Dance To The Berdache

. The background of the painting is borrowed form Albert Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California which was done in 1868. Bierstadt’s painting depicts a serine, dream-like, empty landscape, what appears as if Bierstadt is the first human to ever set foot there. These types of landscape paintings were not uncommon in the mid nineteenth century, with many artists depicting North America as an empty, unclaimed land that was waiting to be discovered and colonized by European settlers. Of course, we now know that this is untrue, and there were many different indigenous cultures living in North America, but at the time, these paintings done by Bierstadt and the Hudson River School would have greatly influenced people’s ideas of what North America was like and significantly contributed to the Eurocentric master narrative that Europeans were the rightful owners and discovers of …show more content…
Monkman created this work as a response to George Catlin’s Dance to the Berdash (1830). A Berdash is also known as a two-spirited person, or someone who takes on the roles and dress of male and female genders and was something that Catlin (along with the majority of Europeans) viewed as disgusting and wrong . In The Triumph of Mischief Miss Chief is the Berdash and is being danced to by the other figures. Here, Monkman reframes the Berdash as being celebrated (as they often were in indigenous cultures) rather than vilified (as imposed by Europeans). Monkman not only reinserts indigenous people into the landscape that they were previously erased from, but also brings two-spirited/gender nonconforming people into the master narrative of art history. These people have always existed, but as they were seen as “the other” and existed outside of the periphery, those within the master narrative could shape the ways that they were seen or simply erase them all together, as they too often