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.
