The American Indian Quarterly 26.4 (2002) 559-604 [Access article in PDF] Fluidity of Meaning Flag Imagery in Plains Indian Art Douglas A. Schmittou and Michael H. Logan The history of Indian-white relations reveals a seemingly endless succession of losses endured by Native Americans: their autonomy, most of their lands, and much of their traditional cultures. By 1900 the population of peoples indigenous to North America had fallen from a precontact base estimated as high as 10,000,000 to an all-time low of 375,000 for the continent and 237,196 for the United States.1 For many smaller tribes the synergistic effects of introduced diseases, indiscriminate slaughter, famine, and cultural disruption proved to be insurmountable. Their fate, sadly, was extinction, with the Yahi of northern California being the most widely known case of white-induced Native American genocide.2 Tribes managing to escape this plight weathered the same hardships in addition to new ones: relocation, broken treaties, economic dependency and racism, imprisonment, forced schooling, and denial of our country's constitutional rights. Native Americans today are the heirs, more so victors, of five centuries of brutal mistreatment by the U.S. government, state militias, and, earlier, American-born colonists as well as colonists, military troops, and explorers from Britain, France, Spain, and other foreign countries. Given the undeniably harsh nature of Indian-white relations, the emergence of flag imagery in late-nineteenth-century Plains Indian art represents one of the most intriguing paradoxes confronting scholars who specialize in the analysis of Native American material culture.3 Use of the flag motif was neither an infrequent nor geographically isolated practice among Indian peoples during the late 1800s and early 1900s. An examination of the two major publications on this topic—Toby Herbst and Joel Kopp's The Flag in American Indian Art and Richard Pohrt's The American Indian, the American Flag —reveals that nearly forty tribes from nine different culture areas utilized flag imagery to a greater or lesser degree.4 Many northeastern tribes, as well as the Navajo of the Southwest, used the flag motif primarily on objects that were to be sold in the curio trade. Flag imagery, however, appears most commonly in Plains Indian art and, more specifically, in Lakota (Teton or western Sioux) quill embroidery [End Page 559] and beadwork. Of some three hundred objects illustrated in the aforementioned volumes, approximately 60percent are of Lakota manufacture. The statistical dominance of the Lakota becomes even more obvious through a rank ordering of tribes by the number of specimens attributed to them by these authors. Ranking third are the Ottawa with nine items, most of which are wall plaques or small boxes made of birchbark. The Navajo ranked second with nineteen specimens, all of which are woven blankets or rugs. The overwhelming leader, however, are the Lakota, with a total of 166 pieces bearing flags or other symbols of the United States. Moreover, most Lakota objects exhibit signs of wear, an indication that they were crafted for internal consumption and not for sale to whites.5 Statement of Problem An obvious, yet perplexing, question emerges from the historical context within which flag imagery developed: Why would oppressed peoples adopt the preeminent symbol of their oppressors and employ it as a design element in their decorative arts? Previous investigators have been no less struck by this dilemma. Herbst and Kopp, for example, state that "It has always seemed curious and contradictory that Native Americans who fought so valiantly and tenaciously against the encroachment of the United States should use the symbol of that government to decorate their clothing and belongings."6 Pohrt remarks similarly that "It seems somewhat incongruous that the Sioux, who resisted white domination so long and so well, should be the leaders in the use of patriotic symbols in their arts and crafts."7 Why, then, did the Lakota develop a virtual monopoly on the use of the flag motif while their neighbors, the Crow and Pawnee, rarely, if ever, depicted flags in their beaded art? The latter question...