They are dressed in billowy cotton shirts, baggy trousers, and kerchiefs. Yet another photograph shows a group of blurry-eyed peyote eaters lined up by a tepee at dawn. She grew old listening to the brooding chants of broken warriors, the silence of a prairie without buffalo. As a woman she discovered the affliction of defeat, endured famine and disease. As a young girl she witnessed the return of war parties and made offerings to the Tai-Me at the Sun Dance. As a child she was brought up to believe in the divinity of the sun. At eighty-eight her life has spanned the entire modern history of the Kiowa. She appears proud, yet there is a deep sadness in her eyes that suggests the stoic indifference we have come to associate with Plains Indians is less a characteristic of a people than the result of a century of impossible grief. She has the strong, oversized hands of a woman who has spent her youth scraping meat and fat from hides. A long dress and a blanket cover all of her frail body, save for her hands, which clasp the corners of the blanket to her chest. Her thin hair is drawn close to her head and hidden with a black net cap. The photograph reveals a face formed by the open prairie, by winter blizzards and summer heat. Her medicine bundle has twelve scalps tied to it, seven of them taken from whites, including one from a long-haired woman killed in Texas in the last century. She is granddaughter of Onaskyaptak, owner of the Tai-Me, the Sun Dance Image, the most venerated object of the Kiowa. His ordeal ended when a vision of his mother appeared and told him to go back home because he had forgotten his pipe.Īnother photo is a portrait of an old woman, identified as Mary Buffalo, principal informant and wife of the Keeper of the Ten Medicines, the holy medicine bundles that the Kiowa say date back to the beginning of the world. The caption, an almost illegible handwritten scrawl, explains that during his four-day vision quest, the Indian built a sweat lodge of willow and hides, fasted, cleansed himself with sage and cedar, and endured the heat of the fire until his spirit was released to soar over a field of snakes. Another image reveals the silhouette of a distant ridge of the Wichita Mountains, the place where the Kiowa elder Bert Crow Lance sought the medicine power. In one photograph the land appears as a blur of dust, the sky fading to gray, the air darkened by soil worked loose by the wind, the farmhouses on the horizon broken down and abandoned. IS A small photo album in the anthropological archives at the Smithsonian Institution that shows what it was like that summer nearly sixty years ago when Richard Evans Schultes, a young Harvard student, traveled west to Oklahoma to live among the Kiowa and participate in the solemn rites of the peyote cult.
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