Visions of Yesterday

You can't help but wonder about the parallelism in this fine old painting. Both the horse and the silver-haired warrior are, for a moment at least, distracted by a buffalo skull. Every element is deliberate here--it's no photograph. What's more, because that handsome paint pony is already past the skull, she seems even more engaged; after all, she can't stop thinking about it. 

The old warrior's gaze is just as heavy-laden with travail. The eagle feathers in his hair identify him as a warrior, not just an also-ran or "a loafer," the kind of Indian who pitched his tipi close to agency headquarters, men thought of as lazy even by their own. Those feathers tell a proud story.

He's trying. Good Lord a'mighty, he's trying. Imagine having to turn age-old soil that never grew anything but abominable weeds. Imagine ripping up earth never before turned with nothing more of less than "the plow that broke the plains." This old man has taken up the terms of the treaty. He's determined to become the farmer the Great Father in Washington wants him and all the others to be.

He would have been rare in his time. Very few of the tribe's veteran warriors would ever stoop to "scratch the earth." At best, that was women's work. Simply asking the men to do it was offensive, like cutting off their hair, something this strong old man has refused to do.

He appears half-removed from traditional dress. The vest is embroidered. It may well be full of beadwork; the shirt is a rag, made so perhaps by the immense work he's doing. He's wearing a white man's trousers, bluejeans, and his shoes look like Air Jordans, which is impossible, given the fact that the artist is William Robinson Leigh, who died in 1955. The old warrior is doing his darndest to oblige the terms of the treaty.

I'm thinking a scene like this happened so infrequently you could count the number on your hands, maybe just one. What's here is a deliberate exaggeration. The soil is impossible to plow.

It's the moral of the story the artist is after, the anguish inherent in the loss he feels as he doggedly follows the path of the white man. The buffalo skull does more than suggest that the heart and soul of his plains Indian culture is dead. His traditional way of life, its immense strengths and profound weaknesses, can exist no longer. He's taking up the terms of whatever treaty his people signed, not because it's something he's chosen to do but because there is really no choice. That too makes the anguish on his weathered face more despairing. After all, it's likely impossible to overstate the importance of the buffalo to Plains Indian cultures. 

Visions of Yesterday William Robinson Leigh titled it, and that's its obvious strength. It's an illustration undertaken for white folks, and it leans in hard to make its point. It's not subtle or mysterious. It's an argument.

I don't care. I like it for exactly what it wants to be. The whole thing seems more of a symbol than a wonder, an argument in a frame. You'd hang it on your wall only if you wanted to make a statement.

And that's okay. Sometimes injustice requires a rhetoric more jagged, more cutting than beauty or mystery.
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Visions of Yesterday is on display at the Woolaroc Museum, Osage County, Oklahoma.