ABOUT

Josephine Waggoner
Edited and with an introduction by Emily Levine

Foreword by Lynne Allen

About the Book

During the 1920s and 1930s, Josephine Waggoner (1871–1943), a Lakota woman who had been educated at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, grew increasingly concerned that the history and culture of her people were being lost as elders died without passing along their knowledge. A skilled writer, Waggoner set out to record the lifeways of her people and correct much of the misinformation about them spread by white writers, journalists, and scholars of the day. To accomplish this task, she traveled to several Lakota and Dakota reservations to interview chiefs, elders, traditional tribal historians, and other tribal members, including women.

Published for the first time and augmented by extensive annotations, Witness offers a rare participant’s perspective on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lakota and Dakota life. The first of Waggoner’s two manuscripts presented here includes extraordinary firsthand and as-told-to historical stories by tribal members, such as accounts of life in the Powder River camps and at the agencies in the 1870s, the experiences of a mixed-blood Húŋkpapȟa girl at the first off-reservation boarding school, and descriptions of traditional beliefs. The second manuscript consists of Waggoner’s sixty biographies of Lakota and Dakota chiefs and headmen based on eyewitness accounts and interviews with the men themselves. Together these singular manuscripts provide new and extensive information on the history, culture, and experiences of the Lakota and Dakota peoples.

Curated by Hall W. Rockefeller

Women Artists of New England

Less than Half is a website dedicated to the unsung heroines of the art world: women.

Lynne Allen’s ancestor was Josephine Waggoner, a member of the Hunkpapa tribe of the Lakotas, and a chronicler of Indian life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Seeing her culture rapidly disappearing around her (she herself was sent to be educated at the Hampton Institute, a boarding school meant to assimilate freed slaves into white American life), Waggoner set out to put it down on paper, interviewing tribal leaders and even meticulously copying down the tribes “winter counts,” or the traditional form of recording events among the Sioux.

Though the journals were published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2013 (an accomplishment four generations in the making!), the life of the documents is still growing and evolving in the hands of Allen herself, who uses her ancestors words—and handwriting, which the artist has learned to flawlessly reproduce—to inform her body of prints. Certainly these documents are an invaluable piece of the history of the Lakota people, as well as our own nation’s, but they are also essential to Allen as an individual and to her own relationship with her matrilineal forebears, all of whom lived on the Standing Rock reservation. (Allen herself is not, however, an enrolled member.) “In my native culture everything is passed down by the women,” she explains, “there’s something about knowing that those women cared enough to pass that down. I don’t want to say it makes me feel special, but it makes me feel a part of something.”

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Gill Saunders, Senior Curator (Prints)
Rosie Miles, Curator (Prints)

From the V&A article

For much of their history fine art prints have been a private art form, designed for connoisseurs and collectors, published in limited editions and hidden away in portfolios. The 20th century saw the development of a more public role for prints, with the adoption of affordable processes such as linocut, and editioned lithographs made for public display, such as those commissioned by J. Lyons & Co. for their restaurants, and the much-loved 'School Prints' in the 1940s and 50s. Even so print-making was rarely an artist's main focus. Instead it tended to be a peripheral activity, secondary to painting or sculpture This changed in the 1960s and 70s with the rise of print studios such as Gemini GEL and ULAE in the USA, and Kelpra Studio in the UK. This development encouraged artists to explore the potential of printmaking and use it to produce works which represented major breakthroughs as creative statements, placing print, arguably for the first time, alongside sculpture and painting as a primary means of expression. Printmaking, silk-screening in particular, was also appropriated by artists such as Rauschenberg and Warhol for unique works on canvas, and 'combined' with painting and installation pieces.

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Emily Arthur, Marwin Begaye and John Hitchcock present a curatorial project which metaphorically retraces the history of seventy-two American Indian peoples who were forcibly taken from their homes in Salt Fork, OK, and transported by train to St. Augustine, Florida.

About the Exhibition

The United States war department imprisoned Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Caddo leaders under Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt from 1875-1878.

It was at Fort Marion (renamed Castillo de San Marcos in 1942) that Lieutenant Pratt developed the assimilation methods of control that defined a century of government policy. Assimilation as a term and a political strategy is defined as the total eradication of one culture by another culture by force.

The imprisonment method was institutionalized in the federal off-reservation boarding school policy that was in place in the United States until the 1930s. The most central boarding school example was authored at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania (1879) where Lieutenant Pratt coined the phrase “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Five hundred and thirty Chiricahua Apache men, women, and children were imprisoned in Fort Marion, Florida, which initiated twenty-seven years of prisoner of war status.

The curators asked seventy-two artists to respond to the experience of imprisonment by creating an individual work on paper in the same dimensions as the historic ledger drawings made at Fort Marion from 1875-1878. The exhibition is a contemporary response to a historical experience held intact within American Indian communities through oral history and art.

The artists selected include Native American, non-Natives and descendants from both periods of imprisonment. Engaging these historical events, the artists reclaim the telling of this story to offer an indigenous perspective of our shared history. We urge the viewer to consider this fresh perspective, while bearing in mind the idea of forgotten histories, and the power of memory. As curator Emily Arthur states, “It’s not history,” Nancy Mithlo further posits in her essay for the exhibition: “Memory and alternative temporalities have conspired to make this history present and alive.”