After spending many years studying and touring in Europe and Africa, Osage scholar John Joseph Mathews returns to his tribe’s Oklahoma reservation to write Wah’Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road. This tribal history is based on the journals of Major Laban J. Miles, who served as the Osage’s agent for more than 30 years. With Wah’Kon-Tah’s publication, Mathews begins a long literary career, during which he will document Osage history and culture in both fiction and nonfiction.
Fred Kabotie paints the Watchtower murals.
Hired by architect Mary Colter, Hopi painter Fred Kabotie begins work on a series of frescos on the walls of the Watchtower, a reconstruction of an Anasazi tower at the east entrance of the Grand Canyon. Kabotie’s paintings, which depict Hopi legends, are based on murals found in kivas, the tribe’s religious structures. The job is the first of several important commissions Kabotie will receive in the 1930s, including a mural series for
Harvard’s Peabody Museum and a collection of paintings recording Hopi life for the Museum of the American Indian (see entry for 1916) in New York City.
Black Elk’s Black Elk Speaks is published.
A Lakota Sioux medicine man, Black Elk witnessed in his youth the destruction of Indian cultures by the Plains Wars and their aftermath. Although he was baptized as a Catholic, as an adult he was also involved in an underground movement to preserve Lakota religious traditions in the face of laws prohibiting Indian religious ceremonies, and of the U. S. policy of assimilating Indians into nonIndian society. Afraid that traditional religious knowledge would be lost to future generations of Lakota, Black Elk agreed to discuss Lakota religion, culture, and history with white poet John C. Neihardt, who began transcribing and reshaping Black Elk’s story into a manuscript in the summer of 1930.
“You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle or the four quarters nourished it.”
—Lakota medicine man Black Elk in his autobiography Black Elk Speaks
The most literary of the 20th-century “as-told-to” autobiographies of Indians transcribed by non-Indian authors, Black Elk Speaks immediately finds a substantial readership among whites sympathetic to Indian issues. An underground classic for decades, the book will achieve renewed popularity during the years of the Red Power Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Ella Deloria’s Dakota Texts is published.
Working with anthropologists Franz Boas (see entry for 1887) and Ruth Benedict, Dakota Sioux researcher Ella Deloria writes Dakota Texts, a compilation of Dakota legends and stories she collected during interviews with elders and translated into English. The collection will become a classic of anthropological literature. Deloria will also collaborate with Boas on Dakota Grammar (1941), an analysis of the structure of the Dakota Sioux language. (See also entry for 1887.)
Joseph White Bull makes a pictographic record of Lakota Sioux warfare.
While working on a biography of the great Oglala Lakota leader Sitting Bull, non-Indian author Stanley Vestal interviews Joseph White Bull, a Lakota Sioux who fought in many of the major battles of the Indian Wars. Interested in the old warrior’s own story, Vestal offers White Bull $70 to create a series of drawings depicting his experiences in battle. Eight of the 40 drawings produced by White Bull will appear in Vestal’s book Warpath: The True Story of the Fighting Sioux Told in a Biography of Chief White Bull (1934). Discovered in the University of Oklahoma Library archives in the 1990s, the entire series will be exhibited in 1994 with other drawings commissioned by Vestal from Sitting Bull’s nephew Moses Old Bull.
The Studio is founded at the Santa Fe Indian School.
Conceived by non-Indian art teacher Dorothy Dunn, the Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School is established to “recover, maintain, and develop” Indian art. Under Dunn’s tutelage, Santa Fe students, many in grade school, are taught to paint scenes of Indian life.
Students are encouraged to produce work in the “Studio style,” in which flat, colorful figures are set against an empty or nearly empty background. This mode of representation will become known as “Traditional Indian Style,” although it draws little from actual traditional Indian art. Studio-style paintings will become enormously popular with non-Indian collectors. The Studio will also become well known for instructing many of the most prominent Native American artists of the late 20th century, including Allen Houser, Oscar Howe, and Pablita Velarde. (See also entry for 1903.) 1923), John C. Collier is chosen by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The appointment signals a new era for the BIA. A political progressive, Collier opposes the Assimilationist policies of the past, particularly the policy of Allotment. He instead supports government efforts to revitalize Indian cultures, settle Indian land claims, help revive tribal governments, protect religious freedom for Native Americans, and fund economic development in Indian communities. Collier’s vision of federal Indian policy will be set into law with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (see entry for JUNE 18, 1934).
The first Southwest Indian Fair is held.
In conjunction with the Caddo County Fair, members of the Comanche, Kiowa-Apache, Caddo, Wichita, and Lenni Lenape (Delaware) tribes organize the Southwest Indian Fair in Anadarko, Oklahoma. Like most county fairs of the time, the event is a showcase for the participants’ talents in domestic arts (such as canning and cooking), farming, and raising livestock. The fair, however, also features extensive displays of traditional Indian arts and crafts.
Renamed the American Indian Exposition in 1935, the fair will become an annual event attracting thousands of Indians and non-Indians each year. By the late 20th century, it will be owned and operated by 15 Plains tribes and will focus on exhibitions of Indian art, song, and dance.
World History
