It Wasn’t Always The Trail Of Tears That Told The Tale-Or The Cigar Store Indian Either-The Art Of T.C. Cannon At The Peabody-Essex Museum 

By Frank Jackman

Every red-blooded kid, boy kid anyway and don’t ask me about girl kids because frankly I couldn’t tell you since we were not on speaking terms-then- back in the day, back in the golden age of television longed to fight the “injuns.” Fight the “injuns” depicted on one thousand television screens and the unworthy opponent of the “avenging angel” white man. Except for maybe Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s sidekick and philosophical brethren and even he was suspect when the actually fighting began ad he might return to the well-known savagery his race was known for. Of course those were simpler days, so-called, when at least in America, at least among the knowledgeable everything thing was black and white (beyond the television set as well). The Americans were the good guys against the red hordes that were ready to descend on Western Civilization and make us their robotic slaves and the good guys in the ubiquitous Westerns that sated our reading hours, our evening T.V fare and our Saturday afternoon double feature matinee imaginations wore white hats and the bad guys black. And to quote a term of the time if only metaphorically from Zane Grey or Louis Lamour “the only good injun was a dead one.”     

That is quite a psychic barrier to overcome, no question if you were not an Indian, what now are more familiarly called Native Americans or better indigenous peoples since that term has a too anthropomorphic look on the page. (Although as late as the 1970s when many identity groups began to assert their identities the most famous name from such struggles led-by still unjustly imprisoned Leonard Peltier after the shoot-out at Wounded Knee was the American Indian Movement, AIM.) So delving into the book, the real history of the West book (neglecting the very real native presence right at the Eastern door forgetting that this is all sacred land if not to the white intruder then to those who were here already) and not some dime store novels the ragings of the white man for the land, for the water, for the destruction of the many cultural gradients that have made up the in native experience we, some of us anyway, began to see some serious justice in those cries from the trail of tears. Began to admire those warrior-kings, those ghost-dancers mourning the lost night and began to create a different look, the proud warrior look from some deep place in the imagination.    

Then along came an artist, one T.C. Cannon, a gringo name, but deepest die Native American who did not give a flying fuck about what image the white man had of the “injun.” Did not care whether the white man thought he was a cigar store Indian on some dusty road to the Petrified Forest or thought Sitting Bull was right or thought that Ira Hayes got another raw deal after all. Didn’t care. He was making art, too short a lifespan making art killed in the inevitable car accident before his time, for his people to look at, for his people to respond to, for the sake of the song, for ten thousand years of warrior-kings. (Like Ira Hayes another warrior from out West famed at Iwo Jima he served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. Served like a disproportionate number of young Native American in all this country’s war). Painted them, beautiful, sad, depressed, silly, dandified, every which way, warts and all. And now we whom he did not paint for, whom he did not care whether we liked his art or not can appreciate what he had wrought at the Peabody-Essex.