Abstract
During the 1830s and 1840s frontier artist George Winter painted the Potawatomi and Miami Indians of the Wabash Valley. Winter’s paintings existed at the intersection of competing colonial discourses. Like many “Indian painters” of his time, Winter believed he was capturing the final images of a vanishing race. At the same time, Winter’s work runs counters to the imagery of “nakedness” and “savagery” that characterize many Anglo-American paintings of Native Americans during this period. By holding these visual sources in “productive tension” (Stahl 2001:15–16) with documentary and archaeological sources, the role dress played in the construction of identity by members of Great Lakes fur trade society during the 19th century can be unraveled.
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Mann, R. “True Portraitures of the Indians, and of Their Own Peculiar Conceits of Dress”: Discourses of Dress and Identity in the Great Lakes, 1830–1850. Hist Arch 41, 37–52 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376992
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376992