I recently came across two interesting bourbon decanters while taking photos of our bourbon related artifacts as part of an ongoing collections project to produce high-quality image files of every object in our permanent collection. They caught my attention not because they were decorative whiskey decanters, for most decanters made during the 1960s-1980s were intended to be interesting and eye-catching to promote sales, but because they were designed to look like stereotypical American Indian chiefs.

We are familiar with the image of the American Indian in our culture, as well as debates over whether such images truly respect and reflect Native Americans today. Just last year, the Washington Redskins and Minnesota-based Land O’Lakes decided to remove their brand mascots that featured an Indian chief and young maiden, respectively. One could argue that if decorative decanters were still popular today, we probably wouldn’t see any that looked like Indian chiefs. So why is that? Where did this image come from, and why did distilleries use it to market bourbon?

Such questions led me to the 19th century, when the convergence of a few significant events occurred in relation to Native Americans: the surrender of Sitting Bull in 1881 following nearly a century of conflict between Native American tribes and European settlers, the creation of reservations and forced removal of Native Americans to territories further west, and the popularity of trading cards enhanced by the invention of photography. Without re-writing the plethora of helpful research studies out there on the subject, it would seem that a photo of one Native American paved the way for the creation of the American Indian that has remained an icon in a largely euro-centric culture for over a hundred years. Perhaps the most intriguing fact I came across was the near-celebrity status Sitting Bull experienced following his surrender. As soon as he was no longer a threat, people viewed him with a sense of nostalgia and attached their perception of the collective Native American population to him in the process. After a few men decided to capitalize upon the masses who wanted Sitting Bull’s autograph, his cabinet card portrait rapidly spread across the nation in the form of trading cards, the foundation of the American Indian chief in a feathered headdress with which we are familiar today.

But this still didn’t answer my question about the bourbon decanters. How did we get from antique photographs and trading cards to the whiskey business of the ‘60s? If we can attribute the spread of popular images at the turn of the century largely to baseball and trading cards, it is significant that tobacco companies produced both and, of course, took the opportunity to place tobacco advertisements on all the cards. As mass media and marketing tactics grew throughout the 20th century, more products emerged that used the American Indian image in relation to the land or native crops in order to repeatedly draw upon that sense of nostalgia that places Native Americans within a romanticized perception of our country’s past. The tobacco industry remained at the forefront of marketing this particular image, which is why we can likely recall a time we’ve seen a statue of an Indian chief standing outside a cigar store or on the label of a cigar box. Short of knowing what marketing discussions occurred in bourbon companies several decades ago, the continued prevalence of this image in the tobacco industry provides a plausible explanation for our whiskey decanters. The culture of drinking bourbon and smoking cigars has a long association, so the creation of American Indian whiskey decanters could simply be attributed to the desire to evoke recognition and encourage connection between the two products among consumers. Or perhaps distillery decision-makers thought a marketing tactic that appeared to work well for one industry would do the same for another. During a time in which whiskey sales were down in comparison to post-prohibition war time and the recent explosion of bourbon cocktail culture, one has to imagine the options stakeholders considered to get bourbon in the hands of the average American.

So, where does all of this leave us? We see the present shift towards a common understanding that the image of the American Indian is quite different from the truth of who Native Americans are, especially today. One is an amalgamation of multiple native peoples from various regions constructed in the 1800s, while the latter acknowledges how descendants of Native Americans appear and act in real life. The American Indian is an image that stands outside of time and misrepresents the diverse populations of Native Americans as a singular entity, an imagined concept that is not reflective of reality. Ultimately, the argument here is not claim whether this image is inherently right or wrong, for many have viewed it in different contexts with different intentions, but to stress the importance of pausing to reflect upon and question the images we see in our culture. As a former student of art history, I am fascinated by questioning why the things around us look the way they do. Whose stories do images and objects represent? Who is the intended or assumed audience? How does this affect our perceptions? If we choose to remain passive while material culture and mass media constantly floods our minds, we shall discover much less about human behaviors and motives. To conclude back with our bourbon decanters, one may never know the exact reasons that led to their creation, but if we simply accept their existence as Indian chief whiskey decanters without any further curiosity, we may also never discover their part in a larger story about human conflict, prevailing cultures, and the power of constructed ideas.

-Hayley Rankin, Manager of Collection Impact