In the Smaller Scope of Conscience: The Struggle for National Repatriation Legislation, 1986–1990

1. Tallbull’s Quest

1 chapter one Tallbull’s Quest The wooden cabinets were clearly a custom job—fourteen drawers stacked floor to ceiling, each with a tarnished brass pull and a faded yellow label written in flowing long-hand script, cabinet after cabinet on both sides of the dimly lit hallway. The famous anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička had designed the avocado-green cabinets (see figure 1.1) in the early part of the twentieth century to hold his expanding collection. The old Cheyenne man adjusted his glasses, stunned at the sheer magnitude of collections around him. William Tallbull was born in 1921 in Muddy Creek, Montana.1 Raised by his grandparents on the rural Northern Cheyenne reservation, he spoke the Cheyenne language fluently. During World War II, he served in Europe as a member of the Army Air Corps, but he returned to the reservation afterward to hold a variety of government positions, including election to the Tribal Council. He retired in 1972 after thirty years of public service and dedicated the rest of his life to increasing the public’s awareness of Native American cultures and beliefs. As part of a delegation of tribal religious leaders, he found himself among Hrdlička’s cabinets seeking a pipe in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Tallbull was also a member of the Dog Soldiers, one of the ancient Cheyenne warrior societies entrusted with the protection of the two sacred covenants given to the Cheyenne people by the Supreme Deity. Mahuts, the four sacred arrows, were given to the Cheyenne at Bear Butte in South Dakota. Is’siwun, the sacred buffalo hat, was given, along with the sun Figure 1.1 The green cabinets that held human osteological specimens at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Tallbull’s Quest • 3 dance, to the Suhati people who later merged with the Cheyenne.2 The Dog Soldier Society, along with the Fox, Elk, Shield, and Bowstring Societies , are responsible for ensuring that the rituals surrounding these objects were carried out properly.3 Each society maintained an assortment of other objects that were needed to carry out its ceremonial obligations. The Cheyenne believed the pipe in the Smithsonian’s collection had once been the most significant part of a “chief’s bundle” carried by Chief Tall Bull. In 1869, Chief Tall Bull and other members of the Dog Soldier Society captured two German women in Kansas and were being pursued across the prairies by the army. Colonel Eugene Carr and his troops came upon the Cheyenne camp near Summit Spring, Colorado. In the ensuing attack, Chief Tall Bull was killed and all of the Cheyenne lodges were sacked. A bundle consisting of the pipe with a red stone bowl and long wooden stem (see figure 1.2), a Dog Soldier rattle, a greasewood pipe tamper , and sweet grass, all contained in a buffalo wool bag, was taken from Chief Tall Bull’s lodge. The bundle was a critical part of the ceremony in which members reaffirmed their commitment to the society, and its loss Figure 1.2 The carved stem of the Tall Bull pipe (triple exposure). #78-15883, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution. 4 • In the Smaller Scope of Conscience led to a split among the Dog Soldiers and demoralized the Cheyenne people. An army record of the seizure helped William Tallbull, after years of effort, track down the pipe that had been in his paternal grandfather’s care to the Smithsonian.4 After reviewing Tallbull’s documentation, a Smithsonian employee led him over to a drawer. “Here is the pipe that is referred to in the record.”5 The Cheyenne religious leaders were overjoyed to finally touch the wooden pipe stem for which they searched so long. The red stone bowl was missing.6 A chance inquiry by one of the other Cheyenne led the Smithsonian employee to pull out another of the green drawers. “A Kiowa,” explained the staffer as a jumble of bones was revealed in the carefully designed drawer, long enough to hold a femur, deep enough to accommodate a human skull.7 Hrdlička was the premier physical anthropologists of his day, collecting the crania and skeletons of thousands of individuals between 1903, when he joined the staff of the Smithsonian, until his death in 1943.8 His seven-volume Catalogue of Human Crania in the U.S. National Museum...