Helen H. Blish

Born 1898-11-08 Detroit, MI (USA)

Died 1941-04-07
Detroit, MI (USA)

Buried
Grand Lawn Cemetery, Detroit, MI (USA)

Graduate student of Hartley Burr Alexander. Blish sought to write her Masters thesis on Native American art, and in 1926 discovered, through contact with W.O. Roberts, then a clerk at the Pine Ridge Agency, the ledger drawings of the late (d. 1913) Amos Bad Heart Bull. The drawings were in the possession of his sister, Dolly Pretty Cloud, and were her most precious possession.

After considerable negotiation, Miss Blish was able to rent the drawings for a modest annual fee (1927-1940). Hartley Burr Alexander, her advisor, had the ledger photographed at his own expense, and made two copies, one for himself and one for Blish. In the difficult time of the 1930s, Alexander obtained grants for Blish to complete her manuscript. Mari Sandoz wrote an introduction to the work. But Blish's early death, in 1941, delayed publication. When Dolly Pretty Cloud died in 1947, the ledger itself was buried with her.

Sandoz's judgment of the historical importance of Amos Bad Heart Bull's artwork, and Sandoz' and Alexander's high opinion of Blish's manuscript have withstood the test of time. The University of Nebraska Press published Blish's manuscript in 1967 as A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux. Alexander had a few of the photographs colored for a 1938 collection by a French publisher, and that is the source of the few colored pictures in the book.

The Nebraska State Historical Society has a Helen Heather Blish Collection that includes manuscript and notes.

dsc

Places Lived

Detroit, MI
Lincoln, NE

Author Of

Nonfiction
Visual Work

Keywords

Native Americans--Lakota Sioux; Anthropology; Art

Education

BA, 1926, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE
MA, 1928, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE

Bibliography

A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux. 1967.

We appreciate corrections and additions to our information about authors, but please read the following guidelines and caveats carefully.

The Nebraska Authors database is based on publicly available sources. Unless you are the author contacting us in person, it helps us if you cite the source or sources of your information. We cannot include unsourced information in the database.
We may be appreciative of information we choose not to include in the publicly available database.
To include an image on an author profile, please send jpg attachment to nebraskaauthors@lincoln.ne.gov. A photo-release agreement is required before the image will be published on this site.
Because of the way we are staffed, expect corrections or additions to take time, sometimes up to three months.
While we initially included some actual links to external URLs in the database, we will in the future no longer provide functioning links. We will instead record the presence of specific external materials in language that we hope will help intelligent users find it themselves. Web rot, in which actual materials remain online but undergo changes in their URLs, is too demanding in terms of staff time for us to hope to keep external links current.

Please copy, fill out the form below, and email it to heritage@lincoln.ne.gov to suggest a change.