The Center for Multicultural Education

Prints from the History of the Indian Tribes of North America

The McKenney & Hall Native American Art Exhibit will be on display at the CME throughout the month of April.

The close of the American Revolution also marked the end of the American Indians’ influence in America. Whites were already pouring over the Appalachians and incidents between whites and Indians were mounting. Political pragmatists believed that moving the Indians to reservations west of the Mississippi would be the immediate solution to this growing conflict.

For this purpose Indian chiefs and delegations were brought east to be conditioned for the move to reservation land and to sign treaties. No fewer than eighteen treaties were signed in Washington between 1824 and 1838 with a delegation of chiefs and headmen of the tribe or tribes concerned attending each signing. In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which permitted President Andrew Jackson to legally execute the plan for the removal of tribes to federal land.

It was in this climate that Thomas Loraine McKenney (1785-1859) first conceived the idea of developing an official government collection of portraits of prominent Indians who visited Washington. Serving the federal government as Superintendent of Indian Affairs (then under the War Department) from 1824 to 1830 Thomas McKenney had aprofound understanding and sympathy for the Indians. It was through his efforts that the War Department commissioned prominent Washington portraitist, Charles Bird King (1785-1862), to do the Indian portraits “…preserving the likenesses of some of the most distinguished among this most extraordinary race of people…that this race was about to become extinct, and that a faithful resemblance of the most remarkable among them would be full of interests inafter-times…” as stated by Secretary of War, James Barbour.

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Image Source: http://www.si.edu/oahp/cbking/CB%20King%20Exhibit.htm