The man shown in this watercolor portrait seems to be a plains Ojibwa, originally native to Manitoba and Minnesota. He wears an eastern-type porcupine headdress, which is smaller in size than its western counterpart. For a number of years after this watercolor was done Russell, his friend the writer Frank Bird Linderman, and a number of others waged a campaign to secure a permanent reservation for Little Bear’s band of Crees and Rocky Boy’s plains Ojibwas, who had migrated into Montana to become landless outcasts. Linderman actually led the long fight, but Russell provided important support by making sketches, writing letters to influential people, signing petitions, and talking to the press. In a letter to Henry L. Myers, a senator from Montana, Russell wrote: “These people have been on the verge of starvation for years, and I think it no more than square for Uncle Sam, who has opened the West to all foreigners, to give these real Americans enough to live on.” Today, the tribes are located on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana.