Case Study: Mató-Tópe and the Practice of Portraiture
Mató-Tópe serves as an excellent guide to the ways in which portraits could be actively co-created in the Middle Ground. Designated “second chief” in English, he was the war chief of Mít uta hako'sh (First Village), possessing the best military record in the village. Locally he would have been known as a numakshí (“man-to-be-good”), the phrase that marked all Numak'aki village leaders. To be a numakshí, Mató-Tópe was required to belong to at least one óhate, or society, and to hold the rights of a ka-ka, or knowledge keeper. As second chief, he likely sat on the larger council of the Awatíkihu (Five Villages). And like all residents of the Awatíkihu, Mató-Tópe was multilingual, able to speak the languages and dialects of the Numak'aki and Minitari peoples, as well as several languages of the villages’ trading partners.[33]
The status of these qualifications meant that Mató-Tópe was in a position to not only share knowledge and resources with newcomers, but to also determine what was and was not shareable, and to enforce boundaries between insiders and outsiders. By examining the specific entries that concern this local leader in Wied-Neuwied’s accounts (see Part 2), we can glimpse some of the claims and operative power dynamics potentially pursued by Native leaders in their sitting for, granting, giving, and circulating portraits—motivations that may have driven portrait making in the Middle Ground and across a range of geographies and contexts throughout the nineteenth century.