Political Contestation in Cyrus Dallin’s American Indian Monuments Emily C. Burns Around the turn of the twentieth century, the sculptor Cyrus Dallin made several American Indian equestrian monuments, most of which remain in public spaces in the United States. Beginning in about 1907, and with increasing frequency in subsequent years, critics construed four of Dallin’s sculptures as a connected series that told an “eloquent history . . . of the North American Indian on our continent,” rather than as individual projects that share a common motif. 1 Based on the figures’ positions and gestures, reviewers constructed an interwoven narrative across the four artworks, reading in them a temporal progression: from the American Indian’s naive welcome of white settlers in Signal of Peace, to his warning that the settlers might pose a threat in Medicine Man, to his expression of defiance in Protest of the Sioux ( fig. 1), and finally to acquiescence in Appeal to the Great Spirit. 2 This period reading of Dallin’s sculptures as depicting a defeated and dying race has shaped succeeding scholarship on the artist’s work. 3 Dallin’s extensive collection of press clippings, letters, and unpublished manuscripts preserved on microfilm at the Archives of American Art offers credence to this interpretation, but these documents also reveal an important counternarrative within the sculptures. 4 With added urgency over time, Dallin used his words and his art to criticize US treatment of Native communities during western expansion. This essay argues that while Dallin’s sculptures can sustain the prevailing interpretation that they memorialize the American Indian as a noble savage who succumbed to expansion, they can also be read as equivocal monuments that challenge conventional historical accounts. As art historian Sascha T. Scott has argued about representations of Pueblo peoples by white painters from the 1920s, such art could intervene in political 4 ARCHIVES of AMERICAN ART JOURNAL | 57.1 This content downloaded from 131.204.126.180 on April 26, 2018 13:26:29 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).