Warrior culture has long been an important facet of Plains Indian life. For Kiowa Indians, military societies have special significance. They serve not only to honor veterans and celebrate and publicize martial achievements but also to foster strong role models for younger tribal members. To this day, these societies serve to maintain traditional Kiowa values, culture, and ethnic identity. Previous scholarship has offered only glimpses of Kiowa military societies. William C. Meadows now provides a detailed account of the ritual structures, ceremonial composition, and historical development of each society: Rabbits, Mountain Sheep, Horses Headdresses, Black Legs, Skunkberry /Unafraid of Death, Scout Dogs, Kiowa Bone Strikers, and Omaha, as well as past and present women’s groups. Two dozen illustrations depict personages and ceremonies, and an appendix provides membership rosters from the late 1800s. The most comprehensive description ever published on Kiowa military societies, this work is unmatched by previous studies in its level of detail and depth of scholarship. It demonstrates the evolution of these groups within the larger context of American Indian history and anthropology, while documenting and preserving tribal traditions.
This study of Southern Plains military societies delineates comparatively and ethnohistorically the martial values embraced by the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache (KCA) since circa 1800, describing how military society structure, functions, and ritual symbols connect past and present.
Benjamin Kracht's Kiowa Belief and Ritual, a collection of materials gleaned from Santa Fe Laboratory of Anthropology field notes and augmented by Alice Marriott's field notes, significantly enhances the existing literature concerning Plains religions.
?Once in a blue moon (which means a fairly long cycle in my case) one who deals professionally with new books comes upon something that seems to him truly noteworthy and memorable-a reading experience which he will cherish for the rest of his life. And when this book is original and, indeed, unique-when it achieves something that has never been done before-one's impulse is to rent a billboard, to hire a hall, in some way to underline and emphasize the excitement and enthusiasm of his discovery, so that other readers may share his pleasure. "This has been my experience with The Ten Grandmothers, by Alice Marriott. It was the custom of certain tribes of Indians of the Great Plains to keep a 'winter count,' or calendar, of important events. Each year an officially designated scribe or historian of the tribe inscribed on a specially selected and prepared buffalo hide (which was a sacred tribal possession) a colored pictograph commemorating the most noteworthy event of the year-the happening or circumstance for which the year would be remembered in the oral literature and traditions of the tribe. "Miss Marriott's book is based upon such a tribal history of the Kiowas, an important and tenacious nation of the southern Great Plains, for more than a hundred years. She has taken representative incidents from this story and built each into a unified narrative of personal experience, concrete and dramatic. The thirty-three narratives fall into four groups reflecting the major phases of Kiowa history in the last century; they are called, since Kiowa .economy was based on the buffalo, The Time When There Were Plenty of Buffalo; The Time When Buffalo Were Going; The Time When Buffalo Were Gone; and Modern Times. Since the same characters appear recurringly, the book has the effect of a loosely constructed novel. "Miss Marriott is an ethnologist. Her book is based on eight years of work with the Kiowas?work that certainly consisted of much more than superficial interviews with aged Indians. There is evidence everywhere, not only of accurate scientific knowledge of the material to be presented, but of profound human insight and understanding. "Miss Marriott is also a creative artist of extraordinary powers. Her book has abundant humor, drama and melodrama, beauty and sordidness, pathos and tragedy: all presented sharply, objectively, with economy, restraint, and dignity. The narrative of the long journey of Wooden Lance, to see for himself and for his tribe whether the leader of the Ghost Dance movement (that inspired the last desperate, irrational struggle of the plains Indians against the whites) had 'true power is unforgettable in its simplicity and reality. The story of the Kiowa girl Leah's return from her years at a boarding school in the East to her family on the reservation is as true and socially significant as it is poignant and dramatic. "The great achievement of Miss Marriott's book is that it makes accessible to the reader of today the essence of a culture, a way of life and thought, now almost vanished from the earth. "We have an uneasy feeling that some special meaning and value for Americans of today and tomorrow must lie in the older cultures of our continent which our own has so largely displaced. American writers from Longfellow on have tried with varying degrees of success to capture that meaning for us. "Miss Marriott's book shows that our feeling was justified. No discerning reader will fail to find in the men and women who are so vivid in its pages-Sitting Bear and Eagle Plume, old Quanah and Spear Woman, and the Kiowa boys riding in their jeep to enlist for the present World War-in their vision and knowledge of life and their essential experience, abundant meaning for today."
First published in paperback by UNM Press in 1976, The Way to Rainy Mountain has sold over 200,000 copies. "The paperback edition of The Way to Rainy Mountain was first published twenty-five years ago. One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for that is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness. I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth. "The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself."--from the new Preface
Plains Indians were artists as well as warriors, and Silver Horn (1860-1940), a Kiowa artist from the early reservation period, may well have been the most prolific Plains Indian artist of all time. Known also as Haungooah, his Kiowa name, Silver Horn was a man of remarkable skill and talent. Working in graphite, colored pencil, crayon, pen and ink, and watercolor on hide, muslin, and paper, he produced more than one thousand illustrations between 1870 and 1920. Silver Horn created an unparalleled visual record of Kiowa culture, from traditional images of warfare and coup counting to sensitive depictions of the sun dance, early Peyote religion, and domestic daily life. At the turn of the century, he helped translate nearly the entire corpus of Kiowa shield designs into miniaturized forms on buckskin models for Smithsonian ethnologist James Mooney. Born in 1860 when huge bison herds still roamed the southern plains, Silver Horn grew up in southwestern Oklahoma. Son of a chief and member of an artistically gifted family, he witnessed traumatic changes as his people went from a free-roaming, buffalo-hunting culture to reservation life and, ultimately, to forced assimilation into white society. Although perceived as a troublemaker in midlife because of his staunch resistance to the forces of civilization, Silver Horn became to many a romantic example of the "real old-time Indian." In this presentation of Silver Horn’s work, showcasing 43 color and 116 black-and-white illustrations, Candace S. Greene provides a thorough biographical portrait of the artist and, through his work, assesses the concepts and roles of artists in Kiowa culture.
One of the great tribes of the Southwest Plains, the Kiowas were militantly defiant toward white intruders in their territory and killed more during seventy-five years of raiding than any other tribe. Now settled in southwestern Oklahoma, they are today one of the most progressive Indian groups in the area. In Bad Medicine and Good, Wilbur Sturtevant Nye collects forty-four stories covering Kiowa history from the 1700s through the 1940s, all gleaned from interviews with Kiowas (who actually took part in the events or recalled them from the accounts of their elders), and from the notes of Captain Hugh L Scott at Fort Sill. They cover such topics as the organization and conduct of a raiding party, the brave deeds of war chiefs, the treatment of white captives, the Grandmother gods, the Kiowa sun dance, and the problems of adjusting to white society.
Between 1893 and 1920 the U.S. government attempted to transform Kiowa children by immersing them in the forced assimilation program that lay at the heart of that era's Indian policy. Committed to civilizing Indians according to Anglo-American standards of conduct, the Indian Service effected the government's vision of a new Indian race that would be white in every way except skin color. Reservation boarding schools represented an especially important component in that assimilationist campaign. The Rainy Mountain School, on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation in western Oklahoma, provides an example of how theory and reality collided in a remote corner of the American West. Rainy Mountain's history reveals much about the form and function of the Indian policy and its consequences for the Kiowa children who attended the school. In To Change Them Forever Clyde Ellis combines a survey of changing government policy with a discussion of response and accommodation by the Kiowa people. Unwilling to surrender their identity, Kiowas nonetheless accepted the adaptations required by the schools and survived the attempt to change them into something they did not wish to become. Rainy Mountain became a focal point for Kiowa society.
