Monthly Archives: December 2015

While The Repatriation Files takes a few weeks off from archival stories, I thought I’d post some interesting news items from Indian Country.

Today’s subject—the award of a Presidential Medal of Freedom to the late Billy Frank, Jr. A member of the Nisqually Nation of Washington state, Mr. Frank fought for native fishing rights and environmental issues.

President Obama had these words to offer on Mr. Frank’s posthumous award:

Finally, we celebrate those who have challenged us to live up to our values. Billy Frank Jr. liked to say, “I wasn’t a policy guy. I was a getting-arrested guy.” And that’s true. Billy was arrested more than 50 times in his fight to protect tribal fishing rights and save the salmon that had fed his family for generations. He was spat on, shot at, chased and clubbed and cast as an outlaw. But Billy kept fighting. Because he knew he was right. And in 1974, a federal judge agreed, honoring the promises made to Northwest tribes more than a century before. Billy went on to become a national voice for Indian Country and a warrior for the natural world. “I don’t believe in magic,” Billy once said. “I believe in the sun and the stars, the water, the hawks flying, the rivers running, the wind talking.” They tell us how healthy we are, he said, “because we and they are the same.”

For more on Billy Frank, Jr. see Gyasis Ross’s essay in Indian Country Today: Indigenous Hell-Raiser as National Hero: Billy Frank, Jr. Wins Presidential Medal Of Freedom.

[Read more: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/12/19/indigenous-hell-raiser-national-hero-billy-frank-jr-wins-presidential-medal-freedom]

Between Christmas and the new year, millions of Americans go to the movies. It’s the season for family films, comedy romances, and Oscar hopefuls. In the weeks leading up to the holiday, however, most of us are running late, snowed in, and stuck in front of the tube.

That happened to me the other night. Out to work before eight and home at five. Dark to dark. All I wanted to do when I got home was watch something on TV. If there was nothing on, I’d read a book, but I’d been reading and writing all day.

A quick flip through the remote did not bode well. Wolf Blitzer was in his intergallactic command post, alternately cautioning his viewers against rushing to judgment (“Let me remind everyone that this is just prelimary information and could change.”) and goading some policy maker into starting World War III (“But isn’t it true, Mr. Secretary, that one mistake by the Turkish military in this situation and we could face, literally, Armageddon?”) The movies? Bruce Willis. Liam Neeson. The educational channels? Hitler, autopsies, rehab. As a last ditch effort, I scrolled through Netflix—Nicholas Cage (in several stages of manic), zombies, British cop shows (they don’t even carry guns).

Then a new release caught my eye, “The Daughter of Dawn,” a silent film from 1920. What drew my attention was the inset photograph in the blurb. A young Native American man and woman in regalia stand in a wood, the image tinted like an Edward Curtis ethnographic portrait.

I watched it and liked it. The plot wasn’t much—a four-way love story embedded in a slight melodrama of warring tribes and a buffalo hunt—but it was beautifully restored and completely new to me.

What was especially striking about the picture was the fact that everyone in it was Native. The longer I scanned the faces on the screen, expecting the tell-tale sheen of grease paint redface, the more surprised I was by the rich variety of shapes and sizes and expressions. Hollywood could never cast these faces.

The male lead was an especially striking man who wore only a breech cloth and did something a Hollywood Indian would never do—he smiled. More than once. And these were nuanced smiles, not the goofy grin of some sidekick. Later, when I looked at the credits, I found out he was White Parker, son of Quannah Parker, a very famous Comanche leader. His sister, Wanada Parker, played Red Wing, whose love is rejected by the richest Kiowa brave, Black Wolf. In all, several hundred Kiowa and Comanche tribal members from Oklahoma had roles in the film.

The film’s other striking feature was its treatment of the land. Shot on location in the Wichita Mountains of southwest Oklahoma, it seemed immersed in the prairie grasses and wind blown cottonwoods. For such an old movie, it shimmered. When it comes time for the buffalo hunt, the camera lingers over the small herd with deep interest.

bison movie

An old bull in the foreground pants desperately in the June heat. You can almost reach out and feel the nap of his rugged hide even though the film had languished in a warehouse for something like 80 years. I did a little research and found out that these few bison “extras” were among 15 transplants from the Bronx zoo who were relocated to the southern Plains in 1907. They are the ancestors of the some 650 wild buffalo who now browse that range.

Then there are the Kiowa and Comanche actors, whose hand gestures speak so much more clearly than those dancing brows and oversized swoons I’d seen in silent film performers before. The title cards often veered into dime novel dialog, but the economy of  these real people’s movement and their use of signing and dance constitute the film’s most human elements. These are not ethnographic re-enactments. They are performances. They are not “authentic” so much as lived. The scenes they were acting out—medicine councils, dances, the gathering of hunting parties—had virtually been outlawed the U.S. government for a generation.

The actor’s horsemanship is also spellbinding. In one easy movement, riders fling blankets on their ponies’ backs before rocking into place and galloping off in beautifully un-choreographed arcs and eddies. There are no bandoliers hanging from saddle horns. There are no saddles, no Winchesters at all.

The sets are minimal but fascinating in their own right. The media kit posted on the internet explains that the filmmaker had no budget for props or costumes and thus what we see in the film are a collection of things gathered up by the Kiowa and Comanche tribal members. There are the requisite tipi circles (all canvas), bows, arrows, lances, and regalia, but there are other things that bear little place in the plot yet carry significant meaning. Take a look at this production still:

Original production still from “The Daughter of Dawn.” (Esther LeBarre and Hunting Horse)

Here, Daughter of Dawn confronts her father about his poor choice of suitors and he genially agrees that she should indeed marry the man she really loves—if he can pass a test of courage. Notice the tipi wall behind them. On the right, we see a beautiful war shirt, on the floor, a parfleche, and hanging from a small scaffold, an eagle wing fan, moccasins and a beadwork sash. Perhaps most surprising are the objects seen in exterior shots. One is definitely “an object of cultural patrimony.”

In an early scene from the film, Daughter of Dawn has emerged from her father’s tipi to scan the village for a glimpse of White Eagle (Parker).

Screenshot from the restored film showing some of the artwork featured on the “Tipi with Battle Pictures.”

Over her right shoulder, you can just make out some images painted onto the tipi cover. This is the only tipi in the encampment with such an elaborate cover. It represents one of the more cherished possessions of the Kiowa people. Known in the ethnographic literature as the “Tipi with the Battle Pictures,” it is a canvas reproduction based on an original buffalo hide cover that traced it history all the way back to the before the Civil War, when the Kiowa chief Tohausen received it as a gift from the Cheyenne leader Sleeping Bear in 1845.

Silver Horn drawing of medicine items belonging to Haba, including Padogai shield, the striped tipi with battle pictures, a lance, cape, and other items, ca. 1904.

The original burned in a fire in 1872, but a new one was made of canvas in 1916 by Charley Buffalo (Ohletoint), a great Kiowa artist who had lived in the original tipi as a child. In painting the tipi, he followed the traditional practice of inviting elders to join in to recite famous events that deserved to be memorialized in paint on the tipi’s north side. Charley Buffalo’s wife, Mary Buffalo, constructed the tipi cloth. Ohletoint’s brother,  Haungooah, or Silverhorn, was perhaps the most gifted of the traditional Kiowa painters. Her had recorded hundreds of drawings for the anthropologist James Mooney in the late 19th century, including images of the “Tipi with Battle Pictures.” He had himself been responsible for repainting images on the old tipis, updating the events depicted and restoring fading images with fresh pigments.

“The Daughter of Dawn” offers us a unique “home movie” of Comanche and Kiowa people living in 1920 and using the “objects of cultural patrimony” that had been denied them for so many years. From 1882, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs established the  Indian Religious Crimes Code, a multitude of Native life ways were outlawed. The dancing in this film may look innocuous to outsiders, but the actors grew up in a time when federal authorities ruled that

Candace Greene, Silver Horn: Master Illustrator of the Kiowas (Oklahoma, 2001).

As the case of Kennewick Man demonstrates, even those instances in which NAGPRA ought to be able to remedy a blatant case of repatriation gone wrong, sometimes it can’t. This is even more true for the provision in the law that attempts to deal with “objects of culture patrimony.” Let’s look at the story of a object taken from a Native community whose story highlights the difficulties in assigning cultural patrimony.

In 1889, a Lakota man named Išna Toka Kte—in English, Kills Enemy Alone—wrote a letter to his relatives at Pine Ridge Reservation. He wrote it in alphabetic Lakota from Paris, where he was working for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Even though this sounds unusual, quite a few Native people wrote in their own languages in the nineteenth century.

During that period, many Native people turned to alphabetic writing as a means of bridging the ever-expanding geographic and social divide that colonialism and the reservation system had opened between themselves, their families, clan members, tribal communities, and spiritual practices. Išna Toka Kte was—in many ways—typical of this generation of Native Americans who took up the pen to close the distance between themselves and their kin with the written word.

Born around 1854, he had been raised to understand a man’s ‘job’ as embedded in an intricate web of kinship relations, buffalo hunting, warfare, sacred duties, and clan and medicine society obligations. Like many Lakota men in the 1880s, however, he found the buffalo virtually extinct, many religious practices outlawed, his kin and clan scattered across the Plains. Whereas his life before the reservations had been carefully organized around the tiyošpaye, the tightly knit kinship groups that formed the core of the Lakota Nation’s social networks, it now lacked direction, buffeted about by the whims of Indian agents and military officers. Instead of buffalo, he ate beef, standing in line for processed meat distributed at the agency Issue House.

Ration Day at the Commissary, Pine Ridge Reservation, S.D. (1891) Nebraska State Historical Society.

Unable to support himself on government commodities alone, he could have concentrated on farming. But agriculture, promoted by the US government as the solution to all indigenous peoples’ troubles, was a very hit-or-miss affair on the plains of South Dakota. Thus, he turned to wage labor to make ends meet. Some men of his generation became teamsters, hauling freight for non-Indian businesses, but Išna Toka Kte joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1889—just as his more famous Lakota kinsmen, Sitting Bull and Black Elk had done—and traveled to Europe as a performer. When he became homesick, he used missionary books written in Lakota to learn how to write an alphabetic form of his Native language. Then he wrote a letter home. Postmarked ‘Neuilly, Paris, France,’ it began: ‘Wamniyomni cigala ito toka lo anpetu kin . . .’ (‘Well, Little Whirlwind, I am going to tell you something today’).

RG4946.AM: Kills Enemy Alone, Papers: 1889, ca. 1968 Nebraska State Historical Society

Within a year, this letter was circulating at Big Foot’s camp of Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee Creek just as the US army attacked. When the soldiers looted the massacre victims’ bodies, they stumbled across the letter from Kills Enemy Alone. Perhaps thinking it would make a good conversation piece, one of them kept it as a souvenir. It resurfaced in the 1960s in the Nebraska State Historical Society archives. A faint pencil notation on the letter’s envelope reads:”taken from a dead Indian after the Battle of Wounded Knee.”

Is this letter “cultural patrimony”? If so, how is to be repatriated? Should it have been interred with the body of Išna Toka Kte‘s kinsman, who died with it in his pocket? With his family today, his tiyošpaye?

As objects of Native creation but not necessarily cultural patrimony, letters like this are not covered by NAGPRA. Yet they seem to demand some form of repatriation, some recognition of their place in the long history of indigenous peoples in America. Over the next few months, we’ll work to uncover more about this man, his family, his community and the circuitous route his letter took on its journey from Paris to Wounded Knee. Along the way, we will explore other writings by Native American people who adopted alphabetic or syllabary graphic systems to supplement more traditional material practices as they grappled with the affects of U.S. colonialism on their societies. At key moments in Native American history—the 1830s Removal crisis, Canada’s Indian Act of 1876, and the Ghost Dance revivals before and after the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee—alphabetic vernacular literacy served indigenous communities as a means of transmitting and archiving traditional knowledge, maintaining social connections, and innovating new “publics” and polities.