Chronology of American Indian History

P

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 pre-
serve Lakota religious traditions in the face of laws
prohibiting Indian religious ceremonies, and of
the U.S. policy of assimilating Indians into non-
Indian society. Afraid that traditional religious
knowledge would be lost to future generations of
Lakota, Black Elk agreed to discuss Lakota reli-
gion, 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 every-

thing an Indian does is in a circle,

and that is because the Power of

the World always works in cir-

cles, 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 liv-

ing center of the hoop, and the

circle or the four quarters nour-

ished 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 sympa-

thetic 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 com-

pilation of Dakota legends and stories she collected

during interviews with elders and translated into

English. The collection will become a classic of an-

thropological 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.)

April to July

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 In-

dian Wars. Interested in the old warrior’s own story,

Vestal offers White Bull $70 to create a series of draw-

ings 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 exhib-

ited in 1994 with other drawings commissioned by

Vestal from Sitting Bull’s nephew Moses Old Bull.

September

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