American Indian art

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Art and craft of the North American indigenous peoples from prehistory through to the modern era. Some groups maintain their ancient traditions, but much was lost during the period of European settlement. Art has always been part of everyday life for the American Indians, both for functional and ceremonial purposes. Each object is regarded as a piece of cultural history and a profound form of creative expression. American Indian art includes ceramics, metalwork, beadwork, quillwork, textiles, sculpture, painting, leatherwork, and the creation of ceremonial objects and dress. Artistic style and choice of media reflect the different cultures, lifestyles, and environments of the various American Indian groups; for example, Inuit art features miniature bone carvings, a media available in the Arctic. One constant is a deep respect for the natural environment and an all-encompassing bond with the spiritual world.

Art history
Although many art objects and artefacts were lost during the period of European settlement and subsequent relocation of American Indians to Indian reservations, the recent resurgence of interest in American Indian art has enabled the piecing together of a comprehensive art history. Most ethnographic collections include American Indian artworks; notable are those at the Museum of the American Indian, New York, and the Museum of Mankind, London. The Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has a good collection of artefacts from the southwest area.

Prehistoric art
The first Arctic cultures were established in North America about 12,000 years ago. Remains of prehistoric cultures, including stone carvings and pottery (offerings to the dead, household items, and animal-shaped vessels), have been found in the northeast, southwest, and southeast of the continent. In the southeast, pottery was painted with natural pigments and coloured slip (liquid clay). Vessels in the southwest were more refined in shape and usually coloured in natural earth tones: red, brown, black, and white. Geometric forms, objects from nature, spiritual symbols, and mythological animals were incised (cut) into or painted onto the pottery surface. Prehistoric designs are commonly used to decorate modern American Indian ceramics. The finer American Indian artefacts belong to the last 2,000 years.

Geographic and cultural divisions
The peoples of North America can be divided into ten geographical regions: the Plains; the Southwest; the Great Basin; the Plateau; California; the Southeast; the Northeast, or Northeast Woodlands; the Northwest Coast; the sub-Arctic; and the Arctic. Until the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century, these regions contained numerous American Indian cultures. Each major culture comprised a number of peoples, each with their own cultural traditions and language; for example, the ‘pueblo’ (village) cultural grouping in the southwest includes the Hopi, Zuni, and Pueblo peoples, the latter differing linguistically. Individual groups within these peoples also developed their own traditions; for example, the Sioux of the Great Plains are divided into three groups: Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota, each with their own subgroups.

Generally, the arts of the different peoples were determined by materials available, lifestyle, and religion. Nomadic peoples such as the Plains Indians, who hunted the buffalo herds for their livelihood, had to move around, so produced more easily portable art. The Sioux and the Crow decorated buckskin clothes and tents with beadwork and quillwork, and painted buffalo hides. In the harsh sub-Arctic and Arctic regions, the Inuit, produced bone and walrus ivory carvings, shaman masks, and decorated sealskin for clothes, tents, and canoes.

Settled peoples could produce more involved art. The American Indians of the Northwest Coast region, such as the Haida, Kwakiutl, and Tlingit, lived in a rich environment, allowing more time for artistic expression, such as the creation of masks with movable pieces and ornately carved totem poles. Their art reflects the importance of religious belief and social status, as demonstrated in the potlatch ceremony (a formal distribution of wealth, in particular chilkat blankets). In the Southwest region, the art of the Hopi and Zuni features mimbres pottery and murals in kivas (underground ceremonial rooms), reflecting their settled pueblo culture. Earlier peoples built cliff-palace complexes, such as the 12th-century Mesa Verde in Colorado. The Navajo of the Southwest, a farming people (though less settled than the pueblo dwellers), became renowned for their artistry, including stylized sand paintings, blankets with geometric designs, Kachina masks and dolls (representing supernatural beings), and silver and turquoise jewellery.

Other agricultural peoples included the Adena, Hopewell, and Mississippians, who dominated the Midwest and Southeast in turn between 700 BC and AD 1500. The Adena and Hopewell built great ceremonial earthen mounds, such as the Serpent Mound in Ohio, and made copper jewellery and cut-foil motifs; the more technically-proficient Hopewell also made human effigies and sleek animal carvings in stone. The Mississippians built city complexes, and produced shell-carving and trophy-head vessels.

Many American Indians followed the religion of shamanism, whose core belief is the existence of two worlds, the spiritual and the material. Their art was full of religious symbolism, reflecting a need to contact, control, and appease the good and evil spirits of the spirit world. The Iroquois of the northeast created dramatic masks for their shamanistic ‘false face’ ceremonies. With the influx of Europeans, missionaries converted many Indians to Christianity.

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