Native American Watercolor Painting Chinook Indian Tissue Paper

Chinook Indian: Columbia River. Extracts from Alfred Jacob Miller’s original text, which accompanied his images of Native Americans, are included below for reference. These words, which shaped how Miller’s contemporaries viewed the watercolors, reveal the racism and sexism embedded in 19th-century exploration and colonisation of the western part of what is today the United States. It was probably the "Asiatic type, the eyes being almond shaped and slightly turned up at the corners," that attracted Miller to paint this Chinook Indian portrait. He was a "favourable specimen, about 22 years of age," and holding a remarkable bow made of elk-horn with a sinew string, which Miller also drew. Transcriptions of field-sketches drawn during the 1837 expedition that Miller had undertaken to the annual fur-trader's rendezvous in the Green River Valley (in what is now western Wyoming), these watercolors are a unique record of the closing years of the western fur trade.