Lone Wolf: American Indians

Late in Lone Wolf’s life, American Indians whose histories have been rendered all but unrecognized and invisible shared a common aspiration to rediscover their cultural heritage and repossess their civil liberties. Lone Wolf had sought throughout his life to participate in the cultural determination of his Blackfeet tribe. Art historian W. Jackson Rushing III argues that artists of mixed heritage working in the twentieth-century appropriated “styles associated with the ‘dominant’ culture – Post Impressionism, Expressionism, and Pop Art – to probe the personal and social dilemmas of authentic, but non-traditional Indian cultures.” Through American Indians’ depictions in the popular culture, media, film, literature, and the arts, their passive

Lone Wolf was surrounded from an early age by Western representational art, whether those forms were in the clay models he made with his grandfather Yellow Wolf, or in the books he saw at the boarding schools. As Lone Wolf built upon those forms, in the making of his art he incorporated Blackfeet and Euro-American subject matter into his narrative style, and engaged in a process of cultural exchange. The autoethnographic artworks he created both on canvas and in bronze are examples of how colonized people have struggled to validate their own traditions in the face of threatened cultural survival. Lone Wolf forged ways to communicate across the cultural divide of being both Blackfeet and Euro-American, as he appropriated mainstream modes of representation. As the hegemonic Euro-American society appropriated American Indian art and culture, so too, did Lone Wolf exploit his cultural identity for commercial

Lone Wolf was one of very few American Indian artists who produced Western American art, and was embraced by those who supported the genre. Lone Wolf insisted that his art was an authentic depiction of the disappearing Old West. Perhaps the truth in his art is not to be found in the degree to which it replicated the West that depicted cowboys and Blackfeet culture, but rather in his ability to inspire members of his own tribe and the popular American