Sabina, a Cayuse 1891 - 1906

Curator: I'm struck by the somber elegance of this piece. It's titled "Sabina, a Cayuse," made sometime between 1891 and 1906 by Olin Levi Warner. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds this bronze portrait. Editor: Somber, yes, a melancholic beauty hangs about it. It feels incredibly dignified and still, but shadowed. Curator: That feeling of stillness could come from the fact it is rendered in bronze. But the somberness is interesting... Do you sense an element of elegy here? Consider how Indigenous people were portrayed around the turn of the century. Editor: Definitely elegy. It feels like an attempt to memorialize or even, romanticize, a vanishing way of life. That profile view—almost like a coin. What’s up with the name though? "Kash-Kashs Daughter" like that's all the introduction she needs? That part stings a bit. Curator: Yes, this medallic form, this detached profile view. It lends a classicism while obscuring a deeper story, a tension prevalent in much late 19th-century art representing Native Americans. But I see more, too, her braid seems powerfully evocative—a traditional style, perhaps, worn with deliberate pride. The artist did render a likeness. Editor: Her braid grounds her, it stops the work becoming completely abstract, idealised. You can see how the light catches individual strands. It's like a connection to both the personal and the traditional. There's something about the inscription too... It positions her in a certain historical context, and, intentionally or not, as something belonging to the past. Curator: The inscription locks the piece within the period it was created and reminds us the piece becomes a time capsule. Editor: And perhaps that's the real power of "Sabina, a Cayuse." It makes us question what's been lost and how we choose to remember it. Curator: Yes, the quiet resistance embedded in this elegant artifact sparks essential questions about memory and representation, themes so relevant even now.