The Signal Fire 1897

Charles M. Russell painted “The Signal Fire” in oil on canvas sometime in his career as a Western artist. The group of Indigenous people that you see here around a small fire are signaling to someone in the distance. Russell was working in a period of American art when there was great interest in painting the West, but often that was done in ways that romanticized it or that erased the presence and culture of Indigenous people. Russell knew the West well, and his work is infused with a respect for the cultures of its Indigenous people. He would have been familiar with institutional histories of how Indigenous people were treated as a result of westward expansion, the reservation system, and U.S. Indian boarding schools. Looking at Russell’s painting from our contemporary vantage point, we can use it as a touchstone to understand the way that knowledge of social and institutional histories gives context to works of art. We can begin to understand the complex politics of imagery.