The Insistence of the Indian

‘Nature's most beautiful models’: George Catlin's choctaw ball-play paintings and the politics of Indian removal

“…[35] As historian Susan Scheckel has argued, Native Americans during the first half of the nineteenth century posed primarily a moral, not a military, threat to a young nation that sought political legitimacy. [36] Catlin's Choctaw ball-play series and the larger collection of which it was a part helped him and others to reconcile actions such as Jackson's Indian Removal Act. By choosing to represent the Choctaw at play, Catlin furthered the naïve hope that Euro-Americans still harboured about the decision to remove them from their homelands.…”