Salmon Spearing - Ottowas 1861 - 1869

George Catlin, a European American artist, made this painting, "Salmon Spearing - Ottowas," to document Native American life during a period of westward expansion. Catlin romanticizes the scene, bathed in the soft glow of torchlight under a night sky, yet the image is loaded with the painful history of cultural disruption. Here the Ottawa people are depicted practicing a traditional fishing method. Catlin’s gaze flattens the nuances of this practice into an ethnographic spectacle, one rendered even more fraught knowing the Ottawa’s faced immense pressures of land dispossession and cultural assimilation. How do we reconcile the allure of the painting’s aesthetic with its complicated origins and the legacy of colonialism? Catlin’s work prompts us to consider who has the authority to represent a culture and the ethical responsibilities that come with it. The painting serves as a reminder of the complexities and contradictions inherent in the act of witnessing and documenting cultures other than one's own.