War Paint: Blackfoot and Sarcee Painted Buffalo Robes in the Royal Ontario Museum

Kerry Abel is a professor of history at Carleton University. She is the author of Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History, co-editor of Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects, and co-editor of Northern Visions: New Perspectives on the North in Canadian History.

In 1909, artist Edmond Morris asked a number of Blackfoot and Sarcee men
to depict their war exploits for him on buffalo hides using pictographs.
He also recorded the stories that accompanied the robes in his diaries
and correspondence. In this meticulously illustrated book, Arni
Brownstone (a curatorial assistant at the Royal Ontario Museum) pieces
together the history of five of the robes and uses the documentation
that Morris collected to produce a fascinating glimpse into the world of
Plains warriors at an important transition period in their history.

Brownstone indicates an interest in both the history and the visual
aspects of the robes, although the emphasis of the text is on the
latter. The history to which the author refers is primarily the story of
how Morris commissioned the robes. For a general audience, however, it
might have been more helpful to set the scene with a brief history of
the Blackfoot and Sarcee to help the reader interpret the stories. There
is a brief discussion of the role of these robes in Blackfoot culture,
and the author concludes that they probably served as mnemonic devices
that helped warriors to tell the stories of their adventures.

It is clear that the author’s real interest in these robes is as an
art historian. Blackfoot and European artistic techniques are compared
and the author argues that European art is bound up with the “act of
seeing” while Blackfoot art is linked to oral tradition. The novice
will find some of the text that is devoted to this and other
interpretation rather heavy going. The vocabulary is specialized and the
emphasis is on debates that are of interest primarily to art historians.


However, the sections of the book that are devoted to the robes and
their stories are much more accessible. The author has gone to great
lengths to reproduce the pictographs on the robes and the presentation
is attractive and interesting. The photographs of the artists and of
Edmond Morris add considerably to the text. There are also brief
biographies of the artists that help to render them more clearly as
individuals.

Readers should be cautioned that while the artistic interpretation and
ethnography components of the book are helpful, the author’s use of
history is less successful. The evidence of cultural change depicted in
the photographs, robes and their stories is glossed over so that without
a careful reading, one could easily come away from the book with the
impression that these robes represent an ancient artistic tradition on
the Plains with only limited impact from European contact.

Nevertheless, the images of the robes are so striking and the stories
that they tell are so interesting that this book is a good introduction
to a fascinating piece of Canadian culture.