Crafting an Indigenous Nation Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote

Crafting an Indigenous Nation Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote Published by The University of North Carolina Press Tone-Pah-Hote, Jenny. Crafting an Indigenous Nation: Kiowa Expressive Culture in the Progressive Era. The University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/63566. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/63566 [ Access provided at 18 Mar 2021 21:37 GMT from University of Michigan @ Ann Arbor ] Introduction Figure 1, showing a truck rolling down the main street of Anadarko, Oklahoma, hints at what the American Indian Exposition parades looked like during the 1930s. The photo graph highlights dance, regalia, and Kiowa leadership in the event. Jasper Saunkeah, president of the American Indian Exposition, stands tall at the front of the truckbed. Saunkeah served as the president on and of during the 1930s and the 1940s.1 For the 1937 parade he donned a full war bonnet with tail feathers trailing down his back. When this photo graph was taken, “wearing war bonnets had complex meaning among the Kiowa”; for some, they were still associated with “war honors,” but for others, like Jasper Saunkeah, they were formal regalia donned for “special occasions.”2 The war bonnet, a ubiquitous piece of American Indian popu lar culture, signals his leadership of this intertribal fair and powwow. Two young women smile at his side, while a young fancy dancer looks toward the crowd and another young woman wearing a beaded dress and modest crown faces forward. Several other young fancy dancers are packed in the back of the flatbed, and another man sits on the side of the truck. He too is dressed for the parade, wearing neat braids, a long- sleeved shirt, a tie, and a brimmed hat. The truck plays a part too, “as the symbolic vehicle of social and cultural change,” giving viewers a sense of the era in which the photo graph was taken.3 Though we cannot see them, spectators packed the street, trying to catch sight of the dancers and perhaps even Jasper Saunkeah himself. Far from being just a colorful picture of an equally colorful event, the images cap- ture far deeper ele ments of Kiowa cultural history made by the men and women who ride on the truck and watch from the street. The SceNe DepicTeD in figure 1 alludes to the prominent role that Kiowa people have played in the American Indian Exposition since its founding. We see young war dancers, providing a repre sen ta tion of vibrant young men. Saunkeah emphasizes his leadership in this event by dressing in the war bonnet and inhabiting the role of “Indian chief,” showing how Kiowas played upon popu lar repre sen ta tions of American Indians, which sometimes overlapped with those of the Kiowa themselves. Alongside these men, young women wear their finely beaded buckskins, reminding us all that the 1 figure 1 Photo graph of Jasper Saunkeah, president of the American Indian Exposition, 1937. Armantrout Studio Collection, #1, Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma. fair was not just about fancy dancers but also encompassed a number of ways that Kiowa people portrayed themselves. Representing the best of its kind during its day, the American Indian Exposition boasted the finest war dancing, cash prizes for agricultural products, arts and crafts, and displays of all kinds. Kiowa men and women played impor tant roles in each of these domains, whether in the dancing or by displaying their beadwork or paintings, the crops they grew, or the animals they raised. As the flatbed truck crawled down the street, it would have passed Indi- ans and non- Indians standing and sitting two and three deep along the parade route. The American Indian Exposition was a major event not just for Kiowas but for the entire town and the whole region. The number of folks in the audience reflected that fact.There was a great mix of people. Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches (KCAs) attended. Cheyenne and Arapaho folks from just north of town, along with the Caddo, Wichita, Delaware, and vis- iting Indians from tribes in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and elsewhere made their way to Anadarko. Local non- Indians and others from places beyond the 2 Introduction borders of Caddo County visited the fairgrounds and supported the event. Some fairgoers knew and understood every thing about the regalia, dance, beadwork, and arts. They stood alongside individuals who no doubt simply regarded this as an opportunity to see American Indians in what would come to be known as “the Indian Capital of the World.” It was no accident that the exposition started here. Anadarko, located in what is now southwestern Oklahoma, had a long history as a social and administrative hub for a diverse Native population. Some Indians made their homes in this town. By the 1930s, a non- Indian population unassociated with the Anadarko Agency had lived in the area for about thirty years. The town was initially the site of the Wichita Agency. In 1878 the Office of Indian Afairs (OIA) relocated the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Agency north from Fort Sill to Anadarko.4 By 1890 it served as the administrative center not just for the Wichitas and the KCA nations but also for numerous other nations, such as the “Caddos, Delawares, Towaconies, Keechis, and Wacos,” whose lands surrounded the town.5 For years, it was the place where Kiowas and others came for “rations and annuities from the government,” meager though they were in the 1870s and 1880s. Later, they went to the agency for “grass money,” payments “collected from cattlemen who grazed their herds on reservation lands from 1885– 1906.”6 It remained an agency and officially became a town when the KCA reservation opened for settlement by non- Indians in 1901, foreshadowing statehood, which would follow six years later. 7 In the 1930s Anadarko was a small town. Like other places in rural Oklahoma, it sufered from the Great Depression, making the fair a bright spot in the other wise struggling region. As figure 1 suggests, this book is an interdisciplinary study of how Kiowa men and women made, wore, displayed, and discussed expressive culture. Kiowa men and women used the arts to represent new ways of understanding and representing Kiowa identity that resonated with their changed cir- cumstances during the Progressive Era and the twentieth century. Kiowas represented themselves individually and collectively through cultural pro- duction that emphasized the significance of change and cultural negotiation, gender, and the ties and tensions over tribally specific and intertribal iden- tities. This book provides one answer to the larger question of how Kiowa people survived and navigated the “assimilation era” and the early twentieth century. Dealing with this question necessitated developing an understanding of American Indian and U.S. history, visual culture and art, and expressive culture, a category that incorporates art, per for mance, music, and dance. These are all relevant sites of inquiry to begin answering this question. Indeed, Introduction 3 the setting itself, Kiowa country, in southwestern Oklahoma, led me to draw on works of anthropology because anthropologists have played a major role in forming the scholarship about Kiowa people and their past since 1891, when James Mooney, an anthropologist working for the Bureau of American Ethnology, arrived in Oklahoma Territory.8 Discussions of gender form another thread that pulls the narrative to- gether. Older repre sen ta tions of men remained critical to images of nation, but during this time Kiowas altered and updated these images to reflect their own popu lar culture of powwows and war dancing. Generating images of war dancers is one example of a larger project in which men presented themselves in conversation with the enduring images of Kiowas as warriors.9 Just as the historian Joan Scott noted, gender is a useful category of analy sis, and she explained it simply and best by stating that gender “is the entirely social cre- ation of ideas about appropriate roles for women and men.”10 Gender or ga- nized nearly every aspect of Kiowa society before the reservation era. These expectations at times collided and overlapped with new ones that arrived with the OIA, the missionaries, the boarding schools, settlers, and others who brought American cultural mores with them for the purpose of instructing Kiowa men and women in their own value systems, including appropriate gender roles. These intersections and collisions over gender, the arts, and repre sen ta- tion led to new repre sen ta tions of Kiowa people associated with powwows. Women continued to play critical roles as beadwork artists, creating patterns characterized by leaf motifs that became hallmarks of women’s regalia and clothing ofering tribally specific designs that we now associate with Kiowa beadwork. Young women also came to occupy a new role as princesses in fairs and powwows. Young men who fancy danced or war danced in the emerging powwow cir cuit represented the intertribal elements of dance. Both these new repre sen ta tions spoke to pre- reservation gender roles as well as the emerging powwow cir cuit. Families became the site of re sis tance to what the historian Margaret Jacobs and others have called “intimate colonialism,” which sought to alter and regulate how men and women, families, and children related to one another and the public repre sen ta tion of self. For nineteenth- century Americans it was these bonds that she noted were “an impediment to complete coloniza- tion.”11 Altering these relationships, or what the historian Cathleen Cahill has called the “afective bonds between Native children and families,” formed the cornerstone of assimilation policy.12 This power ful, single idea informed the field matron program (which sought to teach Anglo middle- class domes- 4 Introduction ticity), the whole of- reservation boarding school system, and the unequal division of land among family members.

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