Between Christmas and the new year, millions of Americans go to the movies. It’s the season for family films, comedy romances, and Oscar hopefuls. In the weeks leading up to the holiday, however, most of us are running late, snowed in, and stuck in front of the tube.
That happened to me the other night. Out to work before eight and home at five. Dark to dark. All I wanted to do when I got home was watch something on TV. If there was nothing on, I’d read a book, but I’d been reading and writing all day.
A quick flip through the remote did not bode well. Wolf Blitzer was in his intergallactic command post, alternately cautioning his viewers against rushing to judgment (“Let me remind everyone that this is just prelimary information and could change.”) and goading some policy maker into starting World War III (“But isn’t it true, Mr. Secretary, that one mistake by the Turkish military in this situation and we could face, literally, Armageddon?”) The movies? Bruce Willis. Liam Neeson. The educational channels? Hitler, autopsies, rehab. As a last ditch effort, I scrolled through Netflix—Nicholas Cage (in several stages of manic), zombies, British cop shows (they don’t even carry guns).
Then a new release caught my eye, “The Daughter of Dawn,” a silent film from 1920. What drew my attention was the inset photograph in the blurb. A young Native American man and woman in regalia stand in a wood, the image tinted like an Edward Curtis ethnographic portrait. 
I watched it and liked it. The plot wasn’t much—a four-way love story embedded in a slight melodrama of warring tribes and a buffalo hunt—but it was beautifully restored and completely new to me.
What was especially striking about the picture was the fact that everyone in it was Native. The longer I scanned the faces on the screen, expecting the tell-tale sheen of grease paint redface, the more surprised I was by the rich variety of shapes and sizes and expressions. Hollywood could never cast these faces.
The male lead was an especially striking man who wore only a breech cloth and did something a Hollywood Indian would never do—he smiled. More than once. And these were nuanced smiles, not the goofy grin of some sidekick. Later, when I looked at the credits, I found out he was White Parker, son of Quannah Parker, a very famous Comanche leader. His sister, Wanada Parker, played Red Wing, whose love is rejected by the richest Kiowa brave, Black Wolf. In all, several hundred Kiowa and Comanche tribal members from Oklahoma had roles in the film.
The film’s other striking feature was its treatment of the land. Shot on location in the Wichita Mountains of southwest Oklahoma, it seemed immersed in the prairie grasses and wind blown cottonwoods. For such an old movie, it shimmered. When it comes time for the buffalo hunt, the camera lingers over the small herd with deep interest.
An old bull in the foreground pants desperately in the June heat. You can almost reach out and feel the nap of his rugged hide even though the film had languished in a warehouse for something like 80 years. I did a little research and found out that these few bison “extras” were among 15 transplants from the Bronx zoo who were relocated to the southern Plains in 1907. They are the ancestors of the some 650 wild buffalo who now browse that range.
Then there are the Kiowa and Comanche actors, whose hand gestures speak so much more clearly than those dancing brows and oversized swoons I’d seen in silent film performers before. The title cards often veered into dime novel dialog, but the economy of these real people’s movement and their use of signing and dance constitute the film’s most human elements. These are not ethnographic re-enactments. They are performances. They are not “authentic” so much as lived. The scenes they were acting out—medicine councils, dances, the gathering of hunting parties—had virtually been outlawed the U.S. government for a generation.
The actor’s horsemanship is also spellbinding. In one easy movement, riders fling blankets on their ponies’ backs before rocking into place and galloping off in beautifully un-choreographed arcs and eddies. There are no bandoliers hanging from saddle horns. There are no saddles, no Winchesters at all.
The sets are minimal but fascinating in their own right. The media kit posted on the internet explains that the filmmaker had no budget for props or costumes and thus what we see in the film are a collection of things gathered up by the Kiowa and Comanche tribal members. There are the requisite tipi circles (all canvas), bows, arrows, lances, and regalia, but there are other things that bear little place in the plot yet carry significant meaning. Take a look at this production still:
Original production still from “The Daughter of Dawn.” (Esther LeBarre and Hunting Horse)
Here, Daughter of Dawn confronts her father about his poor choice of suitors and he genially agrees that she should indeed marry the man she really loves—if he can pass a test of courage. Notice the tipi wall behind them. On the right, we see a beautiful war shirt, on the floor, a parfleche, and hanging from a small scaffold, an eagle wing fan, moccasins and a beadwork sash. Perhaps most surprising are the objects seen in exterior shots. One is definitely “an object of cultural patrimony.”
In an early scene from the film, Daughter of Dawn has emerged from her father’s tipi to scan the village for a glimpse of White Eagle (Parker).
Screenshot from the restored film showing some of the artwork featured on the “Tipi with Battle Pictures.”
Over her right shoulder, you can just make out some images painted onto the tipi cover. This is the only tipi in the encampment with such an elaborate cover. It represents one of the more cherished possessions of the Kiowa people. Known in the ethnographic literature as the “Tipi with the Battle Pictures,” it is a canvas reproduction based on an original buffalo hide cover that traced it history all the way back to the before the Civil War, when the Kiowa chief Tohausen received it as a gift from the Cheyenne leader Sleeping Bear in 1845.
Silver Horn drawing of medicine items belonging to Haba, including Padogai shield, the striped tipi with battle pictures, a lance, cape, and other items, ca. 1904.
The original burned in a fire in 1872, but a new one was made of canvas in 1916 by Charley Buffalo (Ohletoint), a great Kiowa artist who had lived in the original tipi as a child. In painting the tipi, he followed the traditional practice of inviting elders to join in to recite famous events that deserved to be memorialized in paint on the tipi’s north side. Charley Buffalo’s wife, Mary Buffalo, constructed the tipi cloth. Ohletoint’s brother, Haungooah, or Silverhorn, was perhaps the most gifted of the traditional Kiowa painters. Her had recorded hundreds of drawings for the anthropologist James Mooney in the late 19th century, including images of the “Tipi with Battle Pictures.” He had himself been responsible for repainting images on the old tipis, updating the events depicted and restoring fading images with fresh pigments.
“The Daughter of Dawn” offers us a unique “home movie” of Comanche and Kiowa people living in 1920 and using the “objects of cultural patrimony” that had been denied them for so many years. From 1882, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs established the Indian Religious Crimes Code, a multitude of Native life ways were outlawed. The dancing in this film may look innocuous to outsiders, but the actors grew up in a time when federal authorities ruled that
“Any Indian who shall engage in the sun dance, scalp dance, or war dance, or any similar feast, so called, shall be guilty of an offense, and upon conviction thereof shall be punished for the first offense by with holding of his rations for not exceeding ten days or by imprisonment for not exceeding ten days; for any subsequent offense under this clause he shall be punished by withholding his rations for not less than ten days nor more than thirty days, or by imprisonment for not less than ten days nor more than thirty days.”
This law was enacted just 28 years before the film was made. Watch it and enjoy the freedom it portrays!
This film is owned by the Oklahoma Historical Society and was restored through a grant provided by the National Film Preservation Board. The film features special music composed and performed for the showing. The original music composition is by David Yeagley. The score is performed by the Oklahoma City University Orchestra: Ben Nilles, Conductor; John Cross, Music Editor; Mark Parker, Dean of the School of Music; Robert Henry, OCU President.
Selected Readings
Candace Greene, Silver Horn: Master Illustrator of the Kiowas (Oklahoma, 2001).
