To Gordon Yellowman, an acclaimed artist and traditional Cheyenne chief, that's with good reason.
"They are vibrant, and they're alive -- and that's what we've been saying all along. These drawings are alive. They have their own life and their own voice, and it's up to you how you interpret it and how you acknowledge it," Yellowman told The Oklahoman.
For a century and a half, the artwork created primarily by Cheyenne and Kiowa warriors imprisoned there between 1875 and 1878 has been used by U.S. government agents and white historians to tell the Native American history of the iconic Florida fort (now known as the Castillo de San Marcos) on the scenic shores of Matanzas Bay in St. Augustine.
But the Cheyenne have their own story tell, and the Oklahoma City exhibition "Cheyenne Ledger Artists of Fort Marion." lets them tell it.
On view through Jan. 5 at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, "Cheyenne Ledger Artists of Fort Marion" is curated by Yellowman and Eric Singleton, the museum's curator of Native American art and ethnology.
"This began first with a conversation with Gordon and I ... and it blossomed into this exhibition, because it gave Gordon and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes a chance to tell their story about this incarceration," Singleton said.
"So much has come from an academic perspective. It's come from an artist perspective, and as far as I'm aware, this is the first time the Cheyenne have curated their own exhibit on ledger art from Fort Marion."
Now a national monument, Castillo de San Marcos was built by the Spanish in the late 1600s to protect Florida and the Atlantic trade route. The oldest masonry fortification in the continental U.S., it was called Fort Marion from 1825 until 1942, when Congress voted to revert to the original Spanish name.
After President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law in 1830, Fort Marion often was used as a Native American prison. In 1837, more than 230 Seminoles, including famous war leader Osceola, were imprisoned at the Florida fort, and from 1886 to 1887, about 500 Apaches, including many who had fought with Chihuahua, Naiche and Geronimo, were incarcerated there.
In between, more than 70 warriors from five southern Plains tribes were imprisoned there for three years in the 1870s. Although the fort now is considered a picturesque tourist attraction, the National Cowboy Museum's exhibit re-creates the stone interior walls of their prison home.
"As much as we could, I wanted to walk people through those same doors," Singleton said.
After the Civil War and the introduction of the railroad, westward expansion in the U.S. increased significantly, building tensions between Native Americans and European immigrants and culminating in 1874 with the Red River War. At the end of the war in 1875, the U.S. government ordered the arrest of 72 Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Caddo and Arapaho warriors.
Although they were never given a trial, these fighters -- including 15 who were Cheyenne -- were taken from their families and loaded onto trains headed east, arriving nearly four weeks later at Fort Marion. The famed St. Augustine Lighthouse would have been one of the first things they saw when they arrived, Yellowman said.
"They saw sharks, they saw other new things in their surroundings, and they were drawing these things. So, they were visually capturing their historical experience," he said.
"A lot of them got sick because of the environment -- the heat, the cold and just the very humidity. ... We believe that these drawings helped them deal with those conditions. Drawing these drawings of their home, their places, their families, it gave them escape from the prison walls. It gave them freedom to reconnect with their people."
At Fort Marion, the Native warriors were under the supervision of Capt. Richard Henry Pratt, who offered an alternative to conventional imprisonment.
In keeping with his philosophy of "kill the Indian and save the man," Pratt and his cohorts set out to assimilate the imprisoned Natives, cutting their long hair short, replacing their clothing with military uniforms and teaching them English.
Their captors encouraged the Native prisoners to draw, and 26 of them -- mostly Cheyenne and Kiowa -- produced hundreds of ledger drawings chronicling their former lives as warriors and hunters as well as their new reality as prisoners and pupils.
"There weren't any locked doors. ... They have access to two sailboats. They go shark fishing. They go camping on Anastasia Island. They're given these ledger books and pencils, and they're allowed to draw, then they sell the drawings to the tourists. They actually were able to keep the money: they either sent it back home, or they would go into town and buy things," Singleton said.
"But they were forced to remain there against their will. There's no denying that."
Based on his experiences at Fort Marion, Pratt came to believe that Native children could be assimilated into white American culture through boarding schools that followed the military tenets of strict conformity and discipline. In 1879, Pratt founded Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first off-reservation Native boarding school in the continental U.S.
President Joe Biden recently issued a proclamation establishing the new Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument to acknowledge the country's painful past of forced assimilation through the boarding school system.
"When you look at the legacy of Fort Marion and its impact on the tribes -- and on artists as well -- you look at ... the good and the bad," Singleton said.
"Now, you see a burgeoning of contemporary ledger artwork ... and some of the first publicly sold Native American fine art is sold at Fort Marion. At the same time, you have to deal with the legacy of the boarding schools that came from it, and the trauma that's been associated with that."
The exhibit "Cheyenne Ledger Artists of Fort Marion" showcases about 50 works of Fort Marion ledger art by Cheyenne artists.
The director of language and culture programs for the Concho-based Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, Yellowman said his collaboration with Singleton on the exhibit came about by chance. They crossed paths about five years ago when Yellowman visited the National Cowboy Museum.
"He said, 'What are you doing?' and I said, 'Well, I do a lot of research and (have) a lot of interest in ledger art," Yellowman recalled. "And he said, 'Really? Let's go downstairs.'"
Staffers were reframing ledger drawings that are part of the museum's vast Arthur & Shifra Silberman Native American Art Collection, giving Yellowman a chance to view them up close and without glass.
"With the glasses removed, I could actually see the lead reflect itself in the light, and it was amazing. ... The lead is speaking to us because it was a piece of art produced by our ancestors. They're telling their story through this lead pencil and these colored pencils. I said, 'When that lead glistens, it's alive. And it's a voice for these drawings,'" Yellowman recalled.
"When I start interpreting what was happening in each drawing, I said, 'There's been scholars that's come through here and have done research and study of these ledger drawings and provided interpretations. ... But there's never been a Cheyenne interpretation.' And I said, 'That's what we need to do.'"
They were already talking about organizing an exhibit at The Cowboy, he said, when Singleton got a call from a curator at the Cummer Museum in Jacksonville, Florida, who was interested in hosting a show of Fort Marion ledger art from the Silberman Collection. That exhibit, which subsequently traveled to the Old Town Jail Center in Albany, Texas, became the basis for the OKC show.
"These drawings were done 150 years ago, and they're still relevant. ... You would inherently look at them in a different way when it's your own cultural history," Singleton said.
"In some ways, these have been displayed as just fine art. And I think one of the things that we do that's a little bit different in this exhibition is not necessarily look at them as artwork, but look at them as pictographic writing and look at them from a narrative perspective. We let them also tell the story, the history, of the Cheyenne and what occurred in their imprisonment."
Along with the immersive elements, the curators added to the OKC exhibit contemporary Cheyenne artworks, including at least one by Yellowman, and material cultural items like shields, a pair of leggings and a war shirt.
Yellowman said he hopes there will be more exhibits in the future, including perhaps virtual showcases that leverage technology to spread the stories living in the Fort Marion ledger drawings.
"I'm very thankful for the Silberman Collection, for their interest in wanting to preserve these drawings," he said. "It wasn't for these pieces of art, these drawings, we wouldn't be having this conversation now."