About this work
What the viewer encounters in this print is the visual record of one of the most extraordinary — and most contested — ceremonies ever witnessed by an outsider on the American frontier. In words and pictures, Catlin recorded the O-kee-pa: a secret ceremony, a blend of mysticism and ritual, by which the Mandans initiated their braves and conjured the life-sustaining buffalo.
Witnessed by Catlin during his travels along the Upper Missouri in 1832, the O-kee-pa was the centerpiece of the Mandan religious calendar — an annual four-day ritual that included the painful initiation of the most promising young men of the tribe. The chromolithographic plates that illustrate this publication — thirteen tissue-guarded chromolithographic plates after Catlin, rendered by Simonau & Toovey — pulse with ochres, earth reds, and the smoky interiors of earth lodges: figures painted white, red, and yellow crowd the composition, suspended between the sacred and the physical. The ceremony began with initiates sequestered inside a medicine lodge, undergoing a four-day fast and feats of endurance; outside, tribal members wearing buffalo robes performed the Bull Dance to petition the Great Spirit for fertility and abundant bison.
The 1867 publication by J. B. Lippincott in Philadelphia was no mere retrospective. Catlin wrote *O-Kee-Pa* in response to an 1866 article that falsely attributed a scandalous pamphlet to him — making this work as much a defense of Catlin as of the Mandans themselves.
He gathered corroborating testimonials, including a letter from Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, and published the full account, complete with thirteen chromolithographs and a fuller text, in 1867. The stakes were immense: Catlin considered the O-kee-pa ceremony a crucial part of the Mandan's survival, and because the Mandan were almost completely exterminated by smallpox in 1837, virtually no other documentation of this ceremony exists.
Catlin was one of the few non-Indians ever to witness the ceremony, which was outlawed in 1890.
As wall art, this print carries the weight of a document that almost wasn't. It belongs in a library, study, or reading room — a space where history and visual art are given equal standing. The warm, firelit palette and the dense, intimate compositions reward slow looking. It speaks to the viewer who is drawn not to wilderness as spectacle but to people — their rites, their courage, their complexity. Catlin's images carry a purposeful rawness; scholar Joan Carpenter Troccoli has noted that he "left things in a sketchy state because that is the most truthful moment in the history of a picture, when an artist is right in front of his subjects."
