ABSTRACT
Custer On Canvas has been about nostalgia, memory, imaginary pasts, traveling Wild West minstrel shows, Indians playing Indians, whites playing Indians, artists and their Last Stand paintings, soldiers, generals, scouts, ritual dramas, eternal youth, self-sacrificing heroes, buffalo hunters, dime novelists, a myth that will not die. Custer is eternal youth. The Last Stand implies an ending. There was no last stand. It has been about how an event and a set of paintings, when combined with a Wild West show and an advertisement for beer, freezes forever a people in an imaginary racist past. It is about how that past lives in the present through paintings, performances, movies, commercials, and museum exhibits. It has been about storytelling. The Custer narratives are stories about “storying,” and my narrative, as argued in Chapter 1, has been an attempt to problematize the concept of the Custer “script” itself. This book is a subversive response to a script we have all been handed through the Last Stand paintings. In rescripting the grand narrative, I have attempted to undo the Last Stand. This is because there is no last stand. There was no stand. Indeed, there is no last. To repeat, as Eric von Schmidt discovered when inscribing the Last Stand, there is nowhere to stand. There is no true vantage point. The Last Stand is a social construction, pure and simple. My dramatic format throughout has been intended to leave you, the reader, with nowhere to stand, except to understand that what you knew before can no longer be taken as true. The story I tell here is but one more version of the “real” last stand. In challenging the concept of an objective rendering of the Last Stand I create a space for alternative tellings, most importantly, Red Horse’s fortyone drawings. These drawings, like those of White Swan, Amos Bad Heart Buffalo, Mardon, and Scholder, challenge the official history embedded in the so-called canonical paintings, from Adams through Mulvany, and Paxson to von Schmidt. These official stories present Native Americans as uncivilized, violent barbarians. They are part of the Custer myth. The alternative narratives challenge this myth. They anticipate and record the death of the Indian Nation. They bring care and remorse to these tragic endings, emotions excluded in the dominant white narrative. They offer a counter-narrative, turning the Last Stand into a process, into a sequence of interconnected events. They give Custer a small part in the larger play. He is just another dead soldier, not a grand hero or tragic figure.
