War Dance at Fort Marion: Plains Indians War Prisoners, and: A Kiowa’s Odyssey: A Sketchbook from Fort Marion, and: Art from Fort Marion: The Silberman Collection (review)

Three new books broaden and complicate our understanding of Fort Marion narrative art by looking at it both more closely and more broadly from overlapping perspectives. They also provide new information about the drawings and the individual artists and place them in a transcultural context. Brad D. Lookingbill’s War Dance at Fort Marion is a collective biography of the prisoners and Captain Richard Henry Pratt. By focusing closely on about twenty warriors (including the warrior woman Buffalo Calf), Lookingbill gives us a sense of them as individuals and shows how, in their different ways, they not only adapted to the requirements of a military prison but also appropriated what they could from their experiences to gain new forms of power and enlarge their sense of Indianness. He also shows how, despite his dedication to assimilating his prisoners, Pratt came to understand much about their culture and became flexible in executing his educational plan.

Lookingbill begins with the last days of Plains Indian resistance and takes us through the traumatic twenty-four-day journey of seventy-two warriors from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. He elaborates on their basic training (where they competed to become members of a chain of command and were allowed to have guns on guard duty) and their variety of new activities and experiences. And he focuses on individual warrior-artists, as they met white people from the growing number of tourists, sold them their art, and gave well-attended performances of their tribal dances and wild-west shows. But Lookingbill also shows how these activities had ambivalent consequences. On the one hand, they enabled the prisoners to perform their traditional roles, maintain their art forms, and educate their patrons about their different lifestyles. On the other hand, however, they provided Pratt with what he saw as evidence of his success in transforming savages into civilized people. This is particularly evident in his encouragement of ledger art, where, beside providing the prisoners with colored pencils and ledger books, he instructed them to draw pictures in serial order—which, as other authors elaborate, would exemplify the evolutionary philosophy upon which his educational program was based.

Lookingbill also follows the prisoners as they returned to their reservations, where the federal government, failing to abide by its promises, offered little assistance. As a result, many warriors went back and forth between the “white man’s road” and “the blanket,” and some of them suffered greatly. Nonetheless, many of the prisoners incorporated what they learned and came to believe at Fort Marion, while maintaining their old beliefs and practices—and creating resilient new forms of Native identity.

In A Kiowa’s Odyssey: A Sketchbook from Fort Marion, Phillip Earenfight has produced a beautiful book with actual-sized and true-colored ledger drawings by Etahdleuh Doanmoe. He has also brought together new essays by four major scholars, who provide complementary perspectives and shed new light on the drawings, the cohort of warrior artists, and this singular moment in Southern Plains Indian history.

The collection begins with Brad Lookingbill’s “‘Because I Want to Be a Man’: Portrait of Etahdleuh Doanmoe,” where, continuing the collective biographical approach of his book, Lookingbill elaborates on the narrative Etahdleuh produced in his series of drawings. He fills out the historical details of the scenes in Etahdleuh’s ledger book—a Kiowa camp before the surrender, entering Fort Sill, the stops along the cross-country ride to Florida, and life in the prison and St. Augustine—and focuses...