The Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired Stu-mick-o-súcks, Buffalo Bull's Back Fat, Head Chief, Blood Tribe thanks to Sarah (Poulterer) Harrison.

Harrison was the the widow of Joseph Harrison, Jr., a Pennsylvania real estate magnate and engineer who organized the construction of railways for the Czarist Russian government. Coleman Sellers wrote that Harrison's "great work was to be carried on in a land where every kind of corruption was the rule; where all the subordinate officials of the land fed and fattened on the commissions collected from those who had contracts with the Government."

It was the same Czarist regime, rife with brutal pogroms, that drove many families to seek refuge abroad, including the Katz and Krapivsky families of the author's mother, who became citizens of the United States. These families felt that they owed the United States for its onetime willingness to receive immigrants with little education and no money.

And yet Sellers' characterization of Czarist Russia implies that the same type of cronyist corruption was absent in the United States, and this is altogether false in the case of American Indians, sovereigns whose treaty rights are largely ignored by both the U.S. and its citizens. Unilaterally abrogating treaties does not simply hurt the indigenous people: it also hurts the Republic, insofar as it cannot expect other nations to respect its own treaties if it does not respect the treaties with the first nations.

Although political corruption is the usual manner in which we examine the history of campaigns against indigenous peoples, "moral corruption," especially in terms of sexual violence and forced assimilation, also requires close attention. The anthropologist Alice B. Kehoe offers copious evidence that the Kainai ("Blood tribe" of the Blackfoot Federation), the chief of whom is the subject of Catlin's portrait, placed women in a special political and spiritual role, including choosing husbands, which empowered them far more than European women. Catlin did a portrait of a male war leader instead of a female spiritual leader, in part, because "when a White man stepped into the Indian’s world...it was a red man who met him at the threshold because it was his habit to stand between his women and the stranger. Two or more centuries of experience had convinced him that the white man rarely looked upon an Indian woman disinterestedly and he had accordingly built up a set of rules and regulations which forbade his women to speak to a strange man."

The central organizational role of women within the Kainai government, as among many other indigenous peoples, was one factor in spurring the brutal violence by settler men against indigenous women that continues today. Such violence has disrupted the traditional gender balance of the Kainai. The occupying power knew that if it targeted women it would cause enormous damage to the flow of the political system, thereby making available valuable lands and physical resources.

The value of the portrait relies partly on Catlin's notion that the Plains peoples, such as his subject in the portrait, were the "least corrupted by white contact." The phrase, next to the beautiful image, evokes a tragic, impossible nostalgia, as if to encourage us to wonder how much better life would have been if Europeans had never sought refuge in North America.

Adding text about Catlin's painting to the Smithsonian website, an employee made a tiny typo, which has a funny and perhaps revealing significance. The employee, or maybe the zealous AutoCorrect algorithm, gives the chief's name as "Buffalo Bill's Back Fat." If only!