[Mish-Sha-Quat] was a respected elder within the Ojibwe delegation attending the signing of the treaty of Fond du Lac in 1827. U.S. officials regarded [Mish-Sha-Quat] as a savvy political strategist, deftly negotiating with British, French, and U.S. allies for the benefit of Ojibwe sovereignty and the right to make economic treaties around the area of Rainy Lake (on the border between present-day Minnesota and Canada). McKenney writes that [Mish-Sha-Quat] was of noble birth, “well-formed,” and “about forty-five years of age” at the time of this portrait.
I. Portraits Commissioned by the U.S. Government: Indigenous Delegates to Washington, D.C.
A portrait and its meanings are never stable. The work assumes the gaze of future generations and anticipates ongoing evaluation and reflection as new associations, lessons, and questions emerge. Between 1821 and 1834, ideology and federal policy created a portrait "event" that haunts Harvard University and the United States to this day.
In 1821, Thomas McKenney, head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the War Department, commissioned artist Charles Bird King to begin painting Indigenous delegates and tribal leaders who journeyed to Washington, D.C., in the hopes of reaffirming treaties and seeking redress. In actuality, McKenney wanted (in his words) "an Indian Gallery" as a record of "the aboriginal man" amid "the ultimate destruction which awaits his race." King produced around 160 portraits over nine years. Like President Andrew Jackson, McKenney promoted the romanticized notion of the United States as a territorial and ideological republic with a "manifest destiny" to extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. When Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law in 1830, the portraits were sent on a multicity tour, representing a nostalgic and inaccurate archive of a "noble race now passed."
In 1832, McKenney commissioned Henry Inman to copy King’s portraits. A fire at the Smithsonian in 1865 destroyed most of King’s paintings. The Inman paintings remain a poignant archive of the era’s sentiment and prejudice. In 1889, Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology was bequeathed 109 of Inman’s portraits in their original gilded frames.
Inman’s portraits after King provide us with a complex, diverse, and imperfect record. Some of the sitters wear western-style suits and display "peace medals" given by government officials. Some portraits seem to bear witness to sitters’ self-fashioning and their insistence on accurate representation. Others represent delegates in ensembles that indicate their navigation of, and relationship to, multiple cultures. Our sense is that King made sketches of the sitters’ faces from life and from eyewitness accounts. He later relied on memory or McKenney’s descriptions to approximate and "stage" the backgrounds and much of the delegates’ dress and poses. McKenney touted the portraits as typological tools to visually distinguish "civilized" tribes who had assimilated from "uncivilized" tribes. The paintings were intended to justify the forced displacement and removal of Indigenous populations from the eastern United States, serving as illustrations of those nations whose pride, prominence, and wealth were a threat.
II. Difficult Histories / Unstable Objects / New Meanings: Conservation as a Mode of Respect
In the 1930s, the Inman paintings were removed from their original frames and put into wood frames painted to imitate expensive veneer. The paintings were also cut from their original tacking and underwent excessive overcleaning. This permanent damage to the supports and paint layers repressed the identifying characteristics of the sitters and much of Inman’s celebrated brushwork. A second treatment in the early 1970s could not mitigate the degraded paint layers. In 1979, the Peabody deaccessioned the paintings. All but 27 were sold.
In 2019, a collaboration began between the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums and the Peabody Museum’s Collections Division and Conservation Department. Eight paintings were chosen to initiate an ongoing conservation and research project. Straus conservators have led these efforts in concert with doctoral studentsfrom the Harvard Art Museums’ Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art (SITSA). Thanks to a team of faculty, staff, and students, these works are now being transitioned into the Harvard Art Museums collections. The stories of these objects are ongoing, just as the presence and experiences of Native persons in the Americas are ongoing.
Over the next few years, the revitalized portraits will cycle through these two frames in the gallery. In the accompanying labels, the sitter’s form of address attached to each portrait will be kept in brackets. We are doing this because the names were written phonetically from McKenney’s memory, with little care whether the name was a given name, a chosen name, or an awarded name, or if it was a ceremonial honorific or pejorative nickname given by U.S. officials.
