History on Display: The Buffalo Bill Center of the West, pt. 1 –The Plains Indian Museum
The Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, was the ultimate goal of our two weeks on the road. And it was well worth the trip.
The museum is, in fact, a cluster of five museums dealing with different aspects of the American West—the Plains Indian Museum, the Buffalo Bill Museum, the Cody Firearms Museum, the Draper Natural History Museum, and the Whitney Western Art Museum—plus a special exhibit space. I went through three of the five museums and the special exhibition space, which featured a photo essay by Ivan McClellan titled Eight Seconds: Black Cowboys in America.
This is not the museum campus to visit if you are interested in homesteading or the role of the railroads in transforming the west. On its website, the museum bills itself as “Five Museums, One Wild West” and offers visitors a chance to explore Plains Indian cultures and “trailblazing cowboys and cowgirls.” On the surface, it’s a fair description. Looked at in broad terms, the museum focuses on “cowboys and Indians.” And yet, that is not the whole story. In each of those museums, the exhibits look at the subjects they present with depth and perspective and the curators question popular representations and iconic visions of the west, wild and otherwise. In fact, the exhibit on Black cowboys included a useful discussion of the difference between icons and stereotypes.*
The Plains Indian Museum looks at Plains Indian cultures in terms of both historical adversity and contemporary renewal, with an emphasis on “own voices”, traditional and contemporary. The result is a fascinating balancing act between big ideas and specific details. It explores questions of identity, and how the various nations are rebuilding their identities today using cultural centers, events, history and language.** It dives deep into the use of “material culture,” both through an extraordinary collection of traditional objects dating from the late 1700s to around 1890 and by looking at how modern Native artists have reinterpreted familiar objects. It shares important stories from traditional cultures and highlights the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women. One wall is devoted to a timeline of encounters between Native peoples and European-Americans—physically at the center of the gallery, but not the center of the exhibit.
Here are some of the things that particularly struck me:
- Earth lodges and tipis belonged to the matriarch of the dwelling.
- The models on which traditional clothing and horse equipment were displayed were all abstract and made it neutral tones. It was visually striking, but the curators made it clear that the decision was not simply aesthetic: “Our monochromatic figures intentionally look this way to avoid stereotyping Indigenous Peoples and their any skin and hair colors. The models are created in natural earth tones to highlight the museum objects.
- There was a tipi-shaped structure made of brush and branches that I assumed at first was another example of a modern artist exploring a traditional shape. It turned out to be a temporary “camouflaged” lodge built in the woods on hunting and war trips.
- This verse of modern poetry, which led me to learn more about the poet: “When we sing/We are not playing/We are praying for life. “ Lance Henson. “For Soft Dresser”
- This verse of a traditional dong: “If there is anything difficult/If there is anything dangerous/That is mine to do.” Kit Fox Society Song. Oglala Lakota.
I would have counted our visit to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West as a win based on the Plains Indian Museum alone.
Next up: The Buffalo Bill Museum
* Ivan McClellan’s mission statement for the show is worth sharing:
“I come from a place where black folks work the land, tend to animals, rope, ride horses, and identify as cowboys., this is a narrative rarely told by media. People of color are mostly presented as victims, criminals, rapers or athletes….My aim is to expand the cowboy icon to include people of color. To saturate the world with this image so my kids will draw a cowboy with brown skin.”
**Language is always a big issue when a people are asserting their identity. Sometimes the first issue.
In which I finally finish reading The Three-Cornered War
My last blog post was pulled from the History in the Margins archives: a piece on the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, an early event in the wars between the United States government and the Plains Indian nations that ended at the Battle of Wounded Knee. In the course of reviewing the piece before I posted it, I realized something I had not noticed before: the Sand Creek Massacre occurred during the American Civil War and could, in fact, be seen as an incident in the often overlooked “westernmost” theater in that war.
Those thoughts led me back to a book that was sitting unfinished on my reading pile: Megan Kate Nelson’s The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West.* I received a review copy in February, 2020 and galloped through the first 180 pages. Then Covid hit, the world went crazy, and my brain shut down for a couple of weeks. And then, just as I was regaining my ability to focus, I signed a contract to write my book about Sigrid Schultz, which changed my non-fiction reading priorities. When I picked it up The Three-Cornered War last week, I realized I only had about fifty pages left to read and settled down to finish it. If anything, reading those last pages through the lens of my recent exposure to the history of the American West made them even more compelling.
Using the stories of nine people, chosen to represent different viewpoints, Nelson draws connections between the Civil War, the Indian Wars, and the United States’ western expansion, presenting them as three parts—three-corners—of one national conflict. She gives the reader an up-close look at the the efforts of the United States to remove native peoples from their homeland in order to allow white expansion into the west as seen from the perspective of both the Union soldier who engineered the campaigns against the Navajos and Apaches and an Apache chief who resisted that expansion. (Getting into the head of something who believed fervently in the need to control if not exterminate the Native American nations makes the familiar story even uglier.) She unfolds the far less familiar story of the conflicts of the Union and Confederate armies over control of New Mexico and Arizona, setting them within the larger framework of the war. (I don’t know about you, but I had no idea that the Confederate Territory of Arizona existed.) And by drawing connections between events that are often presented as entirely separate, she makes the surprising (to me, if not to you) point that the emancipation of enslaved people in the American South and the attempted elimination of indigenous peoples in the American West were contemporaneous events. (As seems to be a theme around here lately, the answer to “who’s missing from the story?” sometimes gives you a very different picture.)
The result is a complex, well-written account of the Civil War that re-frames our collective past.
*The fact that I let it sit was a comment on my life, not on the quality of the book.
From the History in the Margins Archives: The Sand Creek Massacre
As we drove across Wyoming, heading toward the western-most point of our trip, I noticed signs stating that we were on the Sand Creek Massacre Trail, which confused me slightly since I knew that the massacre occurred in Colorado. A quick internet search informed me that the trail was a 600-mile stretch of road from the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming to the site of the massacre. The joint project of the Northern Arapaho people and the state 0f Wyoming commemorates the wandering of the Northern Arapaho and the Cheyenne in the years after the Massacre.
I first came across the story in 2019. I think it’s worth sharing the post I wrote at the time again. (With a few tweaks.)
I assume most of you, at least in the United States, have heard of the Battle of Wounded Knee, the final battle of the Plains Wars of the late nineteenth century and the focus of Native American activism in the 1970s.(1) But have you heard of the Sand Creek Massacre?
I stumbled across the story while working on a article on the ledger art of Howling Wolf (2) for MHQ, The Quarterly Journal of Military History Quarterly. I’ve been coming across references to the event ever since.
Here is the rough outline of what happened:
In November, 1864, a group of Cheyenne and Arapaho settled at Sand Creek, 170 miles southeast of Denver. The inhabitants had recently concluded peace negotiations with the governor of the territory and had every reason to believe they would be safe in their camp. [It’s worth noting that this occurred during the American Civil War: something I didn’t notice when I wrote this piece.]
At dawn on November 29, 675 members of the Colorado volunteer militia led by Colonel John Chivington attacked the village. Adult male warriors of the tribes, taken by surprise, attempted to defend the noncombatants, mostly women, children and the elderly, many of whom fled into the dry stream bed for which the village was named. The soldiers followed them, shooting. At a point several hundred yards above the village, the Cheyenne and Arapaho dug pits and trenches to protect themselves. The militia positioned howitzers on the opposite bank and bombarded their improvised defenses. Over the following eight hours, the militia killed roughly one third of inhabitants of the village (estimates as to the size of the village and the number dead vary), most of them noncombatants. The next day the militia returned, set fire to the village, killed the wounded, and mutilated the bodies.
The events were horrifying, but not uncommon in the larger context of the Plains Wars. What made them extraordinary was their aftermath. At first, Chivington was praised for the attack, which was framed as a pacification effort. But a different story began to emerge as soldiers who were opposed to the day’s actions filed reports that described the massacre in chilling detail. In response, Congress began an investigation of the events. A Congressional committee eventually ruled that Chivington had “deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre” and “surprised and murdered in cold blood” Native Americans who “Had every reason to believe that they were under [government] protection.” The only reason Chivington wasn’t court-martialed is that he has already resigned his commission.
The deaths at Sand Creek were also the death of any hope of peace on the Plains. Many young warriors of the Plains nations saw the massacre as proof that treaties with the United States meant nothing. (A not unreasonable conclusion based on years of evidence.) Formerly divided nations united in opposition to the United State’s western expansion. Sand Creek was the first step on the path to Wounded Knee. (3)
Today Sand Creek is a historic site maintained by the National Park Service.
It is clear to me that there is a great deal I don’t know about this event, including how it fits into the larger stories of the Plains Wars and the American Civil War. I do know the place to start: Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre. One more book on the To-Be-Read list. One more topic I want to know more about..
(1) Though I must admit that is the sum total of what I knew about Wounded Knee when I wrote this post. I had somehow failed to read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee at the time all my friends were reading it the ’70s. I’ve made up for it since.
(2) Not to be confused with blues artist, Howling’ Wolf. Though both of them had good reason to howl.
(3) Am I the only one seeing parallels to the Amritsar massacre here?