Robes of Splendor: Native North American Painted Buffalo Hides [SOLD]

The fate of the Plains Indians, as George Horse Capture notes, was long dependent on the wanderings of the buffalo. The native American modeled his life on that of the animal. And, in the pact the two maintained, the proud buffalo, the native American's source of life, could become a symbol of human pride through the sacrifice of his life, and therefore of his power. These painted buffalo hides bear witness to this sacrificial exchange.

Seeing these hides, one cannot help but imagine the roving herds, wandering from plain to plain, and the constant displacement of the tribes, attentive to the slightest sign, to the slightest concealed word from Mother Nature. The buffalo is the surveyor of the native American's territory, just as the eagle or the nighthawk, geometricians of the sky, gauge the space from up above.

Thus the Indians' painted hides bear witness to a history, but to a fixed history, a history of suspended time, as if things and the relationships between them were to be forever the same, as if space and time had magically become petrified. Not that native Americans are a people without a history. But their history unfolds in a closed arena, devoid of the spirit of conquest or appropriation.