Stephanie has taught studio art and art history classes to audiences of all ages. She holds a master's degree in Art History.
Have you ever drawn a picture of a piece of paper? What if you didn't have paper available?
For hundreds of years, the native peoples of North America's Northern Plains (today, the area is parts of the United States and Canada), painted on buffalo hides. Native American buffalo hide art was the result of both practical need and creative expression.
Many peoples of Plains tribes, including the Utes, Shoshones, Kiowa, Lakota and Blackfeet, were nomadic hunters who followed the seasonal migration of animals. Expert horsemen and women, these Native Americans hunted buffalo, which were then plentiful. The buffalo was an important source of food and also a source of hide for clothing.
Painted buffalo hides were practical. The Great Plains could be very cold in the winter with lots of blowing snow. Wearing buffalo hides ensured warmth, especially because people wore them with the fur on the inside. This left the side of tanned hide as a surface to be adorned and embellished with painting. Men and women painted hides. Before contact with Europeans they used natural pigments like ocher. Later they used commercial dyes obtained through trade.
But painted buffalo hides were more than simply utilitarian clothing-- they were also ceremonial. The Plains tribes used hides to record their history, track the seasonal cycle of events, and also convey spiritual and healing needs. Let's look more at some symbols on these hides, and learn about their meanings.
A buffalo hide is large with plenty of room for painting. Sometimes artists covered them with symbols painted on for healing purposes, and special hides were painted for spiritual and political leaders. Tribes believed that hides painted with certain symbols could convey those powers to their wearers. Sometimes the symbols were in the form of pictograms, simplified images or symbols that stood for things like people, weather events, or natural landscape features. They might also stand for attributes like peace, friendship or strength. For example, in some Native cultures, a drawing of two crossed arrow signified friendship. Spirals sometimes stood for a journey, while wavy or zigzag lines might symbolize water. Over time, Native cultures developed an extensive vocabulary of these drawn symbols.
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Some hide paintings recorded history and traced the events of a year. Colorful images of simplified horses and warriors conveying important battles. Drawings of men on horseback bringing down buffaloes signaled successful hunts. These types of hide paintings were usually done by men. One type of painted hide was called a winter count robe. Winter count robes were painted by medicine men or shamans, and they recorded the deeds and events of a season or many seasons. Winter count robes might cover a year or several years. This type of robe had two basic patterns. They started in the center of a hide and moved outward in a clockwise spiral or portrayed events in horizontal rows.
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In some tribes, women painted robes with large geometric designs, like the box-and-border figure, with large rectangular boxes surrounded by a large dark outlined border. Scholar still don't know exactly what it means. Other geometric images included hourglass figures, and circles. Some symbols were specific to their creators and designs differed by tribe.
When the buffalo was hunted almost to extinction, Native tribes began to use ledger paper and continued to record their history in drawings. Today, several contemporary Native American artists have revived the art of painting on buffalo hide, maintaining the tradition for future generations.
Now you know more about the symbols and meanings on Native American painted buffalo hides. The next time you visit a museum, perhaps you can see one of these magnificent records of history for yourself.
Native American buffalo hide art was created by members of Plains cultures, who hunted buffalos for food and used their hides for clothing. Painted hides were functional and symbolic. The fur, worn on the inside, provided warmth. The outer hide was painted. Some hides were covered with pictograms, simple images or symbols that stood for things like weather and landscape features or abstract ideas like strength and friendship. Some robes narrative events in the tribes history. Winter count robes depicted a series of events over several seasons. Men painted the hides with images of great hunts and battles. Women painted geometric patterns on hides, including the box-and-border design, the meaning of which is still unknown.
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