Native Ledger Art: Past and Present

Put My Face On

Colored pencil on ledger paper

18 x 11 inches | c. 2012

Collection of Missoula Art Museum

What is Ledger Art?

an overview

In its simple form, ledger art is created by Native artists who paint or draw on paper printed with text or gridwork intended for record keeping.

In its complex forms, it is much more.

Ledger art first appeared in the mid-19th century as drawings made in settlers’ accounting ledgers by Indigenous male warriors of the Northern Plains. They inscribed their war exploits in these portable books, securing their status in their culture’s honor system and recording their history, just as they had done with bison hides and rock art for generations before.

This exhibit uses 1880s ledger pieces from the Barstow Collection at MSU-Billings as the foundation for examining the connection that runs from rock art to bison hides to the ledger drawings of the 19th century, and into the revival of the form today.

On the walls of this exhibit are examples of modern uses of ledger art’s imagery, layering, and composition to tackle modern Native issues. When seen as a communication tool, ledger art can communicate nuanced ideas, like identity, heritage, and conflicted patriotism with elegance and beauty, as well as satire and humor. Today’s ledger art is increasingly adopted by women artists to express a peaceful, family and female empowering tone.

And for all its powers, its greatest attribute is its adaptability. It has evolved and persisted through a century and a half of attempted genocide, forced assimilation and outright erasure to hold any number of expressions of resistance–all while still holding true to its fundamental roots.

So, what is ledger art? It’s not so simple.

native ledger art: history and importance

Ledger art is descended from the ancient Native Plains tradition of inscribing oral histories pictorially onto rock. Having no written language, Indigenous Peoples of the Northern Plains memorialized their accomplishments and designated social positions first by making petroglyphs and pictographs, later by painting on buffalo hides, tipis, and clothing, and eventually drawing images on paper.

As increased settlement of Euro-Americans from the 1850s through the 1870s led to the transformation of life on the Great Plains including the forced removal of Indigenous Peoples and animals, Native chroniclers turned to drawing on the balance sheets in ledger books that they obtained from white settlers, traders, and the military. Recognizing that ledger books were used to record important information, Natives appropriated them as a means to keep track of heroic deeds, recording battles between Natives and non-Natives as well as documenting nostalgic scenes of pre-reservation life.

The symbolic imagery can be read as the telling of a story in pictures. These stories express and manifest the power of the victor. Overlayed on top of colonialism’s mundane accounting of the tools of oppression, Native ledger art can be seen as a surreptitious counter response, a literal overpowering of an invasive and oppressive force, and a resistance to cultural erasure.

During the reservation era these drawings continued to serve as personal narratives but also as a chronicle of the transitions brought on by captivity, life on the reservation, and the subjugation of Native cultures. Contemporary ledger artists are reclaiming their sovereignty to define themselves and their culture. They employ techniques like nostalgia, juxtaposition, humor and political satire to engage and disarm the viewer, and they use visual storytelling as a means of exploring both their cultural heritage and issues of present-day Native experience.

Contemporary ledger art remains an epistemological statement and an act of resistance to colonialism. The works employ ancient and traditional symbols, cultural motifs, abstract patterns, and compositional techniques, drawing a straight line from the rock art of places like central Montana to a postmodern decolonization of today’s attitudes about Indigenous identity, creating room for a deeper understanding of the projects of cultural re-appropriation.