The
original photograph was taken in 1908 by Edward Curtis. Born in 1847 in
North Dakota, Bear’s Belly was a highly respected and honored warrior
of the Arikara and became a member of the Bears in the Medicine
Fraternity. He acquired his bearskin in a dramatic battle in which he
single-handedly killed three bears, thus gaining his personal
“medicine”.
In
Young’s powerful portraits of Native American Indian chiefs. Although
they bear no association with modern American celebrity, such portrayals
of Native Americans have been ironically used to romanticize American
heritage. The 19th-century American displacement of native Indian tribes
during western expansion was framed with the gilded ideals of
colonialism. Manifest Destiny, the idea that America was destined to
stretch from coast to coast, sparked a genocide of hundreds of Native
American tribes and endangered hundreds of others. Young represents this
idea of cultural expansion and enforcement. In these portraits, the
diamond dust signifies something sinister; the stark contrast between
the sacred Native American values represented by the chiefs and the
modern material affluence represented by diamond dust is disturbing.
Similar to Young’s other works, these portraits retain the separation of
reality and perception. Yet, unlike his portraits of Hollywood
celebrities, his depictions of Native Americans hit us a bit deeper in
the gut.
Russell
Young questions the inherent fragility of a nation born of conflict and
bloodshed, a country both young in history and heart that promises
everything and fears nothing. America is a country that in less 100
years went from Native Americans "dancing to restore the eclipsed moon"
to "if you believed they put a man on the moon" and continues to push
any and all boundaries, always striving toward that next achievement,
and then the next.