Offering of the Mandan Indians

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This picture turns on the word "offering," which names a ritual act of giving to spiritual powers rather than a scene of daily life. The Mandan, who lived in earth-lodge villages along the upper Missouri River in what is now North Dakota, practiced ceremonies of this kind, and in the 1830s European and American artists who visited their villages recorded many of them. Those visits came just before a smallpox epidemic in 1837 devastated the Mandan population. Images like this one are valuable today because they preserve religious practices at a moment of profound change, though viewers should also consider who made them and for what audience.

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