Guarding the Corn Fields

Here Seth Eastman depicted the reality of Dakota women saving their corn, one of the crops women planted to augment the food supply. Stationed on makeshift platforms, they bang on a metal pot and wave cloth to keep predatory crows and blackbirds from descending. This could be land along Minneapolis’s Lake Calhoun (Bde Maka Ska in Dakota) where one Native community set up farming, as game was becoming harder and harder to find. This watercolor, one of 35 works on paper by Eastman in Mia’s collection, was the basis for an illustration in Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s massive Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1851-57).