1859 -1880 · Camps, canoes and colonial view of the West

Bierstadt places fishermen, councils and indigenous camps in vast landscapes; these images show a real presence while filtering it through the colonial imagination of the 19th century.

Albert Bierstadt met and represented indigenous communities during his travels in the American West from 1859. He designed clothing, teepees, canoes and activities, then recomposed these observations in his New York studio. Scenes of spear fishing or canoe crossing combine gesture, water and landscape with great visual efficiency. The councils and camps introduce a collective organization, while the views of Mariposa or Columbia place the figures in specific territories. Bierstadt thus gives a presence to indigenous peoples within a landscape painting which often erases them. But he frequently places them on a small scale, in a past supposed to disappear in the face of American expansion. This vision corresponds to the colonial myth of the "people doomed to disappear" and masks violence, dispossession and continuity of the nations represented. Generic titles - "Indians", "Indian camp" - also reduce the diversity of identities. The collection must therefore be seen as an archive of Bierstadt's vision, not as a neutral description of the peoples and their history. The selection "Indian Scenes by Albert Bierstadt" compares Indians fishing with spears and Indian Canoes. His reading favors drawing.

Indigenous figures from Bierstadt inhabit the landscape, but the composition often places them in the imagined past of a territory that colonization already presents as available.