Crow Dog’s Trial and Ledger Drawing: Cultural Production and Tribal Nation in the Maw of the American Empire

Abstract

Abstract The 1882 trial of Crow Dog (Kangi Súŋka), for the murder in 1881 of Spotted Tail (Siŋté Glešká), a leader of the Sicangu/Brulé Lakota, had all of the hallmarks of a twentieth- or twenty-first-century celebrity trial. People came for miles around Deadwood, Dakota Territory and far-flung parts to the west in order to attend the trial and rub shoulders with the participants. From the point of view of government officials in the Bureau of Indian Affairs who engineered the trial, the goal was to wrest criminal jurisdiction from Indian governments on reservations. A number of drawings on paper, “ledger drawings,” produced by Crow Dog and other Lakota participants engulfed in the trial and related activities, show another colonial process at work—the appropriation and resignification of the Native voice within the public sphere. The confluence of national, regional, and local events swirling around Deadwood, Dakota Territory, and the legal case that becomes Ex-parte Crow Dog before the Supreme Court, resituates the historical significance of this genre of “Captivity Ledgers” both for Lakota and settler sensibilities during the post-Civil War and early reservation era.