Crafting an Indigenous Nation: Kiowa Expressive Culture in the Progressive Era

By Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote

In this in-depth interdisciplinary study, Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote reveals how Kiowa people drew on the tribe's rich history of expressive culture to assert its identity at a time of profound challenge. Examining traditional forms such as beadwork, metalwork, painting, and dance, Tone-Pah-Hote argues that their creation and exchange were as significant to the expression of Indigenous identity and sovereignty as formal political engagement and policymaking. These cultural forms, she argues, were sites of contestation as well as affirmation, as Kiowa people used them to confront external pressures, express national identity, and wrestle with changing gender roles and representations.

Combatting a tendency to view Indigenous cultural production primarily in terms of resistance to settler-colonialism, Tone-Pah-Hote expands existing work on Kiowa culture by focusing on acts of creation and material objects that mattered as much for the nation's internal and familial relationships as for relations with those outside the tribe. In the end, she finds that during a time of political struggle and cultural dislocation at the turn of the twentieth century, the community's performative and expressive acts had much to do with the persistence, survival, and adaptation of the Kiowa nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781469643670

Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote

Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote (Kiowa) is assistant professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Book preview

Crafting an Indigenous Nation

Crafting an Indigenous Nation

Kiowa Expressive Culture in the Progressive Era

Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote

The University of North Carolina Press  CHAPEL HILL

© 2019 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tone-Pah-Hote, Jenny, author.

Title: Crafting an indigenous nation : Kiowa expressive culture in the progressive era / Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2019]

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018026819 | ISBN 9781469643656 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469643663 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469643670 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Kiowa Indians—Ethnic identity. | Kiowa Indians—Social life and customs—19th century. | Kiowa Indians—Social life and customs—20th century. | Indian arts—Social aspects. | Indian arts—Political aspects.

Classification: LCC E99.K5 T66 2019 | DDC 978.004/97492—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018026819

Cover illustration: Photograph of Massalena Ahtone, Kiowa, at the Anadarko Exposition of 1940. Courtesy of the Tartoue Negative Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society (negative 20912.14.95).

A portion of chapter 4 was previously published in a different form as We Worked and Made Beautiful Things: Kiowa Women, Material Culture, and Peoplehood, 1900–1939, in Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building, eds. Brian Hosmer and Larry Nesper (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 253–274. Used with permission.

To my family

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Beyond Feathered War Bonnets

Kiowa Labor, Performance, and the Public Imaginary, 1870–1934

CHAPTER TWO

Circulating Silver

Peyote Jewelry and the Making of Region

CHAPTER THREE

We’ll Show You Boys How to Dance

Intertribal Space, Dance, and Kiowa Art, 1920–1940

CHAPTER FOUR

We Worked and Made Beautiful Things

Peoplehood, Kiowa Women, and Material Culture

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1. Jasper Saunkeah, president of the American Indian Exposition, 1937  2

2. Anonymous Kiowa drawing of man and woman riding horses and leading a pack animal carrying a parfleche, ca. 1875–1877  16

3. Murray Tone-Pah-Hote, Tie Clasp  33

4. Frank and Ed Two-Hatchet  45

5. Indian father (Takone) and child  47

6. James Takone, Earrings  49

7. Mr. and Mrs. Conklin Hummingbird  50

8. Stephen Mopope, Indian Beating Drum; Bird Flying Overhead  53

9. Spencer Asah and Charlie Tsoodle  59

10. Jack Hokeah, Hummingbird Dance (1929)  75

11. Alice Littleman  81

12. Women’s moccasins  86

13. Women’s moccasins  87

14. Tah-do, Cradle (ca. 1915)  88

15. Laura Pedrick  94

Preface

I am a citizen of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, and I grew up near Orrick, Missouri, a small town near Kansas City. In Kansas City, my family participated in an urban American Indian community. Like many others, it was intertribal, and it included folks from American Indian nations in Oklahoma, individuals who stayed in the area after attending what is now Haskell Indian Nations University, and people from the reservations in the Midwest. My family and I attended American Indian events in Kansas City, danced at powwows in the area, and visited relatives in Oklahoma, often making a summer trip for the American Indian Exposition held in August in Anadarko, Oklahoma.

When I was a child, my father’s stories shaped how I imagined Oklahoma and our nation. My father, Preston Tone-Pah-Hote Sr., grew up in Anadarko and Carnegie, two major hubs of the Kiowa community, during the 1940s and 1950s. The people he told us about—mostly our immediate and extended family—fascinated me. With my grandparents Massalena Ahtone and Murray Tone-Pah-Hote, my father and his siblings lived for a time with my great-grandparents Sam and Tah-do Ahtone in their pink house west of Carnegie near Zóltò (Stinking Creek). Sam Ahtone was born in 1871, several years before the Red River War that closed one chapter of Kiowa history and ended the nomadic lifestyle of our people on the Southern Plains. Tah-do was born about a decade later, and their lives revolved around Rainy Mountain Baptist Church, where Sam Ahtone served as a deacon. He farmed and raised cattle and horses; she was a mother, cared for their home, and made beadwork. She made cradleboards for each of her grandchildren, but stopped due to failing eyesight before my father was born. Some of these cradles reside in museum collections to this day.

Their daughter Massalena Ahtone, born in 1912, married my grandfather, Murray T., born in 1911. His parents, Arts-a-paun (Joseph Tone-Pah-Hote) and Pay-yah-sape (Letty Payasape), both succumbed to tuberculosis, a disease that ripped through our family and left my grandfather, his brothers, and his sisters orphans. In 1949 Sam Ahtone passed away. A few years later the family moved to Anadarko, a larger town with more Indian people, where there was a market for the silverwork that Murray T. made. He became a well-known silversmith. My grandmother made and sold her own beadwork and helped to sell his jewelry, and they raised their children.

The lives of my grandparents and their parents reflected an important fact of Kiowa society during the early twentieth century. Those outside Indigenous communities often think that they are monolithic, with forms of cultural expression that are singularly Indian or not. But in the early twentieth century, barely a generation removed from the wars of the 1870s, Sam and Tah-do Ahtone lived in a world where many forms of cultural expression coexisted. They participated in a Christian church community. At the turn of the century, many churches stigmatized dancing, participating in the emerging Native American Church, and anything else that led away from the Jesus road. My grandmother remained a devout Christian her whole life and went to powwows, which became major community events during her lifetime. Though I knew my grandmother, Murray T. passed away years before I was born. To my knowledge, my grandfather was not a churchgoing man. In fact, my father remembered him coming to church only on Christmas Eve, a stark contrast to his in-laws, who camped at Rainy Mountain the entire week leading up to the holiday and days afterward.

What I knew of our family combined with my curiosity about some of the specific objects that simply were a part of our household. For instance, the only piece of my grandfather’s silverwork I ever saw before embarking on this project sat on a bookshelf along with my parents’ classics—Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians, one or two works by Vine Deloria—and a collection of buttons, including one that said Another Indian for Mondale. The silver piece Murray T. had made was a German silver cup. German silver is a nickel alloy and was his preferred medium. The cup had a handle and featured a warrior on horseback chasing a buffalo around the circumference of the cup. He rendered each figure—the man, the bison, and the horse—in full detail.

It left me with a lot of questions. Where did this come from? Why did he make it, and what did it mean? To what extent was his art-making unusual? Or was this part of how Kiowa people remained, well, Kiowa people?

Other questions swirled around my mind as a child and would do so for decades to come. As I pondered them, I learned that the two generations of my family before my father’s witnessed and participated in major changes in Kiowa cultural life—the coming of Christianity, the rise of the Native American Church, the emergence of powwows, and the reemergence of Kiowa military societies, just to name a few. They also witnessed the dispossession of our land, its settlement by outsiders, and the creation of Oklahoma. Along the way, they participated in a world that was full of material objects and forms of cultural expression that were rich with meaning. Tah-do Ahtone’s cradleboards and Murray T.’s silver cup were just a glimpse into this world.

The stories about my grandparents, the objects they made, and their lives during the early twentieth century eventually generated the questions that led to this book. How did Kiowa people survive the upheavals of the early twentieth century? How did Kiowas change? To what extent did the arts change or symbolize cultural social change? What were the roles of cultural producers in this community? How did people understand the arts and their meanings?

This book resonates with the stories that I heard growing up. They were not the stories of famous battles or great Kiowa leaders of the nineteenth century, but rather about how people lived, died, and carried on about the business of being Kiowa during and after the reservation era. The stories my father told taught me how to understand myself as Kiowa in the intercultural spaces in which I have lived. They showed me the importance of family ties, the arts, and the power of story to connect people across place and time. The men and women of my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations understood the power of the arts to represent themselves and what was and would be important to Kiowa people.

In the pages that follow, readers will find the text influenced by my own experience, family history, and interests. Other Kiowa people would choose different ways of envisioning this time, place, and nation, but this is my attempt at answering two fundamental questions: How did Kiowa people survive during the reservation era and the early twentieth century, and how did they use the arts to facilitate this survival? The men and women of my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations understood the power of the arts to represent themselves and what was and would be important to Kiowa people. Kiowa people did not simply maintain their traditions; they embraced new media, cultural arenas, and artistic practices in service of what was fundamentally significant to them. What follows should matter to those of us interested in the survival and adaptation of Indigenous people because cultural producers played central roles in our survival.

Acknowledgments

So many people contributed to the process of making this book, and I am certain that my acknowledgments will be at best incomplete. My professors and mentors at the University of Missouri–Columbia, where I went to college, nurtured my interests in American Indian history. Thank you, Dr. Jeffrey Pasley, Dr. Maureen Konkle, Dr. Karen Cockrell, and Dr. Pablo Mendoza. I attended graduate school in the History Department at the University of Minnesota, where Jean O’Brien served as my adviser, and I cannot thank her enough for her guidance and support of this project, especially in its initial stages. Along with Brenda Child, David Chang, and Pat Albers, she taught me the fundamental tools of my craft. Thanks go to Chantal Norrgard, Heidi K. Stark, Christina Gish-Hill, Jill Doerfler, Matt Martinez, and the rest of the American Indian Studies Workshop. While in graduate school I also worked as an intern in the Americans, Oceania, and Africa Department at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and many thanks go to Joe Horse Capture, who was then an associate curator, and who introduced me to the field of Native American art studies.

Other colleagues supported this project as well. Brian Hosmer and Larry Nesper provided feedback on a version of chapter 4, We Worked and Made Beautiful Things, that appeared in Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building, a volume they coedited. I appreciate the questions and comments I have received from friends and mentors at the annual American Society for Ethnohistory conferences, the Native American Art Studies Association meetings, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association meetings. Presenting this work at other universities has proved fruitful and important too. Thank you, Dan Usner, for inviting me to present We’ll Show You Boys How to Dance for the Vanderbilt History Seminar and for your suggestions on chapter 2. Colleagues at the University of New Mexico asked insightful questions and offered useful feedback on chapter 2 as well.

My colleagues at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill supported and encouraged my work on this project. Thanks go to Bernie Herman, who mentored me as much as I would allow myself to be mentored. He offered feedback on the manuscript at a couple of important junctures along the way. My current department chair and colleague, Elizabeth Englehardt, has also supported my career and fielded a number of my research- and teaching-related inquiries. I want to acknowledge the participants in the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Colloquium, particularly Kathleen DuVal, Dan Cobb, Theda Perdue, and Valerie Lambert, who have offered feedback on various chapters. And though she is now at the University of Washington, I’d like to thank Jean Dennison for her friendship and encouragement. Similarly, I need to acknowledge my writing partner and, dare I say, friend, Michelle Robinson. Thanks also go to my writing group, which has included a cast of characters including but not limited to Laura Halperin, Angeline Shaka, Ben Frey, and Gabrielle Berlinger.

This book would not have been possible without the support of a number of grants, fellowships, and archives. The Carolina Postdoctoral Fellowship for Faculty Diversity brought me to the University of North Carolina and proved instrumental in providing writing time and professional development. In 2010, a Philips Fund Grant from the American Philosophical Society funded additional research that contributed to the creation of the book. I also held a faculty fellowship through the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies in 2012. At UNC–Chapel Hill, a University Research Council Publication Grant funded image permissions and developmental editing. The archivists and librarians at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and Fort Worth, Texas, were important in helping me to identify resources. Archivists at Oklahoma Historical Society and Western History Collections, as well as the National Anthropological Archives and the National Museum of the American Indian, proved instrumental in the project. Also, thanks go to Vanessa Paukeigope Jennings for giving me permission to publish an image of a painting by her grandfather, Stephen Mopope.

Mark Simpson-Vos deserves a gold medal and a million dollars. He saw the book long before I did. The University of North Carolina Press supported this project in various ways, especially through a manuscript workshop with Cathleen Cahill, who generously shared her time and expertise. I also need to thank the anonymous reviewer of the manuscript as well as Clyde Ellis, who served as a sounding board and offered excellent advice about the manuscript as I revised it. Clyde’s enthusiasm and conversations showed me the contribution this book could make.

My family helped me see this book through to the end. My parents, Preston Tone-Pah-Hote Sr. and Deborah Tone-Pah-Hote, offered unwavering support and read through chapters along the way. My father and my aunt, Teresa Edmonds, helped me understand silverwork by offering their perspectives on the life and times of our family and my grandfather, Murray Tone-Pah-Hote. Thank you, Ah-ho, for your time, openness, and encouragement. Many thanks go to Keith Richotte Jr. for his humor, partnership, and steadfast belief that I could write a book—especially because there were (many) times I was pretty sure I couldn’t. Steven, thank you for just being your joyful self.

Crafting an Indigenous Nation

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 photograph 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 off 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 photograph 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 popular 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