Plains Indian Ledger Art

• The Vulnerability of Extant Ledger Books
Researchers estimate today that well over 200 books of Plains Indian ledger art still exist in institutional and private collections, but a number of factors make them extremely difficult to locate and study. They are held in collections scattered across the United States (an unknown number are abroad), so there is no efficient way for scholars to view physically large numbers of them. The expense of traveling to work with even those ledger books in the United States, let alone those in foreign countries. They are also extremely fragile, as neither the binding of the volumes nor the paper were manufactured to last centuries and cannot be expected to withstand the handling necessitated by frequent and intensive research commonly associated with visual objects of artistic and historical significance.

Currently, most scholars are forced to rely on sets of slides of the books they want to study, which is a highly cumbersome and inconvenient approach. Comparing drawings from a number of ledger books within the oeuvre of a single artist or following a specific tradition presents major logistical and organizational challenges. In addition, the relatively small size and limited resolution of slides, prints, or transparencies hampers the detailed analysis of these visual materials. When scholars are able to study an actual book of drawings, they cannot readily compare multiple volumes side by side and face a laborious process even if the other ledger materials happen to reside in the same collection.

These conditions and other concerns seriously impede any efforts to compare different pages of the same work side by side, for example, or the elements of different books. Furthermore, the individual books have appreciated tremendously in value since the 1980s, fetching large sums in public auctions and private sales. These significant prices have created an economic incentive for art dealers to dismantle ledger books that appear on the market for American Indian art in order to frame and sell the individual pages to collectors for thousands of dollars apiece, making it impossible to view or study those books as a whole ever again. Between the fragility of the books themselves, their dispersed nature and the economic pressure that is militating against keeping any books not in institutional hands intact, there is an urgent need to safeguard these precious records of Indian people and preserve the insights into history and culture that they contain. These crucial issues of access and preservation can all be addressed using increasingly ubiquitous Web-based information technology.

• Plains Indian Ledger Art Digital Publishing Project
The Plains Indian Ledger Art Digital Publishing Project (PILA) was conceived as a way to keep this irreplaceable historic and cultural information intact, address the challenges of research and public access to the Plains Indian ledger books, and preserve the images for future generations. It places state-of-the-art digital reproductions of entire ledger books in a digital database and made accessible through a dedicated public Web site, allowing users to browse freely through the digital pages of these manuscripts and search for pages across the ledger book according to the fields of the PILA database, which includes the characteristics of each book and plate, historical and ethnographic information, and a lexicon of index terms. Users may open multiple windows showing different pages across the PILA project and zoom in to view the details of any portion of any open ledger book page, facilitating research in ways that are currently impossible using the books themselves (even without considering the present logistical difficulties). The PILA site includes a virtual research station for visitors who register their contact information, which allows users to login and save searches, create Web-based slide shows that can be displayed on any computer that has access to the Internet, record their own research notes linked directly to the images, post public comments, as well as download research notes and plate lists to a local computer. The technology is ideally suited to the medium, as ledger art is a two-dimensional art form with no brush strokes or impasto, and viewers of the images lose nothing by looking at the drawings translated into digital media.

The PILA web site serves as an attractive virtual repository for institutions and private owners to make dozens of these widely dispersed and particularly fragile manuscripts available to a wide audience. For scholars, it overcomes the major limitations to the study of Plains Ledger art; access to customized and searchable digital images encourages interdisciplinary methodologies and develop new approaches to this unique record of Native American voices. It will also attract graduate and undergraduate students interested in embarking on new research. As recent publications of Janet Berlo, Mike Cowdrey, Candace Greene, James Keyser, Joyce Szabo, and a number of other scholars make clear, a new generation of art historical work in Plains Indian ledger art has emerged, using sophisticated interdisciplinary techniques that include historical, anthropological, ethnographic, and art historical methodologies. Increasingly, scholars are asking larger questions about ledger art through research that identifies undocumented ledger artists; contextualizes the life’s work of an individual ledger artist; and links the content of ledger art firmly to cultural, religious, and cosmological concepts and beliefs crucial to understanding the information that these materials can convey to us. PILA will help create a collaborative community where scholars distributed geographically and in diverse fields come together to create an archive that makes in-depth research into these resources possible.

For many Native American communities in the Plains and elsewhere, PILA enables tribal peoples to have a direct and encompassing experience with this part of their heritage. The widespread nature of ledger art in public and private collections presents an even greater obstacle to tribal historians, educators, and cultural trainers than it does for researchers in the academy. While they might be able to establish a relationship with a few museums that have ledger art in their collections, most have to rely on published studies and facsimiles rather than participating directly in the production and dissemination of new knowledge about these important materials relevant to their own historical experience. PILA offers tribal educators, historians, and culture bearers the ability to participate directly in the archiving, organization, and interpretation of Plains Indian ledger art.

Additionally, PILA will digitize and make available in PDF format important resources that will enhance the educational and research import of the project for all site users. PILA will seek permission to scan and prepare key finding aids, historical, art historical, and ethnographic materials to be linked to the PILA web site.

PILA has already helped to raise public consciousness and educate owners about the cultural value of ledger books. Many of those in private hands have been handed down to third and fourth generations and are coming to light now because they are becoming economically valuable. Some owners who considered selling their ledger books and came in contact with PILA’s pilot efforts stipulated that their books go only to new owners who would keep them intact. People who find themselves in possession of a ledger book may find in PILA the means of exploring the history and significance of the material, and a vehicle for sharing its contents in a way that makes a difference to academia, Native American peoples, museum professionals, artists and their patrons, and the general public.

For information about how PILA can include ledger drawing s from public or private institutions or individuals in the project, please CLICK HERE.

• History, Scope and Duration
The Plains Indian Ledger Art Digital Publishing Project was born in the summer of 1994, when its project director arranged to digitize the Southern Cheyenne “Morning Star Ledger,” (now called the Pamplin Cheyenne/Arapaho Ledger) a Plains Indian ledger book that had been purchased at a Sotheby’s auction by a group of dealers who originally planned to dismantle it and sell the pages individually. Joe Burke, director of Visual Information, Inc. (VII) of Denver, CO, offered to scan the entire ledger book free of charge at VII’s Denver facility. Mack Grimmer, then head of Morning Star Galleries in Santa Fe, NM., subsequently consented to ship the manuscript to VII, where professional staff scanned its covers and 94 pages of drawings. On his arrival at UC San Diego, the project director had hired a graduate research assistant with University start-up research funds to prepare digital slides of ledger book materials for use in the classroom. Acquiring images of the Pamplin Cheyenne/Arapaho Ledger at first simply seemed an important step in preserving the series of drawings intact as a digital facsimile of the original and as a point of departure for further research and material for teaching.

Shortly thereafter, in October 1994, another ledger book was sold at auction, and it also appeared for a time to be slated to be dismantled, with portions going to different collectors. Again the project director received permission to digitize it from the eventual purchasers, Eugene and Clare Thaw, who subsequently donated it as part of an important collection to the New York State Historical Association in Cooperstown, NY. VII again offered to scan the manuscript at an unrelated project facility set up at the New York Public Library.

With a growing repository of digitized ledger art images, the project director began to consider how they could best be utilized. He explored the possibility of publishing them on CD-ROM, but as the World Wide Web matured, it emerged instead as the ideal method for promoting access to the images and allowing for new types of research to efficiently take place that would encompass all of the digital images of ledger art that could be assembled together in the future. Once the materials had been digitized, the cost involved in storing them on the Web and making them available to scholars and the general public was negligible, and the interface would be far less cumbersome and the access universal to anyone with a computer. It became clear, in fact, that there was no other viable way to carry out a project of this nature.

Early funding has come from the project director, a seed grant from the UCSD Chancellor’s Associates awarded to the project, and from a development fund established at UC San Diego by private individuals connected to the American Indian art business who have an interest in the preservation, research, and accessibility of this important genre. Support has been provided by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at UC San Diego for graduate research assistance during three summers, which has advanced the design of PILA, as well as research on three of the ledger books currently within the project. An established network of scholars of ledger art participate in PILA by directing the digitization, research, annotation, and indexing of specific ledger books as ledger directors.

PILA has been designed as an ongoing project, and plans to digitize and place in the database a critical mass of 40 additional ledger books and to annotate and index at least 20 complete ledger books—within the next few years. Additional funds to support the project will be generated by online sales of high-resolution printed ledger art images (where PILA has been given reproduction rights) and books related to ledger art. The digital printing aspect of the project will be carried out in collaboration with Hi Rez Digital Solutions www.hirezdigital.com, a project of the Southern California Tribal Chairmen’s Association, in partnership with Hewlett-Packard’s Digital Village program, and with UC San Diego and other partners.

Please view www.sctdv.net for more information about the Tribal Digital Village.