Throughout North America, Indian people created rock art in the form of pictographs (paintings on rock) and petroglyphs (rock engravings). Along one of the old buffalo roads which led through western Montana, through the Rocky Mountains, to the buffalo hunting grounds on the Great Plains, there are several panels of pictographs on the cliffs to the south of a marshy resource area. These pictographs were most likely made by the Kootenai or the Kalispel Indians.
The lines were painted onto the rocks using a finger-painting technique. With regard to the composition of the paint, in his book Indian Rock Art of the Columbia Plateau, James Keyser writes:
“Early descriptions indicate that Indians mixed crushed mineral pigment with water or organic binding agents, such as blood, eggs, fat, plant juice, or urine, to make paint.”
While the figures in the panel shown below were done in red, the most common colors used for pictographs in the Columbia Plateau area--white, black, yellow, and even blue-green pigments--were sometimes used in other locations.
James Keyser writes:
“When freshly applied, the pigment actually stains the rock surface, seeping into microscopic pores by capillary action as natural weathering evaporates the water or organic binder with which the pigment was mixed. As a result, the pigment actually becomes part of the rock.”
As for the meaning of the pictographs, in general the pictographic panels in this region are related to the vision quest and/or rituals associated with hunting. In the vision quest, individuals seek to make contact with or acquire spirit guides. Throughout the Plateau culture area, it was (and often still is) felt that having a special guardian spirit was essential for success in life. Among many of the tribes a young person was not considered to be an adult until the help of guardian spirits had been obtained. Following a successful vision quest, the supplicant sometimes created a pictograph to commemorate the experience. James Keyser reports:
“The linking of pictographs with vision quests was so strong in the northern Columbia Plateau that the presence of paintings was thought to indicate a very sacred place, where powerful spirits dwell.”
In his book
Native Arts of North America, Christian Feest reports:
“During the historic period the Salish made their rock paintings in connection with dream fasting, in which adolescents tried to obtain the vision of a guardian spirit.”
With regard to the Western Montana sites, James Keyser writes:
“Game animal pictographs and the hunting scenes probably represent ‘hunting magic,’ conducted either before the hunt to control the animals or afterward to propitiate their spirits. As did many hunting groups around the world, Columbia Plateau tribes thought that animals had spirits controlling their behavior. Certain rituals would appeal to these spirits, convincing them to allow the animals to be killed for the good of the human group.”
Shown below are photographs of some of the pictographs from one rock art panel.
In looking at rock art panels like this, there are a couple of basic questions that come immediately to mind: (1) How old are they? (2) What do they mean? And (3) Who made them? Determining the age of rock art is difficult, particularly when the sites are not directly related to living sites. In the Columbia Plateau area, images of horses are indication that the sites were made after about 1710 or so. Since the panel shown above is along one of the buffalo roads which was used after the acquisition of the horse, many of the images were probably made in the last three centuries. However, the use of this area for other resources and for vision questing may mean that some images are older.
With regard to meaning, ethnographic accounts and the oral traditions of tribal elders generally indicate that rock art of this type has a sacred or spiritual function. It often serves to mark a place as having special spiritual meaning, as being a portal to the spirit world, and/or being a place of intense human experience.
It should be pointed out that, from a traditional Native American view, discussing rock art as if it were a form of modern graffiti or a way of indicating “Kilroy was here” is felt to be disrespectful, insensitive, and ignorant at best, and perhaps even demeaning.
Rock art, which is symbolic and may be a form of communication, is generally not viewed as a type of writing. Dennis Slifer, in The Serpent and the Sacred Fire: Fertility Images in Southwest Rock Art, writes:
“There is consensus among scholars that rock art is not ‘writing’ and cannot be ‘read’ as such. It is language only in the sense that symbols are used to represent things in a nonliteral, symbolic manner.”
And finally, who made the pictographs shown above? In trying to assign these to a particular “tribe” it should be remembered that the concept of “tribe” is a European concept which had little, if any, relevance for the lives of Indian people prior to the European invasion. Since the panel shown above is found in an area which was used by Kootenai and Salish-speaking (Kalispel, Pend d’Oreille, Coeur d’Alene, Spokan) groups, it is most likely that people from these groups made the pictographs. However, it should be kept in mind that people from other groups—Shoshone, Nez Perce, Cree, and Blackfoot—were also known to have traveled through the area.