Kiowa Apache Research Articles

Allotment Knowledges: Grid Spaces, Home Places, and Storyscapes on the Way to Rainy Mountain

Allotment Knowledges:Grid Spaces, Home Places, and Storyscapes on the Way to Rainy Mountain Marcel Brousseau (bio) Out of the lands ceded, conveyed, transferred, relinquished and surrendered by Article I hereof, and in part consideration for the cession thereof, it is agreed by the United States that each member of said Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache tribes of Indians over the age of eighteen (18) years shall have the right to select for himself or herself one hundred and sixty (160) acres of land to be held and owned in severalty, to conform to the legal surveys in boundary. —SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT NO. 17, JEROME AGREEMENT, 1892 Mammedaty had his own life to live, and he thought of being a farmer … He had very little choice in the matter. Under the allotment system he had too little land to raise cattle as a business, and the whites had long since begun to close in on all sides, building roads and fences, churches and towns. While many of his kinsmen gave themselves up to self-pity and despair, Mammedaty sowed cotton and wheat, melons and beans. —N. SCOTT MOMADAY, THE NAMES, 1976 ON JANUARY 5, 1903, called "one of the blackest days in the history of the American Indian," the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Kiowa chief Lone Wolf's lawsuit against Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the U.S. secretary of the interior.1 Lone Wolf had sued to resist an act of Congress that allowed the U.S. government to take possession of and title to 2,991,933 acres of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Plains Apache (Kiowa Apache) reservation. When signed by President McKinley on June 6, 1900, this act ratified the disputed Jerome Agreement of 1892, confined tribal members to individual allotments of land, and opened the rest of their reservation as surplus to be sold to whites in what was then called Oklahoma Territory. The dismissal of Lone Wolf's challenge had long-term effects on the economic stability of Oklahoma's Native communities. After being allotted, tribal land progressively decreased as individual Indians sold their land to raise money, were forced into fee patents that resulted in "'heavy losses' from transactions," and were swindled through predatory land sales disguised as leases.2 Kiowa landholding fell from the mandated [End Page 136] allotment of 160 acres per capita after the ratification of the Jerome Agreement to 17 acres per capita in 1934—losses that, as legal theorist Blue Clark asserts, "cast a whole people into an economic coma."3 At a larger scale, the precedent set by the Lone Wolf decision gave the U.S. Congress the unilateral "right to dispose of Indian lands without the consent of the Indians" throughout the United States. Consequently, as historian Francis Paul Prucha declares, "the treaty system, upon which the tribes in the Indian Territory had so long depended for protection, collapsed [as] Congress asserted its plenary power over Indian affairs."4 The complicated landscape sanctioned by Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock—an eroded, discontinuous Indigenous land base, characterized by "checkerboard" property ownership interspersed with non-Indigenous real estate—remains in place in Oklahoma and across Indian Country today. The "long, messy, and difficult" process of allotment and the ongoing "work of Indian landowner activists and advocates" to reclaim and retain Indian land in the United States have been examined by and large from the disciplinary perspectives of policy studies, law, geography, and history.5 The following essay relies on this interdisciplinary scholarship in order to examine allotment through a different set of frames: textual and cultural studies. In particular, I focus on Kiowa textual responses to allotment by comparing Kiowa-Cherokee author N. Scott Momaday's canonical literary text The Way to Rainy Mountain with the "Indigital" cartography currently being theorized and practiced by the Kiowa geographer Mark Palmer. Numerous scholars have examined The Way to Rainy Mountain since its publication in 1969; it functions as a cornerstone text for Indigenous literary studies. The book has inspired fruitful analyses of the tropes of orality and memory, of multivocal poetics, and of the formal and generic innovations made by Indigenous authors. I propose to study The Way to Rainy Mountain as a geohistoriographical...

Picturing the people: Kiowa, Comanche, and Plains Apache postcards

This paper examines the presentation of Southern Plains Native people through the medium of postcards. Postcards became an international phenomenon in the twentieth century, generally associated with tourism, but they also offer scholars and community members an opportunity to view selected moments in Native American cultural history. This paper considers the development of postcards, their presentation of Native Americans in general, and how they can contribute to an understanding of Kiowa, Comanche, and Plains Apache people at different moments in time.

Photographic Evidence for Southern Plains Armor

The use of armor by Plains Indians is one of the more obscure culture traits of the area. Although there are enough occasional references in early historical works to ascertain armor use and reconstruct some of the particulars, pictorial and artifact evidence has been virtually nonexistent. The recent discovery by Lawrence T. Jones III of a photographic carte de visite portraying an unknown Comanche, Kiowa, or Kiowa Apache (Plains Apache) man circa 1871 provides intriguing evidence for armor on the Southern Plains. This find also prompts discussion of related cultural practices and the ethnohistorical potential of photograph analysis.

Pilot Attitudes in Comparing U.S. Army Glass Cockpit and Traditional Crew Station Designs

The crew station instrument panel of U.S. Army rotary-wing cockpits has changed from one of traditional displays (e.g., gauges and dials) to one using multifunction displays (MFDs). The newer design is referred to as a “glass cockpit.” Pilots generally approve of the introduction of glass cockpit designs, and there is significant evidence that commercial aircraft with glass cockpit designs have fewer accidents. However, a recent study of U.S. Army rotary-wing aircraft comparing accident rates between traditional and glass cockpit models of the same aircraft type found evidence for higher accident rates in the glass cockpit models. Since the design of future aircraft will almost certainly include glass cockpits, it is important to explain this finding. To identify characteristics of glass cockpit designs that might be contributing to the accident rate differences, pilots of both traditional and glass cockpit models of the OH-58 Kiowa and AH-64 Apache helicopters were surveyed regarding their attitudes toward traditional and glass cockpit designs in the areas of workload, safety, crew coordination, situational awareness, and training. The survey results suggest that the pilots of glass cockpit aircraft generally have more positive attitudes toward their cockpit than the pilots of traditional cockpit displays. Significantly, though, pilot ratings of some aspects of workload and training were more favorable for the traditional cockpit design than for the glass cockpit design, so further investigation on those areas offers the best chance of explaining the accident rate differences.

On the Big Horn Medicine Wheel: A Comment on Matthew Liebmann, Plains Anthropologist

The Big Horn Medicine Wheel, often considered as "shrouded in mystery, " has been interpreted as a depiction of a Sun Dance lodge on a horizontal plane, and as a place for vision-seeking. There should be no quarrel with the latter proposition. The first proposition, however, is erroneous. The tribes near the location of the Big Horn Wheel in prehistoric and historic times included the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache. These tribes did not have "Sun Dances" but major ceremonies with names different and no emphasis on sun worship. The exception is the Shoshone, who adopted a Sun Dance between 1800 and 1820. The lodge structures of the ceremonies of these tribes, investigated here in detail, in no way reflect the feature of the Wheel. The author explains the Wheel as a depiction, on a horizontal plane, of the Cheyenne Massaum lodge. This lodge, in which the secret part of the ceremony was held, was a closed tipi with a frame based on 28 poles. The Wheel, in addition, is here seen as a Cheyenne oxzem, a spirit wheel, as a territorial marker directed to the spirits of the world above.

Jicarilla Apache

Jicarilla Apache is an Eastern Apachean language, a member of the Athabaskan family of North American languages. The speech described here is that of one of the authors, Merton Sandoval of Dulce, New Mexico. The Apachean group is comprised of Western Apachean (Navajo; the Western Apache dialects Cibecue, San Carlos, and White Mountain; and Chiricahua and Mescalero) Eastern Apachean (Jicarilla, Lipan) and Plains Apache (formerly called Kiowa Apache). The other major groups of Athabaskan languages include the northern group of languages spoken in Alaska and Canada, and the Pacific Coast group spoken in Oregon and California. While the western Apachean languages have a well-documented member in Navajo, the eastern group is less well known, being best documented so far in the works of Goddard (1911), Hoijer (1938, 1945, 1946a, 1946b) and Jung (1999). Differences between the western and eastern groups concentrate in consonant development and the evolution of stem shape, and, to some extent, in the lexicon; however, Jicarilla resembles all other Athabaskan languages in bearing a close morphological relationship to all its relatives.

MODEL COURSE III

MODEL COURSE III

Book Reviews

ROCK'70. by Chris Hodenfield.PRAIRIE FARMER AND WLS: THE BURRIDGE D. BUTLER YEARS. by James F. Evans.MARY RENAULT. by Peter Wolfe.MELODRAMA UNVEILED, by David Grimstead.BALLADS, by M. J. C. Hodgart.JIM WHITEWOLF: THE LIFE OF A KIOWA APACHE. Edited with an Introduction and Epilogue by Charles S. Brant.OHIO, A PERSONAL PORTRAIT OF THE 17TH STATE, by Dick Perry and Bruce Goldflies.THE HALL OF FAME OF WESTERN FILM STARS, by Ernest N. Corneau.THE FILMS OF ORSON WELLES, by Charles Higham.THE BALLAD AS SONG. by Bertrand Harris Bronson.

Western Apache and Kiowa Apache Materials Relating to Ceremonial Payment

Western Apache and Kiowa Apache Materials Relating to Ceremonial Payment

Western Apache Clan and Phratry Organization

N AVAHO and Western Apache clan systems have long presented a puzzling picture, especially when set against the relatively clear-cut systems of other groups in the Southwest having clans. With regard to the Navaho, statements about matrilineal linked clans and a possible phratry organization are generally used to characterize their higher system of social organization, but no detailed analysis has yet been made of the way in which Navaho linked clans and phratries function or functioned. Lack of historical data and/or conflicting statements from informants are usually given as reasons for this. There seems to be a general feeling that there is at present no higher system which organizes Navaho life beyond the family and clan, or that what system there may have been in the past has been irretrievably lost as the population and area of occupation have expanded. The enforced emigration to Fort Sumner in 1865 is often given as the precipitating event for the breakdown of such an old system, but a usable analysis of the pre-Long Walk Navaho clan organization has yet to be made. On the other hand, Goodwin collected some precise information on the clan organization of the Western Apache which lends itself readily to analysis. Goodwin died before he was able to complete his analysis of the system, and the section on clans in The Social Organization of the Western Apache (1942) and his earlier article on clan characteristics and functions (1937) represent but a developmental stage in his thinking. The raw data which he published in the appendices to the volume on social organization, however, make it possible to work out both a complete picture of the way in which each clan was structured and also the larger framework into which these clans fitted. The following remarks are based on a re-analysis of Goodwin's data and on ten months' field work among the Western Apache.* Supplementarily, there is the assumption, based upon comparative research, that Navaho and Western Apache clans are related, both having had the same historical origin. Navaho and Western Apache social organizations are closely related, as both culture and language demonstrate. Therefore, a presentation of the salient features of the Western Apache clan system should suggest directions for research into Navaho clan organization. The Western Apache, Navaho, Jicarilla, Mescalero, Chiricahua, Lipan, and Kiowa Apache are groups of speakers of Southern Athapaskan which today represent the end of a long process of tribal segmentation and coalescence that has been going on since the first Athapaskans entered the Southwest. Each group represents adaptation to a different ecological and cultural environment. The Kiowa Apache, forming a band of Kiowa and operating as