George Catlin, Artistic Prospecting, and Dakhóta Agency in the Archive

Abstract

A mineral chart in the George Catlin Papers manifests the artist’s novel ethnogeological approach to depicting pipestone, a blood-red stone quarried on Dakota homelands. Catlin ignored Indigenous protocol to procure and popularize the sacred stone in ethnographic paintings and displays. This essay examines the Indigenous knowledge behind Catlin’s claimed “discovery” of pipestone in the context of Indigenous land dispossession.