About this work
The image confronts the viewer with a single figure split across two worlds. On the left, Wi-Jun-Jon departs for Washington in full traditional dress, carrying a calumet; on the right, he returns to his village wearing a uniform, top hat, and carrying a fan and an umbrella.
The composition renders the same brown-skinned man twice — dark eyes and high cheekbones, straight black hair falling around his face and down his back — set against pale green trees and an ice-blue sky.
On the departing side, a cascade of white and black feathers sweeps from his headdress down his back, and he wears a tan leather tunic with beaded shoes. The transformation on the returning side is pointed and unsettling: Wi-jún-jon had "exchanged his beautifully garnished and classic costume" for a suit of broadcloth trimmed with gold lace, epaulets on his shoulders, and high-heeled boots. The palette swings from warm earth tones and ceremonial ochre to the cold authority of military blue — Catlin's visual argument made without a single word of caption.
Catlin first met Wi-jún-jon in St. Louis in December 1831, when the Assiniboine warrior was en route to Washington to meet President Andrew Jackson.
Catlin mistranslated Ah-jon-jon — whose name actually means "The Light" — as "Pigeon's Egg Head."
During a winter in the nation's capital, Wi-jún-jon traded his native dress for European clothes and customs, and for Catlin, this transformation illustrated the tragic gulf between Native American and white cultures.
When Wi-jún-jon returned home and shared his stories of Washington, his own people eventually rejected them as fabrication — a rejection that ultimately led to his murder.
The work held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum is a hand-colored lithograph on paper, measuring 17½ × 11⅞ inches, and exists as one of the most reproduced images in Catlin's entire output — circulated by Currier & Ives and exhibited across Europe as a pointed commentary on cultural collision.
This is a print for rooms that hold history seriously — a study lined with books, a sitting room where conversation runs past the surface of things. The portrait of Wi-Jun-Jon offers a visual representation of the notion that as Euro-American influences entered Native American nations, Native cultures and practices would disappear — which means it carries genuine weight on a wall, not just aesthetic presence. The hand-coloring gives it the warmth of a historical object; the dual-figure format gives it the structure of an argument
