Native Nebraskans see themselves in ‘Faces From the Interior’ exhibit at Omaha museum |

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Vida Stabler was a 1970s teenager the first time she saw her own people, the Umoⁿhoⁿ, represented in artwork.

She walked with her Omaha Central High School art class across the lawn north of the school and entered the Joslyn Art Museum.

What she found, in a collection of watercolors including a portrait called “Omaha Boy,” would influence her career spent teaching the traditions of the people also known as the Omaha.

That expertise recently brought Stabler, now 64, back to the museum and again in front of the paintings of famed artist Karl Bodmer. Now, it was she who commanded the audience’s attention.

Museumgoers fanned out around her as she sat and pointed to the frame behind her on the wall: “Omaha Boy.”

What would his life have been like, she asked, this child of her tribe standing for a portrait in 1833? Who was this boy posing at a trading post a few miles from where, a century later, the Joslyn would be built on the lands of the Umoⁿhoⁿ?

Stabler’s answers to those questions are why the museum invited her and other Natives — including people whose tribal ancestors are depicted in the paintings — to take a leading role in the current exhibit, “Faces From the Interior.”

The exhibit, on display through May 1, features 90 watercolor portraits Bodmer painted after an epic 1830’s journey up and down the Missouri River. His portrait subjects: Native people of the Northern Great Plains.

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The collection, considered a defining body of Western art, is now on view oh-so-close to where Bodmer once set up his easel.

But the paintings arrived here only after a wild journey. They went by boat to Bodmer’s Paris studio, then languished in a German castle before a post-World War II discovery brought them back stateside. Omaha energy company Northern Natural Gas bought the collection and loaned it to Joslyn in 1962. The loan became a gift in 1986, after Northern became Enron — but before Enron became infamous.

“Faces” is the first Joslyn exhibit focused solely on Bodmer’s portraits. It’s also the beginning of the museum’s effort to study the works from an Indigenous perspective, said Joslyn chief executive Jack Becker.

“It’s a collection that should be seen from multiple points of view,” Becker said.

Native artists, activists and educators now have a voice in how these works — their own family portraits — are displayed and interpreted. Their insights tie the challenges their tribes wrestle with today to the pressures that U.S. policies put on the people Bodmer painted.

Visitors walking the gallery can experience these contributions: companion art pieces, video documentaries, written and audio messages.

Stabler, speaking at a gallery talk, looked at Bodmer’s painting of the Umoⁿhoⁿ boy wrapped in a bison robe. She saw his forehead streaked with vermillion, the bangles circling his wrist, a plume tied in his hair.

“If ever I saw an elegant young Umoⁿhoⁿ boy, that was him,” Stabler said.

She said he would have lived in a warm earth lodge. He would have collected wood and hauled water. He would have learned about his tribal clan in the ceremonies that brought people together in a circle representing the cosmos.

He’s not much different, she said, from the children she teaches today, at Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation Public School in Macy, the Omaha Reservation town, pop. 1,045.

“We’re resilient,” she said. “Even though we live in a whole different world, there is something beautiful and innate about our children.”

Stabler’s approach to preserving her language and teaching it to her students was influenced by Bodmer and his employer.

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In 1832, Bodmer was hired by a German prince, Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, on a mission to study the plants, animals and people of what he called “The natural face of North America and its aboriginal population.”

The prince sensed he was running out of time. Settler encroachment, disease and U.S. government policy had already decimated some Native tribes.

Arriving in Boston on Independence Day, 1832, Maximilian wrote, “I looked in vain for the original American race, the Indians; they have disappeared from this region.” Steaming up the Missouri past Bellevue in Spring 1833, he saw survivors scarred and blinded by smallpox.

The prince’s and artist’s trip to visit Northern Great Plains tribes fell squarely between Lewis and Clark’s expedition, begun in 1804, and the Homestead Act of 1862. From open prairie, to private ownership, in less than one lifetime.

What Maximilian and Bodmer brought back to Europe in journals and paintings is now considered one of the most accurate pre-photography records of the American West.

Recently, Omaha artist Steve Tamayo studied the Bodmer painting “Wahktä́geli, Yankton Sioux Chief” to recreate the man’s feathered headpiece in three dimensions for the exhibit.

Tamayo, a member of the Sicangu Lakota tribe, worked in his studio, teaching his grandson, Izzy Tamayo, at his side. He cut cloth, trimmed eagle and hawk feathers, stretched sinew and deer hide, and mixed mineral pigments to craft the piece. Each notch in a feather and each red stripe represent a battle achievement, he said.

Bodmer’s documentation is meaningful to Tamayo in light of government policy that aimed to strip Native people of culture and language. As an artist, he tries to revive cultural identity.

Working with the Joslyn is “an awesome opportunity to show that this way of life still exists, but we need to teach the next generation.”

The portraits have helped Lestina Saul-Merdassi of Omaha reconnect with her heritage. She recently greeted museum visitors in the Dakotah language, then translated: “‘It’s good that you are all here, and I greet you all with a heartfelt handshake.’”

Looking up, she explained, “I had to read that off my phone, because I’m in the process of relearning my language.”

Saul-Merdassi, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe, is an addiction counselor, a powwow dancer and an advocate in the “MMIW” movement to raise awareness of missing and murdered indigenous women.

She saw herself in one of the few portraits Bodmer made of a woman.

“When we talk about our history, not everything is all powwows and beauty,” she said. “Some of us are still healing from what our ancestors went through.” By turning to tradition: “We’re on the mend.”

The exhibit’s perspective is part of an “orientation shift” happening in the art world, said exhibit curator Annika Johnson, the Joslyn’s first-ever associate curator of Native art. The new role will continue into the future thanks to an endowment established by museum board chair Stacy Simon.

Johnson works to build relationships with Native people within and beyond museum walls. She launched a Native art advisory committee, opens the Joslyn’s archives to Native elders and tribes and mentors Native students.

This work to preserve and share Native art and history is crucial, said Stabler, who learned something from the Bodmer collection.

“If we don’t write things down, maybe we’re going to miss something,” she said. “Will we have the time to teach that lesson, or tell that story? Or will they be forgotten?”

The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.

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