BROWNING — When David Dragonfly was 3 or 4 years old and living in California, his neighbors were painting their house and left a paint bucket and brush on the sidewalk. A young Dragonfly seized the opportunity. When his mom wasn’t looking, he painted a car parked on the street.
His mother wiped the paint off before it dried. She later joked it was then that she knew her son would grow up to be an artist.
Dragonfly, who is now 66, was born in Kalispell to John and Dorothy Dragonfly. When he was 2, the Dragonfly family moved from Montana to Los Angeles through the Indian Relocation Act, which promised Indigenous people jobs if they left their communities. The law, which was part of America’s “Indian termination policy,” has since been criticized for forcing Native people to leave their communities and support systems to assimilate.
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Dragonfly’s family lived in Los Angeles for a few years, and when Dragonfly started high school, they moved to Browning.
“Coming back here was a bit of a culture shock,” Dragonfly said. “L.A. was like a melting pot. Here, on the reservation, there’s a lot more oppression. It’s just how it is.”
Dragonfly always enjoyed art. He graduated from Browning High School in 1974, earned his Bachelor of fine arts at the University of Montana in 1992, and went on to the Institute of American Indian Art in New Mexico. Dragonfly had primarily been working with stone carving, jewelry and prints. In 2014, he was invited to a ledger art show in Brooklyn, but he declined to attend.
“I was scared of New York,” he said. But the invite piqued his interest. Dragonfly started experimenting with ledger art, and he fell in love with the craft.
Popularized in the last few decades, ledger art refers to paintings or drawings done on official documents, like tax papers, city government files or checks.
Many Plains tribes chronicled stories in the form of pictographs on rocks and buffalo hides. In the 1800s, when settlers began killing buffalo to starve Native Americans, Indigenous people adapted their art and began drawing stories on discarded pages of ledger books they obtained from settlers.
Dragonfly said in the 1890s Native warriors who were arrested and jailed practiced ledger art.
“The guards gave them books, and they drew war history, like when they fought another enemy,” Dragonfly said. “They didn’t have formal drawing training so you can see their perspective is off, but what they’re really trying to portray was a story.”
Lisa Simon, Radius Gallery co-owner, said ledger art is more than just a symbol of resilience.
“The paper speaks to the fastidiousness of the 1800s and 1900s as well,” she said. “White people spent so much time documenting. It’s very bureaucratic. So ledger art is a symbol of bureaucracy met with life and creativity and imagination. It’s not just a symbol of Native resilience, it’s also a criticism of white bureaucracy.”
Dragonfly uses colored pencils, marker and watercolor paints to depict stories on ledger paper.
“Most of the time, people don’t know what my art is,” he said. “This kind of art isn’t mainstream, that’s for sure.”
Sometimes, Dragonfly said the hardest part of creating ledger art is finding the paper. He collects old documents from antique dealers in Chinook or Virginia City, and sometimes he will buy papers from eBay, traders or collectors. Dragonfly said he wishes he could use historical Blackfeet papers in his work, but, according to him, “all of those documents are gone. You can’t find them anywhere.”
“The paper brings validity to the piece,” he said. “It dates the piece. Sometimes I try to match the meaning of the work to the paper. That’s when you have to get real creative with your thoughts.”
One of Dragonfly's pieces shows a Native man riding in an old-fashioned car.
“A long time ago, not many Indians owned cars,” Dragonfly said. “Cars are expensive and so is gas. Maybe the white Indian agent on the reservation had a car, but no one else did. Most everybody had wagons. So I was imagining what it would look like if an Indian did have a car back then.”
Another piece, which is on display in the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, shows a train passing through the Blackfeet Reservation. A passenger holds a camera to the window, demonstrating how non-Native people perceive and depict reservation life.
Who should buy Native art?
Dragonfly’s pieces range from $200 to $3,000. He sells his work in Browning, and his pieces are also available in galleries in Whitefish and Kalispell. Radius Gallery in Missoula featured Dragonfly’s work in their last show, and the gallery is now selling a few of his larger paintings as well as some of his ledger art.
Simon said some non-Native buyers are hesitant to buy Native art, fearing they may contribute to cultural appropriation. She added that some curators have the same fear.
But Dragonfly encourages anyone who is interested to buy his art. He said he likes when non-Native people buy and appreciate his work.
Simon said Radius is careful to never show the work of non-Native artists who create Native-looking art. She also said the gallery educates buyers on the historic and cultural significance of each piece.
“If people are hesitant, I encourage them to look at ledger art,” Simon said. “Supporting ledger art shows that you are acknowledging a history of oppression, and it shows you are trying to be on the other side of that history.”
Dragonfly said he hopes when people see his art, they see Native Americans in “a positive light.”
“Around here, we have lots of artists,” he said referencing the Blackfeet Reservation. “People here are really talented. It’s a natural talent, too. No one does the same thing, but this kind of art, it can be overlooked, even by our own people.”
For more information on Dragonfly’s work, visit Davidjohndragonfly.com or Radius Gallery in Missoula (120 N. Higgins Ave.).