Indian Conquest

By Lawrence Malkin

Lo, the poor Indian! Whose untutor'd mind sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.

--Alexander Pope, 1732

The European view of the American Indian has generally been patronizing, to say the least. Pope's classic dig helped fix the image of a savage. A noble version was conceived by the 19th century romantics, but an ignoble one was later imported from Hollywood. Museums on both sides of the Atlantic have not helped much, tending to confine their Indian exhibits to ethnographic ghettos dominated by braves and their war bonnets. However, Sacred Circles, a stunning show of Indian art sponsored by Britain's Arts Council and private American donors as a U.S. Bicentennial event at London's Hay ward Gallery, may trigger a change.

The show's curator, Ralph T. Coe of Kansas City's Nelson Gallery of Art, is not an anthropologist but an art historian who uncovered the 850 artifacts in obscure collections from South Dakota to south Bavaria. The exhibit, which has been praised by London's art critics, is loosely organized by geography, with scholarly gloss held to a welcome minimum. Prehistoric stone carvings from the southeastern forests immortalize a puma or a hawk in onyx and a snake in a slithering s of shiny mica. The ochers and sharp abstractions of the Southwest desert dominate the region's basketwork and pottery.

High Foreheads. Most startling is the dramatically lighted collection of Northwest Indian masks. With their thrusting chins, hooked noses, popping eyes and arrogant high foreheads, the masks could be expressionist versions of the grandees of the Italian Renaissance. "Tell me what difference in standard there should be between these and the dukes of Ferrara," says Coe challengingly.

If this elegiac exhibition of the art of a vanishing race has a leitmotiv, it is an elongated, galloping wooden horse carved by a Sioux and collected by a missionary. Wounded -- by a white man's bullet? -- the anguished animal seems to be flying forever across thousands of miles of American experience. It epitomizes an essential theme of American art and literature: nature corrupted and innocence defiled.

No one understands this better than the Indians themselves. When Coe, who plans to bring the exhibit to Kansas City next spring, began his research, he wrote 20 major Indian nations seeking their support. Only two bothered to reply. Coe believes the rest were not interested in displaying their art. Why? "Because they are living it."

Lawrence Malkin

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