ARTstor Native American Art and Culture

It is with great pleasure that we announce the availability in ARTstor of the
"Native American Art and Culture" Collection, the result of a collaboration
with the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. To
browse this new collection, please enter ARTstor and click on the "Native
American Art and Culture from the Smithsonian Institution" link.

The "Native American Art and Culture" collection has two components. The
first, now available to ARTstor users, consists of more than 10,000 high-
resolution images made from historic photographs richly documenting Native
American subjects (portraits, scenes, etc.). These digital images have been
made from glass plate negatives collected by or produced under the auspices
of the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) beginning in the late
19th century. The BAE photographic collections, supported by extensive
documentation, are a foundation for our visual knowledge of the American
Indian past. They were critical in shaping perceptions of Native Americans in
the last quarter of the 19th century and thereafter and they constitute an
unparalleled visual record of historic Native American art and culture. The
subjects treated in these photographs range from studio portraits of
individual Native Americans to tribal scenes, documenting treaty councils,
official expeditions of exploration, and early anthropological and
archeological inquiry in America. All major tribal groups are represented,
many having been photographed during formal meetings of tribal delegations
with members of Congress.

The second component of this collection, still in production but likely to be
made available to ARTstor users by early Fall 2005, consists of ca. 2,000
Plains Indian "ledger drawings." Plains Indian ledger drawings, mostly
produced in the middle to late decades of the 19th century, represent an
important indigenous artistic tradition of great and increasing interest to
art historians and other scholars. These drawings on paper, often done on the
pages of ruled ledger books acquired through trade, continue a long tradition
of painting on buffalo hides and other available media.

These two archives are among the most heavily used resources in the
Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archive. This digital version should
be invaluable to art historians, anthropologists, cultural historians, and
indeed to all scholars, curators, teachers and students who deal with
American and Native American art, history and culture, as well as to scholars
engaged with the study of cross-cultural encounters.