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James D. Keyser. The Five Crows Ledger: Biographic Warrior Art of the Flathead Indians. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2000. 128 pp. 12 color, 49 half-prints. ISBN 0-87480-659-3, $24.95.
Ledger art among Plains Indian peoples developed as the tribes found themselves incarcerated on reservations from the mid-to-late 1800s. Indian agents, missionaries, and others often provided lined ledger book paper to Indian people as a way for them to record their cultures and their personal and tribal histories. In many ways, ledger art became a substitute for the "picture writing" that their peoples had executed for millennia before the Euroamerican invasion, often on the rock faces of cliffs and on the walls of rock shelters and caves. Some of that art was certainly shamanic-that is, part of ritual behavior-but other works were as often a recounting of elements of lives that eventually showed up on ledger paper. The difficult task was to interpret the drawings in manifold ways.
More than anyone else, James Keyser, an archaeologist with the United States Forest Service, has followed this evolution of Plains Indian art. His research has tracked the origins and development of pictographs (rock paintings) and petroglyphs (designs and figures pecked into rock) across time, from their earliest forms through their echoes in contemporary Native American art. In The Five Crows Ledger, Keyser looks at a series of thirteen ledger drawings collected and annotated by Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet during the time from 1841 to 1847, when he was a missionary to the Flathead Indians of Montana. In Jesuit archives for more than a century, the drawings resurfaced in the 1990s.
Five Crows was a Flathead chief, Shil-che-lum-e-la, who was also known as Ambrose, a name given at his baptism. He is known to have done the first eleven drawings in the series, with two others probably done by a different artist. Keyser places the drawings,...