The Battle of Little Big Horn

Kicking Bear (Mato Warantaka) c.1896

Courtesy of the Southwestern Museum

Kicking Bear's great depiction of the Battle of Greasy Grass, also known as Little Big Horn.  This was one of the most important events in the history of the Plains tribes.  It was the high-water mark for Plains warriors in the 19th century.   In the battle, the combined forces of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors defeated the Seventh Cavalry, and George Armstrong Custer was killed along with all of his men.

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Wohaw Between Two Worlds

Wohaw, c.1876-77

(Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society)

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Plains Indians were defeated.   Their traditional ways of life were shattered.  Many warriors such as Wohaw, the Kiowa artist who drew this self portrait, were imprisoned.  The Plains Indians found themselves unable to live as they had in the past, and at the same time unable to live as the white men did.  In this ledger drawing,Wohaw portrays himself between the world of his past and the world that was to become his future.  Beneath the sun, the moon, and the morning star, all powerful celestial beings in Kiowa thought, he offers the sacred pipe both to the buffalo (sacred animal of his people's past) and tentatively, it seems, to the beef cow (meat resource of his people's future).   Beside the buffalo is a plains tipi with the lodge poles protruding from the top.   To Wohaw's other side, paralleling the symbolism of the tipi as the traditional home of Wohaw's people, we see a farm house in the distance, complete with a tilled field.   He has drawn the sort of home the white man has in mind for him.  Both the buffalo and the bull breathe power toward Wohaw (whose Kiowa name means "beef cow.").  An empty sky hangs over the future the white man has planed for this Kiowa man.  Wohaw has given us one of the great images of the American Indian at the end of the 1800's.  At this time all Indians found themselves in a social and psychological place that was neither their own world nor fully the white man's world.   In this drawing we find Wohaw in a liminal place, honoring the values of his past and at the same time attempting to make peace with with his inevitible future.  A foot in each world, he was at home in neither.          

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