Crafting an Indigenous Nation

Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote's critical interdisciplinary analysis of Kiowa expressive culture is a significant revision of the conventional narrative that leaves the Kiowa in despair and decline at the close of the nineteenth century, only to resurface with the rise of the acclaimed Kiowa Six painters in the next century. Our understanding of what happened in the presumed-moribund interim is limited to the travesty that was the 1903 Supreme Court decision in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, which sanctioned the allotment of Kiowa land in violation of the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek (1867), a direct assault on tribal sovereignty. The author's accessible synthetic intervention bridges the temporal gap suggestive of tribal defeat and powerlessness with a portrayal of historical continuity and innovation found in the production of Kiowa expressive culture (song, clothing, jewelry, painting). The juxtaposition of an 1876 ledger drawing of a Kiowa woman in her “best dress” made of trade cloth—an innovation necessitated by the U.S.-sanctioned slaughter of the buffalo—with images of well-dressed twentieth-century Kiowa women outfitted in elk-tooth-adorned buckskin illustrates an assertive form of Kiowa “survivance” (pp. 16, 83). The arc between the drawing and the photograph shatters the myths of the vanishing Indian and cultural decline and asserts a counterclaim that the Kiowas renewed their values of generosity and obligation, identity, and sense of nation via cultural production, directly challenging a climate of federally supported cultural oppression

Apotheosis · Art · Art history · DIDO · Literature · Oppression · Painting · Political science · Politics · Sovereignty · Archaeology and Natural History · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law

• Nahuatl Nations

  Magnus Pharao Hansen•Nahuatl Nations•2024

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