Neal Keating has written a stimulating—and bold—book. Iroquois Art, Power, and History “describes and interprets the historical and current practices of visual expression carried out by indigenous Haudenosaunee and Iroquoian peoples of the Eastern Woodlands of North America.” (Haudenosaunee refers to the original six member nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.) Covering more than four centuries, Keating seeks “to demonstrate a significant cultural continuity between contemporary Haudenosaunee peoples and their pre-colonial and colonial-era ancestors.” Fortunately, he recognizes this is “an argument that is surprisingly contentious in the field of Iroquois studies” (3), and so his assertions are, on the whole, well grounded.

To make his case, Keating analyzes a diverse collection of “pictorial and graphic images produced in a wide variety of media, including painting, writing, incising, drawing, tattoo, body painting, photography, videography, and digital media” (7). Ranging from ancient earthworks (e.g., Serpent Mound in Ohio) to “tree paintings,” treaty “signatures,” and, further, to the art of living artists such as G. Peter Jemison, Shelley Niro, Jeffrey M. Thomas, and Melanie Printup Hope, Keating seeks a continuous cultural thread even as he asserts that the form and content of Haudenosaunee visual expression changed in response to shifting social, political, and economic circumstances, colonial intrusion, and imperialist pressures at different points in time.

Keating’s methodology is anthropological, not art historical, though in the final analysis, he draws sensitively and with great skill from many disciplinary practices. His basic premise—that “visual expressions can serve as indexes of the sociopolitical relations and processes involved in their production and circulation . . . [that] pictures can . . . provide us with insights on power” (3)—is not far from the work many art historians do today. Indeed, Keating’s close analysis and interpretation of specific works of contemporary Haudenosaunee art contain some sparkling insights.

Iroquois Art, Power, and History is organized around “four broad eras of time, which conform to significant shifts in political economy and, thus, structural power” (11). The first, the “era of autonomy,” spans 5,000 years (ca. 3000 BCE–1535 CE). In this section, which serves as a prelude to his main focus on the three later eras, Keating draws upon archaeology, historical linguistics, and “comparatively vague” visual data to advance only a few general hypotheses—not about Iroquoian ethnogenesis (i.e., “the origins of Iroquoians as a distinct group of peoples and cultures” (23)), but about the circulation of ideas. Specifically, he proposes that “information moves faster and farther than physical bodies do, and that information also travels across cultural and ethnic differences” (23). Further, he suggests that “important cultural information traveled rather freely throughout the Woodlands, more freely in the pre-contact era than post-contact” (24). To the untrained eye of this art historian, these do not seem to be highly incendiary (or even strikingly new?) propositions.

Keating’s real contributions are found in his discussion of the three subsequent historical periods, which he dubs the colonial and neocolonial eras and the era of decolonization. For each, Keating offers concise overviews of Haudenosaunee interactions and power relations with European colonizers. He then examines distinct genres of Iroquoian imagery, paying particular attention to the ways social and political relations were expressed visually. From the colonial era (1535–1800), Keating concentrates on “pictures along passages” (45), or images painted or inscribed on tree trunks in forested areas between villages. Though they no longer survive in physical form, their description and interpretation can be found in documents written (and illustrations sketched) by Christian missionaries and settlers. Keenly aware of the biases and limitations of this “data set,” Keating proceeds cautiously. Based on his analysis of this “tree painting ekphrasis,” he suggests that the “prototypical subjects” were “narrative cycles of war parties and hunting excursions, and also representations of owachira- [matrilineal kinship-] based identities” (45). His strategy then is “to attempt to draw out the indigenous perspective from the record, to allow ‘the subaltern to speak’ (Spivak, 1988), or in this case to show, to bring indigenous representations out from behind and under the words, images, and biases of the colonizers” (13; emphasis in original). He tackles this endeavor with admirable restraint and in a way that opens up, rather than closes down, the possible interpretations of a largely unexamined mode of Native visual expression. His conclusion is that “the power represented in tree paintings is that of indigenous autonomy, the expression of self-determination, free movement, and open territories. The frequent representation of owachiras confirms the conditions of freedom within which Iroquoian people imagined themselves” (46).

In a chapter dedicated to “other expressive strategies used during the colonial era,” Keating again relies on colonialists’ ekphrasis to consider pictorial and graphic imagery on bodies (i.e., permanent and nonpermanent tattooing and painting), painted and incised posts and poles, “board” pictures inside longhouses, and warrior pictures on wooden clubs. He then pivots to a fascinating discussion of indigenous writing. The premise at work here, borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault as well as John Elkins (The Domain of Images, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), is that “the difference between a written word and a picture is not a matter of kind but of degree” (8). This is a notion, it seems to me, that holds exciting possibilities for future art-historical studies. And indeed, Keating’s analysis of “treaty pictures” (owachira symbols and other marks) that appear as Native signatures on deeds and other documents made “in situations of asymmetrical power relations” (95) between Haudenosaunee peoples and Europeans yields intriguing conclusions. By contrast, his discussion of “an eighteenth-century probable Mohawk watercolor” (101–2) is difficult to assess, due to scant documentation of his sources.

In the period Keating calls the neocolonial era (1800–1950), Haudenosaunee peoples lost ninety-nine percent of their territories, were removed to and confined on reservations, and were subjected to widespread assimilationist policies and practices aimed at cultural eradication. Under these severe pressures, “Haudenosaunee expressive strategies that had been used in the traditional indigenous visual communication system disappeared,” and, Keating argues, “new strategies emerged” (129). I am not sure it counts as a strategy exactly, but it is during this period that decidedly Western artistic practices take hold, as evidenced by works of art made with conventional Western materials (e.g., paper, canvas, oil, and watercolor) by a small number of individual named artists. Keating describes well the role of church- and state-sponsored schools for Indians in this reorientation (even as he also draws attention to the rise of a tourist market not for painting in the Western tradition, but for “authentically Native” beadwork and basketry). Noting that more extant Iroquois-made pictures and biographical information about the artists “allows for a more focused analysis of the individual consciousness of artists and their engagement with the changing world” (133), Keating offers particularly nuanced discussions of David Cusick, Zacharie Vincent Telari-o-lin, and James Beaver. (He also discusses artists Dennis Cusick, George Wilson, Thomas Jacobs, and O. Dieker/Oherosokon.) Art historians teaching nineteenth- and twentieth-century Native American art will find this section generally very helpful due to the biographical information Keating gathered through extensive archival research, and for the inclusion of high-quality reproductions of artworks not widely published previously.

One minor criticism of this section: Keating rightly points out that “the spaces in which Haudenosaunee expressions appeared changed from undulating forest trails and autonomous villages to square classrooms on reservations” (133), but he does not fully explore (following Spivak) the degree to which these artists adapted and/or subverted Western pictorial conventions, particularly for depicting the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface.

Turning to “Phase 2” of the neocolonial era, characterized by rapid transformation of former Haudenosaunee territories into an industrial corridor and even greater pressures to assimilate, Keating describes the prominent role of anthropologists (particularly Arthur C. Parker) and the Seneca Indian Arts Project, a New Deal program that ran from 1935–41, in “shaping Iroquois cultural representation during the early twentieth century” (170). The widespread patronage of indigenous artists by anthropologists practicing “salvage anthropology” in this period is well documented; however, information about the Seneca Indian Arts Project is less well known (at least to me), and Keating’s work fills an important void. Though one might quibble over some minor assertions, his discussion of the art and careers of Jesse Cornplanter, Sanford Plummer, and Ernest Smith (and their involvement in the New Deal program) is thorough and informative.

Keating’s final section, the “era of decolonization,” covers 1950 to the present. Leaving aside his questionable designation (is decolonization even possible on the North American continent?), this section will undoubtedly prove the most controversial. Though he brings together an interesting group of artists and diverse forms of visual expression (from Robert Markle’s expressionistic paintings to the widely reproduced “Warrior Flag” logo by Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall, associated with the Red Power movement), and offers nuanced, culturally informed interpretations of specific works (see, for example, his discussion of George C. Longfish’s paintings), his selections will strike many readers as highly idiosyncratic. (Besides those already mentioned, Keating writes about Arnold Jacobs, Oren Lyons, Carson Waterman, Frank Thomas, John Fadden Kahiones, Ric Glazer-Danay, R. G. Miller, Katsitsionni Fox, Sue Ellen Herne, Zenja Hyde, Linley Logan, Alex Jacobs, Eric Gansworth, Greg Staats, Ivan Bomberry, and Alan Michelson.) Keating is aware that he has made unique choices and goes to great lengths to explain and remind the reader that he is not making an argument that encompasses all contemporary Haudenosaunee visual art, but is instead focused on “the engagement of contemporary Haudenosaunee visual artists with social and cultural power” (234). What exactly he means by this, however, is somewhat unclear. After all, what artist is not engaged on some level with social and cultural power?

Conversely, some of the assertions Keating does make about contemporary indigenous art generally seem overstated. He suggests, for example, that the “veritable explosion of visual art production . . . in many indigenous communities throughout North America” in the latter half of the twentieth century stems from “a growing human rights movement aimed at decolonizing Native peoples and lands.” Further, he states, “This was the energy that drove the indigenous appropriation of contemporary and modern art languages, media, and genres” (233). My own work in this area makes clear that the human and civil rights movements may have motivated some Native people to “appropriate” Western art forms, but certainly not all.

The weaknesses of Keating’s study in its entirety come into sharp relief in this final section. For example, he focuses (primarily) on “those visual expressions that are pictorial (that is, contain images, are themselves images, or both), and are usually created on some kind of two-dimensional surface” (7). But Keating’s own findings throughout the book call attention to the limitations of the Western bias that assumes “figure” and “ground” can be extricated from one another. In terms of modern and contemporary art, too, which increasingly seeks to obliterate the boundaries separating two- and three-dimensional art forms, it is a distinction that has lost its potency and relevance.

Similarly, the decision to include so many dissimilar modes of visual expression drawn from such a vast expanse of time is both the primary strength and weakness of Keating’s study. The sustained discussions of disparate modes of visual expression placed side by side and within a single book are highly provocative. But the book sets up a tension between synthesis and selectivity. In the final section, the omissions are unsettling: where, for example, is prolonged discussion of artist and longtime activist Jolene Rickard?

Still, this final section on Haudenosaunee visual expression ca. 1950 to the present is rich and provocative, and warrants close study. Keating discusses key events and the political activism and resistance they engendered, and he introduces a number of little-known artists alongside more familiar ones. He also, in several cases, offers new information drawn from personal communication and conversation with these artists, and includes high-quality color reproductions of several works by each.

Iroquois Art, Power, and History makes a number of important, original contributions to the literature on Native American art. Artist and curator Truman Lowe (Ho-Chunk) likes to say that Native art needs more people writing from many different perspectives, more scholarship that situates indigenous art and lives within multiple contexts. Keating’s well-researched, wide-ranging, and multidisciplinary study answers the call, and charts a promising course for future work.