscape of evergreens surrounding buildings with hills along one side: a nearby island. There is a ship manned by what at first seem like soldiers — in reality, they are prisoners outfitted in U.S. military uniforms, taught to sail and give white people tours of their prison camp. In another drawing, the fort’s interior is seen from a God’s-eye view. There are dozens of uniformed men, most Native American prisoners whose hair has been shorn. We see them marching two by two in the yard. It hits you with horrible force that, in the most ghastly sense, there had never been Native American art quite like this before.

There are also visions of the past. We see Native American ceremonies: the sun dance; a meeting between Cheyenne and Pawnee; a successful buffalo hunt; tribespeople in full warrior regalia, decked out in feathers. There’s a gut-wrenching warrior procession: dozens of fighters on horses arrayed in different colors, the line curving like a kind of snake to stay within the borders of the piece of paper. Two drawings depict Cheyenne warriors, each labeled with their names: Roman Nose, Squint Eyes, Making Medicine, Little Chief, Cohoe, and Shave Head. The format is formal, the figures flat, with subtle shifts between the foreground and background. Each horse is labeled, simply, “horse” — a word written by artists learning to communicate in English.

It is tempting to see subversion or resistance in these drawings, but I am more struck by their clarity and honesty. The great depth of this art comes from the witness the artists bore, the atrocities they lived through with the steadiest and truest of gazes. They ask you to open your eyes as they did so that you might see.

On April 28, 1875, 72 Native American prisoners of war from five different Great Plains tribes (Arapaho, Caddo, Cheyenne, Commanche, and Kiowa) were shackled and transported by train from Fort Sill, in Oklahoma territory, to Fort Marion, St. Augustine, Florida. The “trouble causers,” as the press labeled them, were greeted with vehement derision by the White settler crowds that came out to taunt and humiliate them every time the train stopped. Nearly a month later, on May 21, their harrowing journey came to an end when they arrived at Fort Marion. 

There, Captain Richard Henry Pratt forced the men to assimilate into White Protestant society by cutting their hair, demanding they dress in army uniforms, instructing them to speak English, and providing them with ledger books in which to draw. Pratt’s model was the United States Army’s insistence on conformity. This was one way that the US eradicated Indigenous cultures; the other was genocide. 

During their three years of incarceration, from May 1875 to April 1878, Pratt gave the men art supplies and permitted them to sell their drawings — made while White settlers were obliterating Indigenous people — and keep the money. The ledger drawings became a concentrated point of resistance, an expression of individual and communal pride, a form of preservation and the continuation of each Indigenous culture’s pictographic tradition, an alternative history of their imprisonment, and more than that.

Most of the 100-plus ledger drawings in the heartbreaking exhibition Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865–1900 at David Nolan Gallery, in collaboration with Donald Ellis Gallery, have never been shown in the United States. This alone makes it the most important gathering of ledger drawings on view in New York since the 1996 touring show Plains Indian Drawings, 1865–1935: Pages from a Visual History, organized by the Drawing Center, and 2016’s Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains, at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. The Drawing Center show changed Ellis’s life. He visited it more than 50 times, and has since become one of the world’s leading authorities on ledger drawings.

A significant portion of this exhibition calls attention to two artists: Nokkoist (Bear’s Heart) (Cheyenne, 1851–1882) and Ohettoint (Kiowa, 1852–1934). In November 1876, in recognition of his abilities, Nokkoist received a drawing book of 24 pages, rather than a discarded ledger book. He wrote his name on the book’s signature page. He was 25 and his art was as powerful as anything being made in the US at that time. Also on view are works from a book with drawings by both Nokkoist and Ohettoint, and from Ohettoint’s drawing book. 

With one exception, Nokkoist drew only on one side of the paper in his book. For me, his signature and that decision mark a shift in his intentions, from using art to record events to claiming ownership over his creative property — both of which are acts of resistance. The subjects of his 12 drawings include scenes of a way of life that no longer existed (“Successful Buffalo Hunt” and “Cheyenne Warrior Procession”), historic events (“Meeting Between Cheyennes and Osage”), memories of his journey from Fort Sill to Fort Marion (“Paddlewheeler”), and religious ceremonies (“Observing the Sun Dance”). Together, they present a record of a man moving from the past to the present, as in “Fort Marion Parade Ground,” where the incarcerated men, dressed in army regulation uniforms, are seen marching inside the fort. At once frontal and aerial, the view underscores a feeling of entrapment. The artist’s Great Plains world has been replaced by a prison overseen by White colonists. 

In “Locomotive (rector/verso),” which spreads across two pages, Nokkoist renders an elongated brown and green locomotive with a pink cab pulling a pink coal car and a canary yellow passenger car. What look like decorative green boughs and wreathes adorn the side. In the feel of it, this drawing is a departure from a ledger drawing portraying a train approaching Fort Marion, with its barred windows (not in exhibition), attributed to the artist. In this absent drawing, we see the train frontally and the fort’s imposing facade aerially, in the upper left-hand corner. It suggests that Nokkoist’s world has been turned upside down, and he is cut off completely from the world he once knew. In contrast to the ledger drawing, “Locomotive (rector/verso)” is shown without context, as if inhabiting a boundless space.

In addition to the drawings of Nokkoist and Ohettoit, all of which belong in an art museum, the exhibition includes many other exquisite works. A grid of 16 ledger drawings of a horse (c. 1880), attributed to an artist named Cedar Tree, occupies one room. In each of the drawings, the artist, who was evidently left-handed, renders the animals’s contour in a single unbroken line. 

In an alcove is “Pictorial Muslin” (c. 1900), an ink and watercolor work by an anonymous Lakota artist, which was likely made to sell to tourists. The artist’s delicate touch and fierce attention to color and to the details of feathers, horses, and riders is riveting. 

Made during the waning years of the Hudson River School, and on a modest scale with humble materials, the drawings of Nokkoist, Ohettoint, and others communicate a dark side of US history. It is a story that Albert Bierstadt and other White painters chose to overlook. If ledger drawings are going to be confined to ethnological and history museums, then it is time we put works by Bierstadt and his contemporaries in the same museum as an example of White privilege. 

Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865-1900is an exhilarating presentation of nineteenth century drawings that illuminate an essential and complex piece of American art and history. The exhibition features over one hundred Plains Ledger drawings created by Arapaho, Cheyenne, Hidatsa, Kiowa, and Lakota warrior artists that testify to the power of the image both in its making and in its capacity to speak to the depths of the human spirit. 

Ledger art refers to drawings made in white colonizers’ ledger books primarily by Southern Plains Indian warrior artists about personal and tribal triumphs in accordance with pictographic traditions going back to petroglyphs and paintings on buffalo hide. But whether in accounting books, notebooks, or on single sheets of paper, ledger drawings were made by Native American warrior artists with materials they secured in trades or took from their enemies’ dead bodies on the battlefield. Thus, as the US government was executing its self-declared mandate of Manifest Destiny by taking over Native lands, killing and displacing their citizens, and eliminating the buffalo on whose survival the tribal communities depended, warrior artists responded to the epic upheaval with articulations of valor drawn over the lines, numbers, and words on the pages of their aggressors’ books. It is tragically ironic how the compression of their recorded chronicles from buffalo hides to sheets of paper corresponded to their forced confinement. But faced with their own extinction, Ledger artists prevailed and, fusing acts of drawing and telling, they embedded their cultural narratives and worldview in their art and shared it amongst themselves and with non-Native people for perpetuity. 

It is noteworthy that the first historical survey of late nineteenth century/early twentieth century Plains Indian drawings took place at the Drawing Center, a contemporary arts institution in New York City. The exhibition introduced the genre of Plains Indian ledger drawings to a generation of artists, curators, academics, and general viewers who were astounded and inspired by this little-known legacy of American art and history. Today, in the wake of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and the Black Lives Matter movement which helped raise awareness about the structural environmental and racial violence towards Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, Fort Marion and Beyond offers a new opportunity to witness a prodigious group of artistically significant ledger drawings that serve as a tangible bridge of communication and insight between the past and the present.

A rich and turbulent history unfurls from an exclusively Indigenous perspective in this thoughtful installation throughout the two galleries and connecting hallway. The show is comprised of drawings from three periods: pre-reservation era (1865-1875), Fort Marion (mid 1875-mid 1878), and reservation era (1878-1890). Appealing to a modern sensibility, the drawings share a generally spare vocabulary dominated by lines of graphite, colored pencil, and ink, along with figurative forms touched in or filled in with lines or washes of sometimes startlingly vivid color, and the supremacy of space as an expressive envelope within which events and people play themselves out. But the familiarity stops there. The pre-reservation drawings are simple, pared down compositions that represent life as it existed on the Plains for millennia. Two small drawings in the hallway, circa 1870, by an unknown Cheyenne artist are breathtakingly poignant in their austerity. In one, a horse and rider materialize in profile out of the space of the page with a delicate, crisp line of black ink and pale washes of pink and grey. A thin, wobbly line connects the figure to a floating glyph above, a common ledger drawing feature that identifies a person, and five short horizontal lines with vertical tails suggest the firing of arrows or bullets. Another group of early drawings installed in the left gallery are attributed to an anonymous Cheyenne warrior from the Tie Creek Ledger Book. In them, repeated patterns of curved shapes and dots convey the dynamic movement of horses and warriors, respectively, while concentrated fields of horizontal lines describe an onslaught of enemy ammunition being launched at the protagonist. Intrinsic to these and later ledger drawings is a multivalent, multidimensional sense of space and time based on Native American lived experience (as contrasted with the order, linearity, and single point perspective prized in Euro-American art). Figures occupying different places on the ledger sheet, as in the drawing attributed to Arrow in the Cedar Tree Ledger Book, for example, are likely illustrating a succession of actions and movements over a period of time and, perhaps, from different vantage points too. 

When Plains warrior life as portrayed on buffalo hides gave way to life on government reservations, subject matter in ledger drawings expanded to include scenes of courtship, hunting, and ceremonial events. Fort Marion and Beyond offers jewel after jewel by known and unknown artists from the reservation period with meanings and associations that may never be fully accessible to contemporary viewers, even as they elicit perceptions about Indigenous life and art after contact with white culture. A two-sided drawing from 1880 portrays a warrior in full regalia on a yellow horse counting coup on a uniformed man with a rifle on his back; on the verso is a procession of red and yellow horses galloping from right to left and, it seems, beyond the page, while the colonial wagon they are harnessed to remains static. Attributed to Southern Arapaho, Mad Bull, from the Mad Bull Ledger Book, the drawing exhibits a greater refinement of line and color in the depiction of clothing and in the representation of figures in space than in pre-reservation drawings. A series of courtship drawings attributed to Northern Cheyenne, Eugene Standing Elk, circa 1882, is dazzling in its polished details and use of saturated color as it documents a suitor’s ritual of wooing a squaw and in one of them, the paramour and his horse stare uncharacteristically boldly out at the viewer as the woman remains in profile. A grid of sixteen images, each of a single horse drawn in graphite at the bottom of a lined sheet of paper in ever so slightly different positions is, at once, unassuming and sophisticated. Attributed to southern Arapaho, Cedar Tree, circa 1880, from the Cedar Tree Ledger book, the installation is like a flip book of a horse in motion and recalls Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic study, Horse in Motion (1878), done just a few years before. 

Another gallery is devoted entirely to Fort Marion drawings made by two artists, Nokkoist (Bear’s Heart) of the Cheyenne Nation, and Ohettoint, of the Kiowa tribe. They were two of seventy-two indigenous warriors notoriously incarcerated without a trial and sent across the country to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida in mid-1875 for three years for their alleged roles in the Red River War, the US military operation aimed at displacing the Plains tribes from their lands. Captain Richard Henry Pratt, who oversaw their capture, their transport, and arrival at prison, believed in the promise of educating the prisoners so they could assimilate into Euro-American culture. Towards this end, he provided at least twenty-six prisoners with art supplies so that they could make and sell their drawings to locals and visitors. He also made gifts of drawing books to politicians and friends to advance his cause. Much has been published and talked about this period and drawings. Much work needs to be done. But it is irrefutable how much of a departure the Fort Marion drawings are from earlier Plains art. 

Individually and collectively, the Fort Marion ledger drawings represent a re-envisioning of the artist-prisoner’s visual world. For the first time, the artist-prisoners made drawings based on personal experience and direct observation as opposed to following established pictorial conventions. Bear’s Heart’s Locomotive and Paddlewheeler, both circa 1876, portray modes of transportation the prisoners took for the first time on their journey across the country. Surprisingly charming and candy colored, the drawings, nonetheless, reveal a sharp eye for detail in transcribing the mechanical parts and workings of motorized vehicles that must have been simultaneously frightening and fascinating. Observing the Guards from the Fort, Fort Marion Parade Ground, and Sun Dance are other examples of drawings Bear Heart made from his observations of events and of his new surroundings in St. Augustine. This radical shift in artistic intention and subject matter, a manifestation of the vast changes in the artist-prisoners’ lives, positions the Fort Marion drawings at the beginning of contemporary Indigenous art. 

For the first time, too, Fort Marion artists began to incorporate features of landscape. Plains artists had never drawn landscape or even a horizon line, so Fort Marion artists had to invent new modes of visualizing the land and compositional space. Bear’s Heart’s Cheyenne Camp Scene, circa 1876, describes a brightly colored, bucolic scene in colored pencil. Horses of many hues graze alongside three tribal members who sit and talk behind grass covered mounds while a row of five tipis sits in a plane below. The spatial configuration is unlikely a literal transcription of what Bear’s Heart saw, but rather a visual solution for including everything in the space of the page. Ohettoint’s Warrior Process on Horseback is a dreamy pastoral landscape where warriors on horseback are partially visible behind a hill rendered in long strokes of colored pencil. On the verso, a transparent lighthouse is set against bands of water and land denoted by long lines of blue, yellow, and green pencil and to the right, the very tops of a buffalo herd can be spied as a dark line between the land and the vast sky. 

Drawings are inherently direct and intimate. They channel an artists’ thoughts, impulses, and feelings. While ledger art is not sacred art, the images in Fort Marion and Beyond speak to enduring sacred traditions. Whether or not we comprehend the meanings of the images, we can acknowledge and recognize their mystery and spiritual potency. Each lays claim to a space that is a product and reflection of its respective culture but in the intersection of the two cultures there comes into being a zone in between writing and drawing and telling—a third space where, even if we slip in and out of knowing, we may find ourselves in a shared place of understanding.

What does genocide look like? A plaintive, pathos-filled exhibition at David Nolan Gallery of 87 Native American ledger drawings — named after the ledger books that the artists appropriated as material for their work — from the 19th century offers an answer. Many of the drawings were made in a prisoner-of-war camp in St. Augustine, Florida, where dozens of members of the tribes of the Great Plains were incarcerated amid a brutal U.S. military campaign of relocation and displacement. The drawings depict, with a simplicity that belies their sophistication, heartrending scenes of imprisonment, isolation, and forced assimilation as well as glorious celebrations of a way of life outside the prison walls that was already receding into oblivion.

“Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865–1900” has been beautifully organized by genius obsessive Donald Ellis, a Vancouver-based private dealer who showed a handful of similar drawings at the 2017 Frieze Art Fair. The current exhibition is timed for Master Drawings New York in the hopes that curators might rectify the inexplicable and disappointing arm’s-length stance the art world has so far adopted toward this work. (Much of this work is found in ethnographic and natural-history museums and libraries.) The drawings may appear crude, featuring blank or ruled backgrounds that have been decorated with colored pencils — people, horses, and tepees. Encouraged by the prison’s commander, who attempted to assimilate these warriors by cutting their hair and stripping them of their traditional clothes, they drew these pictures to sell to whites and eke out a living. But what they made is visionary art, incorporating the traditions of semi-nomadic tribes, such as hide-painting, all under a sophisticated system of narrative and space.

Start in the gallery with the Fort Marion drawings, where you can see two hallucinogenic pictures of the trains that brought nearly 80 Native Americans to their new “home” in St. Augustine. One was made by Nokkoist (Bear’s Heart) when he was 25. (He died at 31 from tuberculosis contracted probably from colonists.) Another drawing by Bear’s Heart features a landscape of evergreens surrounding buildings with hills along one side: a nearby island. There is a ship manned by what at first seem like soldiers — in reality, they are prisoners outfitted in U.S. military uniforms, taught to sail and give white people tours of their prison camp. In another drawing, the fort’s interior is seen from a God’s-eye view. There are dozens of uniformed men, most Native American prisoners whose hair has been shorn. We see them marching two by two in the yard. It hits you with horrible force that, in the most ghastly sense, there had never been Native American art quite like this before.

There are also visions of the past. We see Native American ceremonies: the sun dance; a meeting between Cheyenne and Pawnee; a successful buffalo hunt; tribespeople in full warrior regalia, decked out in feathers. There’s a gut-wrenching warrior procession: dozens of fighters on horses arrayed in different colors, the line curving like a kind of snake to stay within the borders of the piece of paper. Two drawings depict Cheyenne warriors, each labeled with their names: Roman Nose, Squint Eyes, Making Medicine, Little Chief, Cohoe, and Shave Head. The format is formal, the figures flat, with subtle shifts between the foreground and background. Each horse is labeled, simply, “horse” — a word written by artists learning to communicate in English.

It is tempting to see subversion or resistance in these drawings, but I am more struck by their clarity and honesty. The great depth of this art comes from the witness the artists bore, the atrocities they lived through with the steadiest and truest of gazes. They ask you to open your eyes as they did so that you might see.