Medicine Lodge (Primary Title)
Robert Houle, Saulteaux Anishinaabe, Sandy Bay First Nation, born 1947 (Artist)
Indigenous peoples, particularly in the plains and southwest, were often conflated in the minds of Europeans who had not visited America and relied instead on written descriptions and carefully manipulated images which bordered on the quixotic. Robert Houle references two popular 19th-century misrepresentations in his print Medicine Lodge: a German-published postcard from the early 20th century and German author Karl May’s (1842–1912) fictional travel-adventure series Winnetou. Though May never set foot in America, his novels provided elaborate written descriptions of life among the Mescalero Apache people, with himself as protagonist and “reliable” narrative voice. Both sources utilized many of the same popular tropes as James Fenimore Cooper (1811–1851), and Houle writes that he selected this fictionalized postcard image because it evokes “the description of May’s hero . . . the archetypal noble savage, Winnetou, who is not a historical Apache but is instead . . . a symbol of natural human experience destroyed by civilization.”
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