Most of the tribes were fairly proficient in pictography; totemic and other designs were inscribed on bark and wood, painted on skins, wrought into domestic wares, and sometimes carved on rocks.
"The Siouan Indians"
W. J. McGee
The decorative art of most savage tribes, for instance, is nearly all of totemic origin, and the decayed and degraded forms of snake, bird, bear, fish, may be traced in the most apparently empty geometric patterns;-but what does this discovery tell us of the essentially decorative quality of such patterns or of the nature of beauty of form?
"The Psychology of Beauty"
Ethel D. Puffer
Primitive decorative art arose in the imitation of the totemic or clan symbols, mostly animal forms; but we have seen that the aesthetic quality of the decoration is due to the demands of the eye, and appears fully only in the comparative degradation of the representative form.
"The Psychology of Beauty"
Ethel D. Puffer