Castle McLaughlin is Associate Curator of North American Ethnography at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.
The Little Bighorn wins a place in McLaughlin’s title by accident,
because the drawings were found near the battlefield in a funerary
lodge a few days after the fight. The details of the discovery are
interesting enough, but it is the drawings themselves—what they
represent and who made them—that give us a rich and startling view
of life on the Northern Plains in the last years before the Indians
who thought they owned them were confined to reservations… What’s
interesting about McLaughlin’s book, in the way that only an
exhaustive inquiry can be truly interesting, is the quantity of
fundamental information she manages to wring from these
drawings—when they were made, who made them, and what they
depicted. McLaughlin makes no broad claims for what she is up to,
but A Lakota War Book ought to be in the collection of any serious
student of the Northern Plains or the Little Bighorn.
*New York Review of Books*
What sets these drawings apart from others of their kind is the
persuasive argument made by McLaughlin that most of the drawings,
and the book as a whole, represent an Indian account of episodes
during the conflict known as ‘Red Cloud’s War’ (1866–1868), and
that it may be possible to identify three of the artists…What is
perhaps most remarkable is the intensely personal style of each
artist, and the attention to identifying detail of weapons,
clothing and body paint, thereby allowing the viewer a glimpse of
the war from the other side.
*New York Review of Books blog*
McLaughlin’s brilliant contribution to the history, material
culture, and art of the Plains provides a transformative
understanding of Plains Indian ledger art.
*Candace Greene, Smithsonian Institution*
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