Distinctly Montana Magazine

w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m 99 ues in the portrait by Haynes is, according to Holm, entirely consistent with technological limitations that plagued pho- tographers in the early 1880s. This blanket strip also exhib- its several stylistic traits that lend credence to a Crow attri- bution. Twelve different bead colors, including six shades of blue, appear on this piece. De- sign compositions on rectangu- lar panels utilize nine different colors; rosettes consistently feature seven. In each instance, these figures exceed the number of colors typically observed on blanket strips with Plateau doc- umentation. Beaded backgrounds on the White Swan robe are light blue and pink, hues traditionally as- sociated with Crow beadwork, whereas blanket strips with Plateau provenance commonly incorporated white as a back- field for end sections of rectan- gular panels. Crow women, by contrast, used white beads al- most exclusively for single-row outlines and as an accent color. The combination of white out- lines and dark blue figure bor- ders, which was consistently applied here to primary motifs, crisply compartmentalizes Crow compositions and provides, perhaps, the single most compelling reason to attribute this piece to Apsáalooke artisans. Plateau beadworkers, on the other hand, employed a wider range of colors on figure bor- ders and rarely combined out- lines with borders. These char- acteristics and its classic Crow color scheme indicate that the White Swan blanket strip is, al- most certainly, of Crow origin. The White Swan robe possess- es exceptional historic and ar- tistic significance, but those qualities were not widely rec- ognized outside of Montana before 1995, when the Montana Historical Society gracious- ly agreed to loan this artifact for a major exhibition ("With Pride They Made These: Trib- al Styles in Plains Indian Art") that I co-curated at the Frank H. McClung Museum, Univer- sity of Tennessee. During the following year, I wrote my M.A. thesis on the White Swan robe. This masterpiece was featured again in the Montana Historical Society's 2018 online exhibi- tion, "Appropriate, Curious, & Rare: Montana History Object by Object." In a related com- petition, dubbed "Montana Madness," the White Swan robe was ultimately selected by participants as one of the four objects most representative of Montana history. It remains a fitting tribute to Montana's nineteenth-century Plains Indian artists, most of whom are not credited in the historical record. A war-exploit robe IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, WHICH THEY ATTRIBUTE TO WHITE SWAN, AN APSÁALOOKE (CROW), IS UNIQUELY QUALIFIED TO REPRESENT THESE ARTISTS OF THE PAST, SINCE IT IS EMBELLISHED IN A STYLE THAT EXEMPLIFIES ARTFORMS PRODUCED, RESPECTIVELY, BY CROW MEN AND WOMEN. White Swan, Crow. Date and photographer unknown. White Swan captures an enemy's gun in hand-to-hand combat. Photograph by W. Miles Wright Mató-Tópe ("Four Bears"), Mandan, April 1834. Portrait by Karl Bodmer. National An- thropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

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