About the Native American Portrait
In Plains Elder, I wanted to create more than a carefully rendered face. My attention was drawn to the individual’s direct gaze, weathered features, traditional attire, and the sense of dignity and quiet authority conveyed by his expression.
The close composition keeps the viewer’s attention on the man himself. Graphite allowed me to work gradually through the textures of his skin, hair, clothing, feathers, beadwork, and other adornment while preserving the strength of the eyes. The portrait is detailed, but the details remain secondary to the character expressed in the face.
The title Plains Elder also invites reflection on a history carried across generations. The Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains were never a single culture. They included many distinct nations, languages, traditions, and ways of life. Some followed the great bison herds across broad territories, while others lived in established agricultural communities and hunted seasonally. Their experiences varied, but the arrival of increasing numbers of white settlers, soldiers, railroads, and commercial hunters transformed the Plains with devastating speed.
For many Plains nations, the American bison—usually called the buffalo—was central to survival and culture. It provided meat, hides for clothing and shelter, sinew, bone, tools, and countless other necessities. The relationship also extended far beyond practical use; buffalo held profound ceremonial and spiritual importance within many Native traditions.
During the nineteenth century, commercial hunters killed bison on an enormous scale for hides, meat, and sometimes little more than sport. Railroads carried hunters into the heart of the herds and transported hides and bones eastward. Federal officials also understood that destroying the buffalo would weaken the independence and resistance of Plains peoples. Herds once numbering in the tens of millions were reduced to fewer than a thousand animals by the 1890s.
The disappearance of the buffalo accompanied the seizure of Native lands, broken treaties, warfare, forced movement, confinement to reservations, and efforts to suppress Indigenous languages, religions, and cultural practices. These were not simply the inevitable results of a changing frontier. They were part of an invasion and dispossession that caused hunger, death, and the destruction of established ways of life.
Yet Plains Elder is not intended only as an image of loss. Native nations endured. Languages, ceremonies, art, family histories, and relationships with the land survived despite deliberate efforts to erase them. Today, Plains tribes continue to sustain and renew their cultures, and many are deeply involved in returning buffalo to tribal lands.
The face in this drawing cannot represent the experiences of every Plains nation, nor is it meant to. I wanted instead to portray an individual whose expression suggests experience, resilience, and self-possession. The direct gaze asks the viewer to look at him as a person—not as a romantic symbol of the past.
The word Elder reflects more than age. It suggests knowledge accumulated through experience and carried forward through generations. The portrait’s quietness is therefore not passivity. To me, it conveys strength, endurance, and the authority of someone who does not need to raise his voice to command attention.
Plains Elder is a graphite-pencil portrait by Michael E. Dorcas for Tantilla Art.
Exhibition: Selected for the 2026 Greeley Stampede Western Art Exhibition and Sale.