The Kiowas and the Legend of Kicking Bird, with Three Kiowa Tales by Col. W.S. Nye (review)

The Kiowas and the Legend of Kicking Bird, with Three Kiowa Tales by Col. W. S. Nye. By Stan Hoig. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000. xxv + 341 pp., preface, prologue, maps, photographs, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth.)

During the last half of the nineteenth century, federal Indian policies opened vast stretches of the Southern Plains to white settlement, confined tribes to reservations, and imposed a program of coercive assimilation. These policies "helped to alter the conditions of tribal life" (xiii), notes Hoig, and doomed its traditional underpinnings (ix). Tribes devastated by the changes struggled to maintain some semblance of order in the face of intermittent warfare, internal dissent, and a chaotically and ineptly administered reservation system. The consequences were especially hard on the Kiowas, whose competing factions brought the tribe to the verge of collapse by the mid–1870s.

Among those who took a leading role in tribal affairs was Kicking Bird (in Kiowa, T'ene-angopte, often translated as Striking Eagle), a noted Kiowa headsman who emerged in the early 1870s with Tohawson, Stumbling Bear, and Yellow Wolf as leaders of a so-called peace faction. These men and their followers generally supported the government's assimilation policies—especially education—and opposed what they regarded as the reckless and dangerous resistance of Satank (Setangya or Sitting Bear), Satanta (Setainte or White Bear), and Ado-eette (Big Tree). Despite the fact that some contemporaries regarded him as a sellout, Hoig argues that Kicking Bird was the crucial Kiowa leader during the era and writes that, but for Kicking Bird's presence, "the tribe may have warred itself into near extinction" (249).

This is an ambitious survey of the momentous changes that occurred in Kiowa country, especially after the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty, when their ability to control tribal affairs steadily declined. But in Hoig's view, the choices tended to represent an all-or-none scenario: "Should they follow their tradition of warring and contest the United States in a struggle that would likely mean the annihilation of their tribe; or should they . . . make peace and accept a drastically changed mode of life as demanded by a dominant white society?" (xiii). While it is beyond dispute that "a drastically changed mode of life" awaited the Kiowas, this book does little to examine its contours or discuss its details. Instead it recapitulates the region's frontier military history. Although Hoig writes with a sure hand and a fine narrative touch, the book reflects the standard litany of late-nineteenth-century Southern Plains military affairs. Early tribal history, contacts with whites, escalating violence by the 1850s and 1860s, the trial of Setainte and Ado-eette, the Red River War, and the Fort Marion incarcerations all appear as if by cue.

In writing yet another military and policy history, this book ultimately falls short of its goal to explain how and why Kicking Bird was the harbinger of a new order (much less what his "legend" is about). But as Frederick Hoxie, Loretta Fowler, Luke Lassiter, Thomas Kavanagh, Morris Foster, William Hagan, and William Meadows confirm in works on the same era published during the last decade (none of which appear in the bibliography), the cultural and social mediations prompted by people like Kicking Bird have become the central focus of new scholarship, not policy and warfare studies. And when the book does attempt to address changes in the Kiowa political economy, it retreats to the easy conclusion that Kicking Bird would be proud of the fact that education remains important to the Kiowas.

Equally disturbing is the complete absence of any Kiowa voices, which leaves Hoig to rely on the likes of W. S. Nye and Time-Life books for "Kiowa" accounts. This leads to embarrassing errors of fact: Pleiades becomes Plelades; the Kiowa phrase "aw day talee" is badly mistranslated; the fate of Kicking Bird...