Little Wolf's Last Camp

Little Wolf was a principal chief of the Northern Cheyenne who in 1878–79 led approximately 350 of his people on the eight-hundred-mile flight from confinement in Indian Territory back toward their homelands in Montana, an episode that ended with his band's surrender in early 1879. Summers's 1977 print refers to this history through landscape rather than figuration: the title locates the viewer at a specific encampment, but the image, on the evidence of his contemporaneous Plains subjects, is composed as an open horizon and sky in his characteristic procedure of inked blocks pressed face-down through dampened sheets so that pigment migrates outward as light. The work belongs to the Native American historical sequence that occupied much of his attention through the 1970s, in which named figures, sacred sites, and tribal histories supplied the titles for landscapes whose imagery is reduced to atmosphere and color mass. The approach refuses both ethnographic costume and heroic figuration — the human history is carried by title and place rather than by image.