The Indian: The Dying Chief Contemplating the Progress of Civilization

This sculpture depicts a powerful but resigned figure. Though muscular and athletic, the Native American chief slumps over as if evacuated of all energy. He holds his head in his hand and gazes down toward the forsaken tomahawk near his feet. In the words of artist Thomas Crawford, the indigenous leader is “broken and bowed before the progress of the civilized white man.”

An earlier version of this work sits within a larger sculptural program by Crawford called Progress of Civilization in the east pediment of the US Capitol in Washington, DC. The bent body of the dying chief appears, alongside a Native American mother and child and indigenous grave, wedged into a corner of the pediment—displaced to the margins of history as the Republic, symbolized by an allegorical white female, rises at center.

Crawford’s problematic work advances the popular 19th-century belief in Manifest Destiny and the inevitable expiration of indigenous culture in the face of white American progress.