Weasel Tail's Dream: Horse Stealing Along the River
(2002)
This ledger painting is 40” wide. Pasted next to each other over a background of yellow and purple are a balance sheet, probably from a trading post, dated 1877, and a song sheet of Charles Wakefield Cadman’s "From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water," dated 1930.
The picture is painted in acrylics over the ledgers in the x-ray, or transparent, style of Plains Indian ledger drawing. According to Flett, the warrior, in his best dress, has painted himself and his horse to return to camp, tell his story, and sing a horse-stealing song. He is wearing a war shirt for the occasion, which would not have been worn on a raid, carrying a coup stick with a horse charm and a pipe bag. Now he is daydreaming about the story he will tell and other horse raids.
Although ledger art was a Plains Indian adaptation of its calendar and buffalo robe pictographs, the warrior’s stand-up bonnet and the hour-glass design on the pipe bag and quiver are from the Plateau tribes like the Spokane. For ledger art was not restricted to the Plains Indians; indeed it was passed on to the Plateau Indians, particularly the neighboring Nez Perce tribe.
Flett enriches his visual story of “what is on the warrior’s mind” as he returns to camp by adapting the Plains Indian ledger art tradition to tell a psychological story. He also adapts the modern surrealist style by using Plains Indian pictographic codes, further adapted by using Plateau Indian designs. Moreover, he layers his picture over just the kind of ledger—which recorded white profits made as a result of Indian losses—that served as the ground for the original, pre-reservation ledger drawings. Like his predecessors, but aware of their history and perhaps more self-consciously, he reverses the historical power relations in an assertion of Indian pride and sovereignty. And he expands the historical component of the ground by adding to the 19th century ledger a 1930’s song sheet of the next generation that brought both profit to a white song writer and his publisher and pleasure to white audiences by idealizing and romanticizing Indian experience.
Two major features of ledger art since its beginning in the 1860s have been the use of the ledger—the chronicle of white profit made as a result of direct and indirect Indian losses—and the pictographic chronicle of Indian drawn over it. This results in a palimpsest (writing material reused so that traces of the original writing still show).
The two ledgers placed next to one another on the horizontal plane of the canvas form a chronological series, which represents the continual exploitation of Native Americans. But the picture as a whole is dominated by Flett's bold colors and his representation of the proud warrior daydreaming of his past heroic deeds, while contemplating the story he will tell when he returns to camp.