"Feeding the Dead" ("Indians Offering Food to the Dead")
odd: label: Local Numbers
content: OPPS NEG.2860 VV 2
label: Local Note
content: McDermott (page 60) cites an oil painting, "Feeding the Dead," which Eastman executed at Fort Snelling of Upper Mississippi River subjects. Engraving by R. Hinshelwood for Schoolcraft's Indian Tribes of the United States was probably based on Eastman's oil which he brought to Washington.
label: Local Note
content: Black and white copy negative
name: label: Creator
content: Eastman, Seth
label: Engraver
content: Hinshelwood, Robert, b. 1812
creator: label: Creator
content: Eastman, Seth
label: Engraver
content: Hinshelwood, Robert, b. 1812
culture: label: Culture
content: Dakota -- Mdewakanton
label: Culture
content: Indians of North America -- Great Plains
label: Culture
content: Sioux
setName: label: See more items in
content: Bureau of American Ethnology negatives
label: See more items in
content: Bureau of American Ethnology negatives / Additional Materials / Eastman, Seth
bioghist: label: Biographical / Historical
content: Bushnell, SMC, volume 87, number 3, 1932, page 8, states that the Dakota Indians sketched and painted by Eastman at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, 1841-1848, were Mdewakanton.

Date: 1851 is publication date of volume I of Schoolcraft's Indian Tribes of the United States in which this engraving appeared.
physdesc: label: Extent
content: 1 Photograph (8x10 in)
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1851
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: National Anthropological Archives
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
label: Type
content: Photographs
genre_format: label: Genre/Form
content: Photographs
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: This picture shows two figures bringing food to a scaffold burial. Mrs Mary H. Eastman, in the American Annual: Illustrative of the Early History of North America, in which this engraving is also reproduced, gives some details about the picture: The dead body is wrapped in a (scarlet) cloth. It is placed on a scaffold, from one corner of which hangs a medicine sack to keep off evil spirits and from another corner, a small kettle containing food for the dead. A woman offers more food in a bark dish. A man holds up a bottle from which he will offer a libation (of whiskey) to the departed spirit. The tent-shaped arrangement of sticks below the scaffold marks the grave of a person already removed from a scaffold (sticks used to keep the wolves off). page 110.