Passage V

Reviving a tradition

When Donald Yellowbird Montileaux first began to make art, he adopted the traditions of his Lakota ancestors, painting images of tribal life on buffalo hides that he tanned himself. It was when he discovered a second tradition, one begun after buffalo grew scarce on the plains, that he started to develop his own artistic style on the pages of antique ledgers. In contrast, he joined a growing number of contemporary artists in reviving ledger art.

[1] White traders, who carried with them ledgers: accounting books filled with records of financial transactions. [2] Ledger art originated in the mid-nineteenth century, when Plains Indian tribes came into increasing contact with white settlers moving west. [3] Plains artists found that the ledger paper, with it's high silk content, allowed them to create more detailed drawings than buffalo hide did. [4] Using ledgers filled up or left behind, the artists provided richly illustrated accounts of their individual and tribal histories-important gatherings-symbolic dreams, and triumphs in battle. (68)

Using pages from these same ledgers, Montileaux faithfully sets down his tribe's history in a style drawn from original ledger art, creating scenes of warriors and buffalo, horse herds and camping sites, in a style modeled closely on that of the original ledger artists. (71) By expertly blending multiple layers of pencil in colors not available in the nineteenth century he is able to produce rich, complex, hues. Against a backdrop of faded numbers and signatures, his distinctive figures, rendered in fiery reds, earthy yellows, and powdery blues, seems to lift off the page.

Though firmly committed to tradition, Montileaux aims to inspire modern Lakota generations to blaze new paths. His dual motivations are, perhaps, best reflected in the painting Looking Beyond One's Self. In it, three Plains youths stand together, the vast star field above them representing their path to the future, a landscape of ledger lines their link to the past.