Kiäsax, Piegan Blackfoot Man

In June 1833, Kiäsax (Bear on the Left) boarded the steamer Assiniboine with his Hidatsa wife and child at Fort Clark, intending to visit his Piegan relatives at Fort Union. On board, he frequently played the long, slender flute decorated with a single eagle feather that he holds in this portrait. Kiäsax styled his hair in the Hidatsa fashion, with beaded bows and a wrapped braid. Bodmer’s image prominently features a striped "Spanish blanket," as Maximilian called it. With broad black, blue, and natural wool-colored stripes, this fashionable textile would have been woven by a Diné (Navajo) woman. Along with the brass cross around Kiäsax’s neck, it offers evidence of the expansive trade networks that connected Indigenous communities in the Northern Plains to those hundreds of miles away in the Southwest.