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Richard Pearce
Box 445
Norton,  MA 02766 

Telephone: (508) 285-3456
Email: rpearce@wheatoncollege.edu

Ledger style acrylic wash on 1921 North American Light and Power Co. stock certificate.
2002, 10 1/4 x 7 1/4

Though the North American Light and Power Company is not located in the Midwest, power companies had a major impact in the plateau area of Western Washington where the Spokane reservation is located. Indeed this stock certificate is a symbol of the kind of power that drove western expansion and maintains our position in the world today. And it is particularly appropriate for ledger art, which is designed to expose and resist it.

The Grand Coulee Dam and smaller dams built on the Columbia River to generate power destroyed the traditional salmon fishing grounds of the Spokane and its neighboring tribes as well as much of their lands and many of their villages. In summers when there have been droughts on the reservation, enormous amounts of water has been used to power the entire Northwest and irrigate the productive farmland, sometimes drying up the Spokanee reservation's already-polluted watershed. Not only has the Federal Government failed to compensate the tribes, the Washington Water Power Company keeps finding ways to circumvent paying the legally required rent for storing water in the tribally owned basin and banks of the Columbia River.

North American Light and Power, like other companies during the period when this stock was issued, was undergoing enormous growth. This stock certificate, therefore, represents the industry’s great profits based on native people losses. In this ledger painting, George Flett has turned the stock certificate into the ground, overlayed with a yellow wash, and dominated by the figure of a richly dressed Plateau Indian woman riding calmly on her painted horse in a pow-wow parade.