COYOTE THE TRICKSTER
COYOTE IS A PROFOUNDLY RICH MYTHIC FIGURE
WHOSE POETIC ATTRACTIVENESS IS NOT CONTAINED BY
CULTURAL BOUNDARIES
(Whitson, Kathy J 1994: 270)

The Death of Crazy Horse-Can you find Me?

We were going to Spotted Tail's camp, but he did not tell me why until later. We traveled most of the night and then we camped. But when we were moving again next day, a band of Red Cloud's people overtook us and said there would be bad trouble if we did not come back right away. Some of us turned around then and went back, and soldiers sent the others back a little later; but Crazy Horse went on to his uncle's camp. After what happened my father told me why Crazy Horse had done this. He was afraid somebody might start trouble down there where all the soldiers were, and the Wasichus had taken our guns away from us, so that we could do nothing if there was bad trouble. The Wasichus (Whites) had made Spotted Tail head chief of all the Lakotas because he would do what they wanted, and Crazy Horse thought we might be safer there with his uncle. Afterwards, the Hang-Around-the-Fort people said that he was getting ready to tie up his horse's tail again and make war on the Wasichus. How could he do that when we had no guns and could not get any? It was a story the Wasichus told, and their tongues were forked when they told it. Our people believe they did what they did because he was a great man and they could not kill him in battle and he would not make himself over into a Wasichu, as Spotted Tail and the others did. That summer, my father told me, the Wasichus wanted him to go to Washington with Red Cloud and Spotted Tail and others to see the Great Father there; but he would not go. He told them that he did not need to go looking for his Great Father. He said: "My Father is with me, and there is no Great Father between me and the Great Spirit." In the evening of the next day after we got back to Red Cloud's Agency, some soldiers came there bringing Crazy Horse with them. He was riding his horse alone a little way ahead. They did not stay there long, but rode on over to the Soldiers' Town, and my father and I went along with many others to see what they were going to do. When we got over there we could not see Crazy Horse, because there were soldiers and Lakota policemen all around where he was and people crowding outside. In just a little while I could feel that something very bad was happening in there, and everybody was excited all at once, and you could hear voices buzzing all around. Then I heard a loud cry in our own language, and it said: "Don't touch me! I am Crazy Horse!" And suddenly something went through all the people there like a big wind that strikes many trees all at once. Somebody in there yelled something else, but everybody around me was asking or telling everybody what had happened, and I heard that Crazy Horse was killed, that he was sick, that he was hurt; and I was frightened, because everything felt the way it did that day when we were going up to kill on the Greasy Grass, and it seemed we might all begin fighting right away. Then everything got quiet, and everybody seemed to be waiting for something. Then the people began to break up and move around, and I heard that Crazy Horse had just taken sick and maybe he would be all right soon. But it was not long until we all knew what had happened in there, because some of the people saw it happen, and I will tell you how it was. They told Crazy Horse they would not harm him if he would go to the Soldiers' Town and have a talk with the Wasichu chief there. But they lied. They did not take him to the chief for a talk. They took him to the little prison with iron bars on the windows, for they had planned to get rid of him. And when he saw what they were doing, he turned around and took a knife out of his robe and started out against all those soldiers. Then Little Big Man, who had been his friend and was the one who told us boys that we were brave before my first fight when we attacked the wagons on War Bonnet Creek, took hold of Crazy Horse from behind and tried to get the knife away. And while they were struggling, a soldier ran a bayonet into Crazy Horse from one side at the back and he fell down and began to die. Then they picked him up and carried him into the soldier chief's office. The soldiers stood all around there and would not let anybody in and made the people go away. My father and I went back to our camp at Red Cloud Agency. That night I heard mourning somewhere, and then there was more and more mourning, until it was all over the camp. Crazy Horse was dead. He was brave and good and wise. He never wanted anything but to save his people, and he fought the Wasichus only when they came to kill us in our own country. He was only thirty years old. They could not kill him in battle. They had to lie to him and kill him that way. I cried all night, and so did my father. When it was day, Crazy Horse's father and mother brought him over to our camp in a wagon. Then they put him in a box, and I heard that they had to cut him in two because the box was not long enough. They fastened the box on a pony drag and went away alone toward the east and north. I saw the two old people going away alone with their son's body. Nobody followed them. They went all alone, and I can see them going yet. The horse that pulled the pony drag was a buckskin. Crazy Horse's father had a white-faced bay with white hind legs. His mother had a brown mare with a bay colt. The old people never would tell where they took the body of their son. Nobody knows to-day where he lies, for the old people are dead too. Many have talked about the place, and some have said they knew where it was and would not tell, and many think it is somewhere on Bear Creek in the Badlands. I know one thing, and this is it. The old people came with the body right down Pepper Creek which is just a little way south across the hill from where we are. There were two hunters who were hunting along the creek there and they saw two old people coming with a pony drag, and when they told my father about this, they said a buckskin was pulling the drag that had a box on it; that the old man rode a white-faced bay with white hind legs and the old woman rode a brown mare with a bay colt. These hunters saw the old people coming down Pepper Creek, and later on they saw the old people again on White Horse Creek which is just a little way down Pepper Creek from where they were before. And the hunters said the box was not on the drag any more. So I think that maybe they hid the body somewhere on Pepper Creek over there because the hunters had seen them, and maybe they went back again at night and took the box away into the Badlands. But Crazy Horse might be lying over there just a little way from us right now on Pepper Creek across that hill yonder. I do not know. It does not matter where his body lies, for it is grass; but where his spirit is, it will be good to be. (Black Elk)

He Dog took part in the Great Sioux War of 1876. When the United States was unable to get control of the Black Hills, the President had a message sent to the northern bands to come in or be forcibly taken in by the U.S. army. He Dog was encamped with the Soreback Band at the time the ultimatum was delivered. He Dog's brother, Short Bull, said that most of the northern Oglala resolved to comply and head in to the Red Cloud Agency in the spring of 1877.

In 1876, He Dog married a woman named Rock and with the Soreback Band, stopped briefly in Wyoming Territory. That spring, a group of troops under Colonel Joseph Reynolds attacked the band, essentially starting the Great Sioux War.

During the summer of 1876, He Dog took part in the Battle of Little Bighorn. He eventually surrendered to American troops at the Red Cloud Agency with Crazy Horse in the spring of 1877. After Crazy Horse was killed, He Dog accompanied the Oglala to Washington, D.C. as a delegate to meet the President.

He Dog left the Red Cloud Agency after its relocation to the Missouri River during the winter of 1877. He joined Sitting Bull in Canadaian exile over the next two years. He Dog and the northern Oglala were ultimately transferred to the Pine Ridge Reservation in the spring of 1882, where he lived the rest of his life. He Dog died in 1936.

The Coffin

The archive box is broad, deep and flat

it vibrates with something terrible

A secret, a horror we are trying to forget

We cannot look with both eyes

What does it hold . . . . .

The conflict with indigenous people in North America produced an imperial ideology that required a significant degree of abstraction because of the nature of those relations.

In North America Europeans set out to claim land they didn’t know that was occupied by people they couldn’t control. To make alliances, establish boundaries, and acquire land they made legal agreements, including treaties that recognized indigenous ownership of land and therefore of political autonomy. After the formation of the United States that recognition, well established in North American legal and political practice, became a signifier of U.S. moral and political superiority. (Konkle, M. Indigenous Ownership and the Emergence of U.S. Liberal Imperialism, American Indian Quarterly page 297)

Much of what they want to commercialise is sacred to us. We see intellectual property as part of our culture. It cannot be separated into categories as Western Lawyers would want.

North American Indian Congress, Ray Appoaka quoted at a seminar on intellectual property rights at the U. N Human Rights Convention in Vienna June 1993. Extract from Posey & Dutfield 1996.

These statements serve to illustrate the difficulty in placing a western definition of ownership upon ethnic artefacts. The western notion of individual rights to ownership is in contradiction to the communal view of property held by indigenous peoples.

The Eagle feather war-bonnet has been perhaps one of the most powerful and evanescent symbols of the North American Indian since as early as 1505. While multiple feather headdresses were worn in many geographic areas, the fullest development was on the plains during the 19th Century. (First Peoples, First Contacts J.C.H King, 1999 British Museums Press, page 30)

The U.S Department of the Interior passed a law in 1990 referred to here and in federal documentation as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

(Appendix 1)

Although the artefact in question is not covered by all elements or sub-clauses of the statute it is covered under section 2: Definitions: as holding a" cultural affiliation" which means that there is a relationship of shared group identity which can be reasonably traced historically or prehistorically between a present day Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization and an identifiable earlier group. (Public Law 101-601 101st Congress)

The validity of this artefacts cultural affiliation is necessarily crucial in any discussion that seeks to explore more than one cultural position and in this case it is of particular importance given the discovery of the artefact in a theatre collection that is removed both culturally and geographically from the artefacts presumed origins.

Reference to ceremonial and/or ancestral artefacts not necessarily connected with human remains is made later in the same document and these references seem entirely pertinent in the case of the headdress.

(C) "sacred objects" which shall mean specific ceremonial objects which are needed by traditional Native American religious leaders for the practice of traditional Native American religions by their present day adherents, and
(D) "cultural patrimony" which shall mean an object having ongoing historical, traditional, or cultural importance central to the Native American group or culture itself, rather than property owned by an individual Native (Ibid)

The headdress contains eagle feathers which are protected items in the US and in the United Kingdom. In the United States as a result of years of habitat loss from urbanization, exposure to chemicals used in agriculture and animal husbandry, and poaching, populations of bald eagles, the national symbol, and golden eagles have been reduced in numbers. In an effort to protect these birds, the United States Congress passed the Bald Eagle Protection Act in 1940, and later amended the Act in 1962 to include protection for golden eagles. This Act prohibits take, transport, sale, barter, trade, import and export, and possession of eagles, making it illegal for anyone to collect eagles and eagle parts without a permit. Native American tribal elders may apply for permission to obtain eagle feathers and the code of Federal Regulations, part 22, has been amended to provide for the issuance of a permit to import/export eagle feathers for religious and cultural purposes only. (US Fish & Wildlife Service, Office of Law enforcement, federal regulations) Native American people cannot collect their own feathers and in fact in an ironic twist the enforcement of the act (s) has disadvantaged native people who honour and seek to celebrate the birds and their feathers. Even the possessors of eagle feathers that have been in families for generations have been subject to prosecution and / or censure. however because of the significance of eagles to Native Americans who for hundreds of years have used eagle feathers for religious and cultural purposes, including healing, marriage, and naming ceremonies the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service established the National Eagle Repository in the early 1970's to provide Native Americans with the feathers of golden and bald eagles needed for religious purposes. (Denver Museum of Natural History Archives: Shannon Garcia)

In the United Kingdom it is illegal to buy or sell body parts and feathers of birds of prey. Although it is less likely that an individual in possession of feathers would be prosecuted, the law changed in 2001 to allow those found guilty of stealing the birds themselves to be prosecuted. (Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) Although some of the laws under discussion do not have a legal bearing in the United Kingdom, their inclusion here serves to illuminate the debate that such an artefact would evoke in its nation of origin. An understanding of the historical and contemporary context is important in creating a picture of the significance attached to the artefact by its maker(s) and owners.

In the first instance it is necessary to establish origin as far as is possible and to this end images of the artefact were sent to a Cherokee tribal elder in the United States and his assessment was that the headdress was a genuine and was similar to other headdress made by the Lakota (Sioux) and related tribes. The full transcript of his assessment, together with an introduction appears here. (Appendix 2 & 3) The construction of the headdress is in the style of the plains tribes and specifically in old Lakota (Sioux) style. The beadwork uses patterning very similar if not identical to Lakota style. Similar beadwork is found on Chief Yellow Calf's bonnet, a well documented artefact. Yellow Calf was a Chief of the Arapaho, a plains tribe with direct affiliation to the Lakota. An image of the bonnet image appears here. (Appendix 4) Anthropological research undertaken by John J Honigmann in 1956 concerning the Sarcee tribe in Alberta, Canada drew comparisons between the northern plains tribes of Lakota root origin and the Sarcee and this information becomes crucial as the study of this headdress continues. Honigmann's work suggests that the Sarcee (Sarci) illustrate a rather thorough assimilation of plains culture that occurred over about one hundred and fifty

years. (Honigmann, John J. Notes on Sarsi kin behaviour, Anthropologica, 2 (1956) p.17)

Headdress with such a large number of eagle feathers have a specific wearer in mind when they are created and this is perhaps another indication of its origins. Only two types of people wore this style of headdress; they either were leaders (Chiefs) or tribal elders.

Each feather in a bonnet represents a specific war honour, or "coup." Before a bonnet was constructed, there was a ceremony in which each feather was held, while the deed it stood for was recited. The feather was then handed to the bonnet-maker to be sewn into place.

(King, 268)

Based upon current research the assumption is made here that the artefact is genuine and is made in the Plains/Lakota style. It is a headdress usually worn by a Chief or tribal elder.

The headdress came to be in the theatre collection by its inclusion in the effects of John Martin Harvey whose widow passed the headdress along with other memorabilia to Eric Jones Evans. (EJE/001481 Correspondence - from Lady Nina Martin Harvey to Eric Jones Evans, being a true account of the events surrounding the sale of Sir John's props and wardrobe after his death) (Appendix 5). (EJE/001592 Correspondence - from Lady Nina Martin Harvey to Eric Jones Evans, concerning several of Sir John Martin Harvey's props and promptbooks, and the giving of them to Eric Jones Evans, EJE/001601 Correspondence - from Lady Nina Martin Harvey to Eric Jones Evans, concerning the Sarcee Indian Chief's headress given to Sir John Martin Harvey, which she sent to Eric)

Sir John and Lady Martin Harvey first visited Canada in 1914 and by their last trip in 1929 had visited six times in all. Each trip had formed part of a theatrical tour usually of the production of The Only Way, an adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities in which the pair achieved their greatest success; Sir John playing the part of Sidney Carton some 4000 times.

(Times 1929 Appendix 6)

During a tour of Canada in 1924John Martin Harvey was presented with the headdress making him an honorary Chief of the Sarcee tribe. (EJE/000027 Press Cutting 1924 - Calgary Herald account of John Martin Harvey, known as Ta-Decasze (Red Feather) being made a chieftan of the Sarcee Indians. Also included is text of presentation address as read by Chief Joe Big Plume)

An even more complex strand to the framework inside which the performativity of such an artefact has to be considered is that the image or "utterance" made by such an artefact serves to mark the absence of a basic reality of post-modern native life. A circumstance that has arguably been a factor in poor educational and social progression and opportunity offered to the native people of North America and Canada. The headdress then is a powerful object/artefact but it could be argued an agent of misinformation that prevents non-native people from engaging with natives of North America and Canada with the necessary mutual understanding of the current political climate faced by Native American peoples.

Perhaps the words of Sirkku Aaltonen in Time – Sharing on Stage: "Often when we believe we have caught a glimpse of the Other, we have only seen our reflection in the mirror"(2000:112) were never more pertinent than when considering a European understanding or "glimpse" of the native American. The headdress and perhaps other artefacts cannot fail to reflect back our own, European view based as it may be on a popular culture of the 20^th century that is rife with images of be-feathered savages astride painted ponies. Not only was there a basic cultural misrepresentation behind the use and acceptance of such images but more problematic for the researcher/translator was the/is the political imperative that shaped the construct of “savagism and civilization” in U.S and I would argue, European culture. This is because the political context was the necessity of denying the principle of indigenous ownership. Maureen Konkle goes further, suggesting a political effect: the positing of an imperial ideology, the primary claim of which was that imperialism didn’t exist as a historical process but was rather the unfolding of God’s will. (Konkle, 297:2005) sometimes referred to as Manifest Destiny. Current populist thinking regarding Native American peoples has folded that ideology back in on itself. Although the headdress represents or simulates an absence, certainly in the contemporary experience of native people, it is persistent in its power to engage the imagination and sentiments. Images of native people, Indians, wearing eagle feather headdress from the 19^th Century are commonly used by white Americans and Native Americans themselves as a currency of shared experience and cultural recognition. The difficulty in using this kind of artefact in contemporary performance are many and complex and even the best intentioned work is likely to be problematic. The location and management of a third space in which a shared cultural dialogue can develop is still no guarantee that an artefact like the headdress could be stripped of its power and consequently the message that is decoded from its presence even if that were the intention.

Bibliography

Konkle, M. Indigenous Ownership and the Emergence of U.S. Liberal Imperialism, American Indian quarterly/summer 2008/vol. 32, no. 3

Transcript of U. N Human Rights Convention in Vienna June 1993. Extract from Posey & Dutfield 1996.

J.C.H King, First Peoples, First Contacts, 1999 British Museums Press

Sirkku Aaltonen Time – Sharing on Stage, Multilingual Matters Ltd, 2000

Honigmann, John J., Notes on Sarsi kin behaviour, Anthropologica 2, Wilfred Laurier University Press 1956

(1956)http://www.nps.gov/history/nagpra/MANDATES/25USC3001etseq.htm

I AM NATIVE not American.
My ancestors have always been here. Hundreds of centuries before immigrants ever arrived
although countless many have disappeared as a result of MASS GENOCIDE conducted by the United Snakes.
Those who survived preserved our roots, our clan, our people, our ways. It's only in the "BLOOD" that you are Indian, native to this north continent.
I respect all things the Creator has put on this earth. But I have no respect for those who have furthered the so called "enlightened" shift from physical to cultural Genocide. The conspicuously oblique, Indian hobbyists, curators and new age shamen who follow and pretend along with the Americans & their relative Europeans. Yuppies, sell outs, cultists, hucksters and the pseudo-religious who imitate native culture, imitate native songs, imitate native ceremonies. My pity goes to those who try to minimize and be-little being Native by blood so they can treat it like some country club and join so they can pretend to belong to a culture they so dearly crave.

Performing Memory

We learn to perform our memory
We learn to perform our forgetting

If we think about how history becomes important to us
personally, how an event from the past becomes embodied,
we venture into the domain of memory. For memory
surely is our personal echo chamber to the past. There
are the obvious remains of the past, the archives of
important objects and the historical records, but even
when we think about our knowledge of these, how we
approach and understand them, we must also think about
how we perform the equation between past and present,
between materials and events that shape them and how
our performative relationship to history is often based on
what remains, but also on what remains differently as it is
embodied through the act of remembering.(GOULISH M:2001)

Who are Indigenous Peoples?

As defined by the United Nations Special Rapporteur, that is a person responsible for compiling reports and presenting them to a governing body, in this instance to the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are:
…those which having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop, and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems.

(Martinez-Cobo, 1984)

Coyote

Coyote




I see him through the grainy
dusk, ahead and to the left
of the trail, gray form still,
listening for something
beyond this world, light
rushing from yellow eyes
that roam the darkening,
the feral grace of his hunger
brushing against my life
before he turns away. If
I follow his tracks, it could
take me years to cross
that narrow clearing where
he paused; years to find
the entrance to the woods
where he vanishes now.

Hauntology

Hauntology

We dance to remember all our beloved ones,
To remember how each passed to the spirit world
We dance because the dead love us
The dead are more powerful than memory

Jacques Derrida, in spectres of marx explores the notion of ghosts and the disruption of history and comes to a theory of 'hauntology', a way of representing the unrepresentable in history. There can be no justice, no simile of truth or good faith without seeking a voice or space for the absent. And because the absent, by their very nature, are not present, they are denied hegemonic representation.

The result is that history is haunted: the ineffable, the unrepresentable, and the unknowable howl at the borders of consciousness and undermine narratives of the dominant ideology.

What then does it mean to write a play about the history of the west? How do we arrange the images of the dead to allow a voice for the absent?

A true history of the American Indian must prove a 'haunting' in Derrida's sense of the word providing us with an alternative story of tribal memory and survival that invokes ghost dancing, Indian bodies, communion with the dead, violent confrontation with the 'other'.

A famous photograph indelibly marks the violent collision between the u.s military and the Lakota at wounded knee. Black and white, hauntingly violent, silent. The terrifying photograph represents the vanquished ghost dancers of wounded knee killed on December 17^th, 1890 by the triumphant 7^th cavalry.

In scholarly accounts of the time the 'origins' of the ghost dance are traced to its first enactment by the Nevada Paiute, Wovoka in the 1870's to its adoption by the embattled Lakota. In describing the dance an objective distance is attempted in accounts of the colourful clothing, the position of the sun and the frenzy of the dancers inside the sacred circle but crucially, the meaning of the ghost dance and its attendant prophecy is couched only in Christian and colonial perspectives. The horrible picture of wounded knee asserts the right of the repressed who must always return and haunt homogenous discourse. Scholars are trained in empirical evidence, finite, disciplined vocabulary. Scholars do not converse with spectres or see ghosts. Empirical tools cannot embrace either spiritual actuality or the spiritual historicism of Native Americans.