A Choctaw Woman
1834
George Catlin traveled thousands of miles across the American frontier in the 1830s to capture the faces and cultures of Native American tribes before they were forever changed by westward expansion. In this striking 1834 profile, a Choctaw woman gazes stoically into the distance, her dark braid and red cheek paint standing out against a sweeping, cloudy sky. Catlin's urgent mission to document these communities resulted in hundreds of portraits like this one, serving as a vital, though romanticized, historical record of a people on the brink of immense upheaval.
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