Monthly Archives: May 2016

In my previous post, Castle McLauglin discussed how she got involved in the preservation of wild horses in North Dakota. Here, our conversation turns toward the historical significance of horses like these, and the place they might play in a broader consideration of repatriation.

PR: What about repatriation?

CM: Well, the point I want to get to has to do with that. The first year they brought those horses home, almost all the pregnant mares aborted from the stress of the roundup. But the next year, when the foals were born, there was a lot of color—a lot of Overo paints, with maybe one blue eye, or a big white spot on the side of the body. The main colors were roans, blue roans and red roans, and a few paints, very few Chestnuts, Bays—the common colors of Quarter Horses.

They matched the historical photos [of the Marquis de More’s horses] that I included with my report to the Park Service. Those photos show all greys and blacks and roans.

So I started trying to get the Park Service to reverse their policy. I was young and idealistic and I was just stunned that they weren’t interested in the horses as historic resources. And also, the horses were so wild that visitors to the parks loved to see them because seeing them was a real feat—most people were lucky to catch a glimpse of the calmest band. It was a special experience people could have.They were the very horses that were descendants of the horses that were there in the days of Roosevelt and Marquis de More.

The other thing is that they had been there for over one hundred years and had survived countless attempts to eradicate them. North Dakota is brutally cold, thirty and forty below, sometimes for months at a time, and these horses had adapted to that really harsh environment and survived, so I felt that there was a biological basis for their being in the park, there was a historical and a behavioral basis for keeping them there. Not some quarter horses, which visitors can see on any ranch.

PR: So, your report did not convince the officials?

CM: Nope, they couldn’t care less. I thought this was a terrible injustice—I still do—but we’ve never been able to get the park to change their mind.

PR: And this had been going on a long time before you arrived on the scene?

CM: Yes, they never consulted any experts. They could have brought in biologists who worked for the BLM or other people who were working with wild horse issues and knew a little about management. They chose not to do that. When the Wild Horse and Free Roaming Burro Act was passed (1971), the Park Service went to court to get an exception so that they would not be subject to the federal regulations that were written to protect wild horses and burros on federal land.

PR: Why would they do that?

CM: They argued that that wasn’t their mission, because then the NPS was focused on biology and preserving pre-contact landscapes. They reintroduced bison and elk and considered the horses “exotics” and unwelcome competition for those native species. Also, I think that in part they just didn’t want to be bothered to try to manage the herd. So Frank and Leo and I were not making a lot of headway. We did attract some and supporters, and in 1999 we decided to start a non-profit organization to protect and preserve at least the horses that Frank and Leo had bought. After the first roundup, every few years there were more roundups, and we would go back and buy as many horses as we could afford to save from slaughter. That’s how Frank and Leo ended up gradually taking on this burden of these horses until they were numbering in the hundreds and they took over their lives. That has been thirty years ago. Those guys often didn’t have enough money to buy a new pair of socks, but they kept the horses alive. So in ’99 we founded The Nokota® Horse Conservancy.

PR: Why that name?

CM: It is not because of the Nakoda Sioux nation, but a contraction Leo thought up that would indicate the horses were from North Dakota. We did find some allies. The western historian, Bob Utley, became our great champion. Leo Frank and I were invited to attend a history conference where I could describe my historical research, and we brought some of the horses to show. Many western historians were there, and some became interested and began writing letters to the park service and so forth.

PR: And?

CM: It had absolutely no effect. Years before that, we had managed-—with the help of some Native people, and some ranchers from other parts of the state—to get the state legislature to name these horses the “State Honorary Equine.”

PR: I wonder if you can help me understand the bigger picture here. Can you look across the Great Plains and find other bands of wild horses in similar situations?

CM: No, and that is the interesting thing about these North Dakota horses. They kind of fall between classificatory categories. The mainstream understanding is that when horses were introduced to the Americas by the Spanish that those were the first horses that Native people acquired. That was in the southwest, and those were colonial Spanish horses. It is also known that some ranchers in the southwest used some of those Spanish horses to develop the Quarter Horse. And, during the open range ranching period on the Plains (1860s-1880s), they brought some of these horses with them to the northern plains, so we know that the Spanish colonial horse had some influence on how the wild horses in North Dakota came to be there and also how they influenced early Indian horses.

So, in the minds of many equine researchers and historians, in order for a horse to be a “real” Indian horse, they have to be a Spanish Mustang. And today those relationships are traced genetically. But, that assumption is just not accurate historically. The Indians on the northern plains liked larger horses. They called them “American horses.” They engaged in a lot of horse taking from the military and ranchers during the Plains Wars (1854-1890) and were happy to blend those American horses into their own herds.

This is one of the slippages with the Nakota® horses— this history vs. DNA thing, let’s say. Maybe if they were “pure” Spanish, the Park Service would have to capitulate.

PR: How did Native peoples on the plains go about raising these animals for war horses?

CM: Interestingly, they did not practice selective breeding in the way that we think of that today. Because their idea about animals is that they are separate “nations” with their own volition, who can make up their own minds about such things. Most didn’t geld horses. They didn’t cull horses. They ran their horses in large, community herds. And they valued very different attributes. They were less interested in conformation and more interested in things like stamina. When it came to appearance, many preferred parti-colored, unusual horses, like the paints, and blue eyes. It turns out that several of the allied Lakota and Northern Cheyenne war societies had a strong preference for blue roans, because they viewed the color as an indication of how to classify that horse in terms of the larger universe of entities and spirits. The Lakota idea of wiyohpiyata —the west—is an area of power that governs both storms and warfare. The colors of the west are both black and blue, and so they saw blue horses as part of this complex of entities and powers, so an ideal warhorse. Several of the war societies preferred the blue roan, a very rare color.

PR: Now here’s another question I have. As an equine person, when you look at illustrations of horses in the Lakota war books you’ve written about, what do you see? That is, what is the relationship between this species history and the images actual Plains warriors drew in recounting their battles?

CM: Joe Brings Plenty (Minneconjou), the former tribal chairman at Cheyenne River, wrote in the foreword to my book that very few Euro-Americans have ever put together the significance of the blue roan to the Lakota and to the artwork in those war books. That was very gratifying for me.

 PR: Could you give our readers an example of what Joe Brings Plenty was talking about?

CM: Well Artist B, the “Blue Roan Warrior”—who I believe might have been Hump (High Backbone), Crazy Horse’s uncle—drew himself riding a real blue roan in all 22 of his pictures. It has a black neck and legs.

PR: So it looks like some of the horses you rescued?

CM: Yes, but a lot of time in “ledger art,” these men drew blue horses for a variety of reasons. They had limited colors.

Sometimes they used a blue pencil to denote a grey horse. Sometimes they drew a blue horse because it was a war horse, and the color of war horses were blue. They were symbolic renderings. That’s what makes this tradition so complicated.

PR: In that case, we could look at those war books for historical evidence of your counter-narrative about the North Dakota horses. War books should be held up as historical evidence with a value similar to DNA evidence and the ranchers’ own stories.

CM: Yes, but historical evidence is obviously not given the same authority as DNA. And the other thing that has driven me to try to preserve this population has to do with the horses having been wild. In recent decades, the term “wild” has been deconstructed, written off as a projection of Euro-American culture. But having watched these horses for decades, I think that quality actually exists. There was something so different about the horses who would rather kill themselves than be captured.

The Nokota® Horse Conservancy is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of this breed. You can find it at http://www.nokotahorse.org

Castle McLaughlin and Butch Thunderhawk have co-curated an exhibit on the Lakota war book: Wiyohpiyata: Lakota Images of the Contested West.

The exhibit “uses ambient sound, motion, scent, and historic and contemporary Plains art to animate nineteenth century Lakota drawings from a warrior’s ledger collected at the Little Bighorn battlefield. This exhibit presents Lakota perspectives on westward expansion while exploring culturally-shaped relationships between words, objects, and images.  https://www.peabody.harvard.edu

 

Working with Native American archival materials, you run into some pretty odd stuff. In previous posts, I’ve described bullet-riddled war books and bloodly banners, but today I’m going to explore another set of objects quite common in these archives—playing cards.

When you think about it, playing cards were the stuff of social life in America until just recently, as social media and online gaming began elbowing out the old Bicycle deck and games like pinochle, cribbage, poker, and gin.

The website for what is perhaps the most famous playing card company in the world, Bicycle, offers a short history of the playing card:

The earliest playing cards are believed to have originated in Central Asia. The documented history of card playing began in the 10th century, when the Chinese began using paper dominoes by shuffling and dealing them in new games. Four-suited decks with court cards evolved in the Moslem world and were imported by Europeans before 1370. In those days, cards were hand-painted and only the very wealthy could afford them, but with the invention of woodcuts in the 14th century, Europeans began mass-production.

[www.bicyclecards.ca/pages/playing_card_history/37.php]

Among the more interesting trivia about cards the website cites is the fact that “France gave us the suits of spades, clubs, diamonds and hearts, and the use of simple shapes and flat colors helped facilitate manufacture,” while (of course) Americans invented the Joker.

But the playing cards associated with American Indians are often quite distinctive. At the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA, for example, you can examine a leather deck used by Apaches in the 19th century.

Chiricahuas and Western Apaches made these cards when Mexican printed playing cards became impossible to obtain as the tribes’ warfare with Mexico closed off all commerce between the nations. The cards are made from horsehide and painted with designs that reflect an intriguing blend of Spanish and Mexican designs with traditional Apache motifs. Virginia and Harold Wayland, in their book Playing Cards of the Apaches: A Study in Cultural Adaptation (2006), explain that “as early as 1581, Indian tribes in contact with Spaniards had access to paper cards in what is now northwestern Mexico and the American Southwest. When renewed hostilities with Mexico stifled trade, Apache painting of rawhide cards began about 1830 and continued for another century, with Chiricahua fugitives in northern Mexico using such cards as late as 1932.”

Much more common in archival collections, however, are decks of cards missionaries distributed among Native people to do double evangelical duty—wipe out gambling and inspire Bible reading. Of course, they didn’t achieve either goal completely, but their presence in several archives suggest yet another set of material practices that might be reclaimed from the archives to shed some light on Native people’s everyday life in the centuries after the arrival of Europeans.

Mohegan missionary Samson Occom makes reference to “Bible cards” several times in his voluminous diary. At one of his circuit stops in 1785, Occom comments, “after supper we had little exercise, with my Printed, Versified Notes of Christian Cards.” He is probably referring to professionally printed excerpts from the Psalms and other parts of the Bible that were circulated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This example of a card found in the archives of the American Philosophical Society, is probably very similar to the ones Occom used in his missionary travels.

Throughout the 1760s, his journal entries are punctuated with comments about the kind of Christian sociability such cards offered him. It seems that the cards were used to supplant games of chance with games of “providence.” That is, a player drew a card and read its verse as a kind of “fortune,” or jumping off point, for disputation and discussion among the card players. Occom mentions playing these card games with “poor negroes,” fellow Native peoples, and white settlers with whom he took tea.

Another set of cards, housed at the Newberry Library in Chicago, reflect the continued importance of gaming evangelism throughout nineteenth century, this time in Mvskogee country. These flowery, Victorian cards were less about chance than about social calling and brightening up a household with conversation pieces whose subject was Christian doctrine.

Such objects are known in the archives as “collecting cards.” In this case, the individual decks sport names like “Words of Strength” and “Manna for the Day.” The display side of the cards feature bright chromolithographs of popular garden flowers, thus encouraging the Mvskogees who were given them to participate in mainstream middle class decorative visual culture. The reverse side of each card features a Bible passage. These cards’ intermingling of civil and religious material culture reflect a common pattern in Euro-American “assimilation” projects. John Eliot, the English minister who led the first concerted missionary effort in New England, articulated this policy as early as  1649, when he insisted he would “carry on civility with religion.”

In the 1880s, Bible cards made their way to Tsimshian villages on the northwest coast of the continent. This example, also from the Newberry Library, exhibits the truly global reach of Native Christian material culture at the end of the nineteenth century.

These cards were produced by Mrs. Emma Grimke of Manchester, England, who was widely known as the founder of the Text Card Mission. In advertising her wares, Mrs. Grimke boasted “having now 50 languages,  [I] wish to send out one million text cards to missionaries this year, cost about 500, proposing to double all gifts sent by Christians whose aid she now asks. Many variety of English, some very superior, F.M sheets, Tracts, Quilt Texts on Calico, &c., always on sale.”

The engraving was produced by the Kaufmann printing concern in Baden, Germany, a firm that still exists today. Close examination of the images on these cards shows how Christian missionaries repurposed engravings for many different constituencies. Ships with European rigging join craft of vaguely middle eastern origin across seascapes and inland waterways bordered by solitary cypress trees and dense hardwood forests. There in an emphasis on the sea, which might appeal to Tsimshian people, who were themselves able and avid sailors and fishermen. But the images are also interchangeable with other seafaring communities the missionaries were trying to reach.

 

Having gotten acquainted with Mrs. Grimke’s ambitious project, I will now be on the lookout for “quilt texts.” They may lead us to another important material practice that many Native communities continue to embrace to this day–quilting and quilt “give aways.”

There is little recorded evidence concerning the use of these cards in Native communities. Some, like those Occom describes, appear to have provided a comfortable space for social interaction among rural Christian converts  who had been marginalized by Euro-American congregations. Others, like the Apache cards, show great wear, suggesting the Chiricahuas enjoyed lively matches of games of skill or chance. Of the Tsimshian and Mvskogee cards, not much has been written or spoken. Perhaps they functioned more as collectors’ items for outsiders. One thing is certain, Native communities already had plenty of games to play without them. The southeastern tribes were famous for their outdoor games of Chunkey since at least the twelfth century. Out in Southern California, games of Peon are still played in the spring. Among the indigenous communities of the Great Basin and the Plains, spring is the season for hand games that can still attract a crowd, and fill the air with song.

Further Reading

Virginia and Harold Wayland, Playing Cards of the Apaches: A Study in Cultural Adaptation (2006).

Lawrence Johnson, Hand Game: The Native North American Game of Power and Chance (2000) [Video]