Common artifacts, uncommon impact

There’s power in Lakota images depicting conflict

January 14, 2011|Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

CAMBRIDGE — About five years ago, the librarians at Harvard University’s Houghton Library realized they had something special on their hands: a Plains Indian ledger book, filled with drawings made by Lakota Sioux of their battle exploits. Ledger drawings — pictographic art made by Plains Indians in the 19th century, often in accounting books acquired from Euro-Americans — are not uncommon artifacts, but it is unusual to find them bound in their original context.

The book, a goldmine of a historic document, launched research resulting in “Wiyohpiyata: Lakota Images of the Contested West,’’ an exhibit at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology co-curated by the museum’s Castle McLaughlin and Butch Thunder Hawk, a Lakota artist who teaches at the United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, N.D. It’s a riveting dip into Lakota warrior culture, which imbued warfare with spirituality, illustrating how one particular band of Lakota weathered the history of westward expansion sweeping across the Plains, pitting native warriors against US forces.

The book was reportedly discovered as soldiers cleaned up after the Battle of Little Bighorn in June 1876. An army private found it in a funerary lodge still standing in a deserted Lakota village. One of the dead there had a sack of mail in a canvas bag beside him, and on top of that lay the ledger book. The book’s discovery at a gravesite may make it subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, McLaughlin said in an interview. If Harvard and Lakota researchers determine that it is, the book will go back to the Lakota, she said.

The private snatched the book and later passed it on to a Chicago Tribune reporter, James “Phocion’’ Howard, who titled it “The Pictorial Autobiography of Half Moon, an Unkpapa Sioux Chief.’’ He bound the book in leather, penned an introduction, and inserted prints, including a ghastly image of Half Moon, with high cheekbones and fury in his eyes. In time, it landed in the hands of a book dealer, and then a Harvard alum, whose sister left it to the university in 1930.

Half Moon, it appears, was pure fiction, devised to appeal to a public fascinated with Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota who helped defeat Custer at Little Bighorn. When McLaughlin and Thunder Hawk examined the book, they determined that at least five artist-warriors contributed drawings during the 1860s and 1870s, perhaps all members of the same fraternity of warriors. Howard had made a Western assumption that the book was the product of a single artist.