Annika Johnson

The question of how artists used images and objects as tools of understanding and negotiating cultural difference guides my research. For centuries, Eastern Dakota sculptors have carved pipestone, a sacred red stone quarried in southern Minnesota, into ceremonial tobacco pipe bowls. Artist-explorers George Catlin and Seth Eastman collected, pictured, and popularized pipe bowls and rituals internationally. Such images, created in the context of the nascent, politicized field of ethnology, obscured the symbolism of carved imagery and the cultural significance of the stone. My research places Euro-American illustrations of Dakota art, diplomacy, and conflict in dialogue with Dakota sculpture to consider how artists creatively adapted their practices to the new resources and demands of life in the Upper Midwest during the mid-nineteenth century. Reading objects through the lens of agency provides a new paradigm for examining cross-cultural art production. Portraits of U.S. Indian agents rendered in pipestone, for example, provide an alternative to images of treaty signings and war that shaped official histories of this region.

While many scholars have offered frameworks for understanding artistic exchange, I employ the watery metaphor confluence to bridge the disciplinary borderlands between Native American and Euro-American artistic practices. Confluence resonates with the region’s geography; where the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers merge is a Dakota origin site that became the locus of artistic and diplomatic exchange. My study encompasses the decades surrounding the devastating U.S.–Dakota War of 1862 that culminated in the largest mass execution in American history and the forced removal of the Dakota from their homeland, Mni Sota Makoce.