Facsimile of a Mandan Robe 1861 - 1869

George Catlin made this facsimile of a Mandan Robe with pen and ink and watercolor. The original robe, now lost, was a painted bison hide worn by a member of the Mandan tribe of North Dakota. It was both a practical garment and a record of significant events. Catlin, as a white artist traveling through tribal lands, was deeply interested in the imagery and culture of native peoples, but his interpretations of native life were often filtered through the lens of his own cultural assumptions. Here, Catlin recorded the robe’s iconography of concentric circles and animal figures, but he did so in the media of paper and watercolor. The image embodies the complex and fraught relationships between white colonizers and indigenous populations in the 19th-century United States. Understanding art like this requires a lot of interdisciplinary knowledge. To research Catlin’s painting, we have to look at anthropology, colonial history, and the history of art institutions. It’s through this kind of research that we can understand the full meaning of the work.