Tashu ke hizi (Yellow horse)

 

John Ihle

  1925 - 2002 (biography)

1983  

color collagraph 

15 5/8 x 15 5/8" platemark 

pencil, lower right 

IX/X 

pencil titled, lower center; pencil inscription in lower left paper corner: Canadian Series Pl. 24 "Yellow Horse" 1983; paper is embossed with M in a circle 

 

ivory wove 

published 

artist 

JI109 

$425.00 

Tashu-ke-hizi, known to North American settlers as Yellow Horse, was a Yanktonai tribalmember from the Standing Rock territory, born around 1845. He was a celebrated warrior who led campaigns against the Apsaroke (Crow) beginning at age fifteen. An account of his experience during the massacre of his tribespeople at Whitestone Hill, 1863 by American general Alfred Sully and his troops was recorded by Lucille Van Solen, a schoolteacher on the Standing Rock reservation who helped to record the oral histories of Sitting Bull and others.

John Ihle had long been fascinated by the pre-colonial histories of the Americas and elsewhere. He found inspiration in Indigenous pictography and symbolism, beginning with an early childhood visit to the Natural History Museum in Chicago. He would revisit this source of inspiration as a student of Mauricio Lasansky at Illinois Wesleyan in the summer of 1949.

From the late 1960s through the mid 1970s Ihle worked on a series of color intaglios he titled the Canadian Series, which incorporated his interpretation of this imagery. Though this print was created nearly a decade after he had completed the series, he continued to explore these themes, including in the earth and rust-toned "Tashu ke hizi".