This story robe is an incredible and important piece of Blackfoot history portraying the accomplishments and life of an unknown warrior. Although it has been mostly well-preserved and is now displayed and known to the world at large, the knowledge that the robe carries and its physical being should have been left with the community and the people who helped create it. Nevertheless, despite the issues surrounding the British Museum’s ‘ownership’ of this robe, I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have this 3D representation from the Blackfoot Digital Library and other interpretations of the artwork. It’s been a very successful entry point for learning more about the Blackfoot Confederacy and Indigenous history paintings as a medium.
One thing I found particularly interesting in my research is the development of biographic historical art—namely the mediums of rock, robe, and ledger art. These three mediums are often framed as being sequential, with specifically northern Plains communities shifting from one to the next as time progressed. However, it is not fully known whether robe art truly came after rock art or if the two mediums existed in tandem, as many robes dating from before the 19th century have not lasted and thus cannot serve as historical artifacts (Keyser). I find it particularly interesting how rock art ceased as a form after Indigenous people were forced into reservations, especially considering how the communities within the Blackfoot Confederacy used to live a very nomadic lifestyle, therefore leaving their rock paintings while moving from place to place (Native). I wonder how their views of permanence and impact may have changed when they were pushed onto reservations. Did they feel that the drawings should be left behind them rather than kept in their current space? Did they want to keep their art close to the community as they were facing uncertainty and violence, therefore being kept to robe art and the growing form of ledger art? I also wonder how this ties into the robes that ended up in the hands of white traders and explorers, and whether those robes were given up freely or taken. While the art itself cannot tell this story, it bears a permanence and a gravity that cannot be diminished.
While doing further research on this robe, I came across two other robes: the Malcolm Robe and the Deadmond Robe. Both robes are currently referred to by the names of the white individuals who recently owned them, and both are attributed to Blackfoot artists, although they came from different points in the 19th century. Both have also been heavily analyzed to discover when they are from and possibly who they are from—although the specific communities who created the robes have not been mentioned other than being referred to as ‘Blackfoot’. Their contents have been broken down by material and the style choices made while depicting human life (Lycett). The analysis of the Malcolm robe also includes speculation about whether multiple artists worked on that single robe, offering their own artistic interpretations of a biographical event. Both of these studies also included multiple sources and methods for analyzing the robes in question, and hinted at a much broader world of analysis surrounding historical biographical art from the north Plains as a whole and even Blackfoot communities in particular. I wonder why these two robes were chosen for analysis, while it seems that the story robe I looked at has not been analyzed as much. As James VanStone notes in his article about material culture for the Blackfoot people, “[a]lthough the Blackfoot are among the most studied North American Indian tribes and collections of their material culture are well represented in American and Canadian museums, relatively few studies have been devoted specifically to their manufactures” (VanStone) I also wonder why historians and academics haven’t made as many attempts to connect these robes to the people and events they depict. It seems that, although this artwork falls within the genre of ‘history paintings’ similar to, for example, Washington Crossing the Delaware or other such war paintings, they are not treated the same way and the history they depict is not valued as much.
There is still much to discover about this robe and the story behind it. The process behind digitizing this artifact was extensive and impressive, and I hope it inspires more research into its original creation and the history being depicted. The efforts of the Blackfoot Digital Library and its collaborators have made the robe easy to examine from such a great distance, which also suggests more possibilities for the robe to be returned to its original community while still being accessible as a source of learning for people around the world. After all, that’s what museums are for, right? Even before the undertaking of the Mootookakio’ssin project, the British Library also put some work into analyzing and digitizing the robe. The drawing I used for my Second View came from the virtual display of the robe on the British Museum’s website, which also had more information about the artifact and additional close-up images that I wouldn’t have been able to get from the Mootookakio’ssin website. Included in these images was also a drawing of a completely different robe of a different shape drawn in a completely different art style. Clearly, the museum is attempting to publicize the knowledge that the robe carries online—but it has yet to return the robe to its rightful owner, and it seems to be making mistakes and misattributing a different image to the wrong object. I truly question at what point the Museum’s ownership and preservation of this object becomes more of a hindrance than a help, especially now that the artifact has been digitized from so many angles. I hope that this artifact and others like it can be returned to the Blackfoot Confederacy and that their stories may be rediscovered. Once again, I am incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to study this tiny piece of history, and I commend the many researchers and community leaders who poured their time and energy into making this accessible, as well as the original creator(s) of this robe.
Thank you for a fantastic class and I hope you have a great summer!
Bibliography
Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park. “CLOTHING – Blackfoot Crossing.” Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, n.d. https://blackfootcrossing.ca/wordpress/clothing/.
———. “OUR CULTURE – Blackfoot Crossing.” Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, n.d. https://blackfootcrossing.ca/wordpress/our-culture-2/.
Blackfoot Digital Library, and University of Lethbridge. “Mootookakio’ssin: Distant Awareness.” mootookakiossin.ca. Accessed May 16, 2024. https://mootookakiossin.ca/about/.
Dormer, Dave. “‘It Reeks of Colonialism’: Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park Frustrated over Lack of Progress Repatriating Artifacts.” CTV News, February 19, 2020. https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/it-reeks-of-colonialism-blackfoot-crossing-historical-park-frustrated-over-lack-of-progress-repatriating-artifacts-1.4819122?cache=enzvogqbavvrgvzn%3FautoPlay%3Dtrue%3FautoPlay%3Dtrue%3FclipId%3D89680.
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Galt Museum & Archives, and Rebecca Many Grey Horses. “A History of Blackfoot Clothing.” YouTube, June 12, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTTdDcHEbik.
Keyser, James D., and Stephen J. Lycett. “Beyond Oral History: A Nineteenth Century Blackfoot Warriors’ Biographic Robe in Comparative and Chronological Context.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 22, no. 4 (2018): 771–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45154563.
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Moffatt, Elizabeth, P. Jane Sirois, and Judi Miller. “Analysis of the Paints Used to Decorate Northern Plains Hide Artifacts during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Journal of the Canadian Association for Conservation (J. CAC) 22 (1997). https://www.cac-accr.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Vol22_doc4.pdf.
Native Hope. “Wandering Warriors: The History of the Blackfeet Tribe.” blog.nativehope.org, May 21, 2023. https://blog.nativehope.org/wandering-warriors-the-history-of-the-blackfeet-tribe.
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