Portrait of A Massacred Indian No. 3

Fritz W. Scholder

Fritz Scholder, a member of the Luiseno tribe of California, often challenged the percieved ideal of the American Indian artist with his use of dark, jarring, heavy imagery that distorted--and thus destroyed--the colonial gaze. Gone is the idealized "noble savage" image, generated by Edward Curtis and other non-Native artists whose works aimed to commemorate a people they assumed would be gone before long. Gone, too, is the assumption that the American Indian would only want to use the techniques and mediums of their tribal ancestors.

By the 1960s, American Indian artists had begun to stake a claim in the art world as being worthy of contemporary consideration, and Scholder's work was among the most salient. One of his series of paintings and prints focused attention on the rarely depicted "Massacred Indian".

Done at Editions Press in San Francisco with Master Printer Lloyd Baggs, "Portrait of a Massacred Indian No. 3" is perhaps the most striking of his oversized lithographic works. On the surface, the image is violent, disturbing; further contemplation suggests a destruction of colonial romanticizing, and a potent, rising reclamation of individual voice.