Few nineteenth-century artists used native women who participated in the North American fur trade as the subjects of their paintings. Of those who did produce a significant number of representations of such individuals, Alfred Jacob Miller is among the best known. The purpose of this study is to explore how a number of nineteenth-century conventions of depiction employed by Miller perpetuated and /or challenged two culturally dominant discourses that furthered the subjugation of Native American women. The first discourse to be examined, Orientalism, functioned through literary and artistic representations that positioned colonized individuals as irrevocably other than, and morally inferior to, their European colonizers. The second discourse, commonly labeled “domestic ideology,’’ functioned through an ideal of feminine domesticity that positioned women as moral, civilizing influences on the frontier. I have chosen to focus on Miller for two reasons. First, over the span of his long career, he produced an unusually large number of paintings and drawings of native women that offer abundant opportunity for exploration of the artistic conventions used in portraying this subject. Second, as the products of an individual of high social standing and considerable professional repute, Miller’s representations exhibit most clearly the culturally dominant attitudes reproduced in and perpetuated by nineteenth century representational practices.

This study provides a history of early to mid-twentieth century social worker Jessie Donaldson Schultz’s efforts to assist Northern Plains Native women in establishing economically viable handcraft programs. These projects opened a space for craft workers to perpetuate important traditions and values and assert agency within otherwise constraining circumstances. Northern Plains Native women’s success resulted from their ability to adapt existing traditional social and cultural structures to the demands of twentieth-century handcraft production.