Rush Roberts and the Setting Sun

Rush Roberts was born November 30, 1859.  A family history prepared by George Roberts named the father as “Latakutskalahar (Fancy Eagle),” and the mother “Chiha (Reed Matting).”  These names are Riítahkaackarahaaru, Proud Eagle, and Chihiítu, Reed Mat.  Both Proud Eagle and Reed Mat died “in the land of Nebraska” – Proud Eagle was killed “by enemy Indians.”  Late in life Rush Roberts responded to a list of questions received from a researcher, and he mentioned his father: “My father was a Doctor; he died when I was about four years of age.  My stepfather was a hunter and trapper.”  This suggests that Proud Eagle was killed about 1864, and Reed Mat married another Skidi man.  This genealogy traces the Roberts family history back to the late 18th century.  But in 1977 Garland Blaine took issue with certain aspects of this family heritage, and he said that Rush Roberts was “a mixed blood.”  Then in 1983 I heard a very different story.  In July that year I sat down with my uncle John Knife Chief to go over a list of Pawnee men who had signed the Agreement of 1892 – the generation that adopted the formal use of inherited surnames.  When we got to the name “Rush Roberts,” Uncle John paused.  He said Rush’s real parents were, as he put it, white immigrants.  They might have been German, he said.  One day they were both killed by the Sioux.  A Skidi group came upon the slaughter and they found a living child and Rush grew up as a Skidi.  These stories are confusing.  Was Rush Roberts the scion of Skidi lineages?  Was he a “mixed blood”?  Was he an adopted son of Proud Eagle and Reed Mat?  We can say for sure that he grew up as a member of a Skidi family, and he shared with his son Henry his memory of his Skidi father, Proud Eagle, who was married to Reed Mat, his mother.  Henry wrote in a 1903 school essay, “He said that when he was young his father was killed in a battle with the Sioux Indians, and so he did not get to see his father very long.”  Perhaps we can reconstruct an arguable model of what happened.  At the killing of his birth-parents, Rush was likely an infant, too young to retain any memories of what had happened.  And he was still quite young when his first Skidi adoptive father, Proud Eagle, died at the hands of the Sioux.  Pawneeland in those days was an embattled realm.  The colonizing Sioux and their client states and allies wrested away swathes of Pawnee hunting grounds by military invasion, taking control of steadily declining herds of buffalo.  And they assaulted the Pawnees in their last city, Wild Licorice Creek – an earthlodge metropolis founded in 1859, a few months before the birth of Rush Roberts.  That city had two Skidi suburbs, and in later life Rush said, “The village I lived in had about fifty lodges in Nebraska.”  From its founding, Wild Licorice Creek was a city under siege.  A New York Times report described a Sioux attack on the “Scheedees” in May 1860 and “a sharp fight took place, lasting about half an hour in which three Pawnees were killed and four severely wounded,” with honorable mention of the deeds of Baptiste Bayhylle and Crooked Hand.  Historian Mark van de Logt noted that “between April and September 1860, Sioux raiders struck the town no fewer than eight times.”  Clyde Milner added: “In the summer of 1860, even with a company of US soldiers on the reservation, the Sioux destroyed sixty Pawnee lodges.  Early in 1861, with the Pawnees off in their winter camps, the Sioux virtually occupied the reservation.  That fall they burned the prairies to prevent a successful Pawnee hunt, and by January many Pawnees had no food.”  The Pawnees also observed Sioux attacks on their American neighbors.  In early September 1862 the American farmer for the Pawnees reported that the Sioux had “killed a white man a few miles above” the Pawnee city.  And “they were intending to have a big fight with the Pawnees.”  He heard “that the Sioux were in large bodies, of 500 each, at various distances on all sides of the Pawnee village.”  Historian George Hyde touched on events in the summer of 1863: “The Sioux were very troublesome this summer.  They started with a big raid on June 22, when they charged straight into the Pawnee villages, killing and scalping some Indian women, with Agent Lushbaugh and the officers of the cavalry company which was supposed to be on guard looking on.  Later in the summer 300 Brulés made an attack on the Pawnee villages, wounding the captain of the cavalry company with an arrow and killing one soldier and a number of Pawnees before the Indians and cavalry could mount and drive them off.  The cavalry company seemed useless, small parties of Sioux getting in almost daily to kill Pawnee women in the corn patches and to enter the Indian villages at night to steal horses.”  Surveying this history, it is certainly possible that Rush Roberts was the son of non-Pawnee parents killed by the Sioux somewhere in Pawneeland – parents who might well have been immigrants from Germany.  Their infant son survived.  The little boy was too young to retain any memories of those grim events.  And Proud Eagle and Reed Mat took in the orphan and they named him Arikaraaru.  The name means “horned one” and it refers to a “stag, buck deer.”  Perhaps we could translate it as Deer Antlers.  In later years he could vaguely recall how his Skidi father died at the hands of an invading Sioux military expedition – a dim memory reinforced by things his mother said in his childhood before she died.  Other Skidis in the community knew the truth, and perhaps some Pawnees thought Deer Antlers was a Skidi with American ancestry.  Deer Antlers became a youth in this time of war, and one summer day in 1873 he survived the genocidal Sioux slaughter of Pawnees at Massacre Canyon.  An American named Royal Buck visited the scene.  He published a somber report in a local newspaper: “It was indeed a regular massacre… for nearly four miles down the canyon the dead bodies are still lying bleaching in the sun or putrifying in the water or slough holes… near one hundred victims are lying on the ground and full two thirds are squaws and pappooses.  All or nearly all are scalped.”  In 1876 Deer Antlers joined the final enlistment of Pawnee Scouts.  Mark van de Logt quoted Rush in his 2010 book on the Pawnee Scouts: “The Sioux and Cheyennes were our enemies, and I had this chance to operate against them.”  It appears that Deer Antlers was present at the Dull Knife battle in late November 1876.  He recalled, “About three days after the Cheyenne battle we had the name changing ceremony at our supply wagon camp.”  Perhaps this was the occasion when Deer Antlers took his Skidi father’s name, Riítahkaackarahaaru.  The name is typically translated as Fancy Eagle, but the word karahaar means “be neat, fastidious, particular, as in one’s dress or work; be proud.”  The term pertains to a person who takes pride in being meticulous and “proudly attired.”  And riítahkaac refers to a golden eagle.  Douglas Parks translated this name as Proud Eagle.  And it must have been during the 1880s when Proud Eagle took another name, borrowing an American name “Rush Roberts” from a Quaker official of the Board of Indian Commissioners.  In October 1875 Benjamin Rush Roberts had visited Pawneeland in Oklahoma, and he was struck at how this new Pawnee realm looked quite beautiful “in the light of the setting sun… a picture which no pen could adequately describe.”  And in 1904 when George Dorsey and James R. Murie published Traditions of the Skidi Pawnee, they included one narrative told by “Fancy Eagle.”  And “God-of-Wind” tells of a “wonderful boy” who could perform magic, transforming a clay buffalo “into a live buffalo calf.”  Stitakäu or Womb “could call the buffalo” and “he seemed to make the ground open so that buffalo came forth.”  This narrative has the feel of an old tradition handed down for generations – it ends with Stitakäu becoming a divinity in the north: “Hikusu, Breath or Wind.”  And the people made offerings in those days, as the story told.  And Stitakäu became Hikusu “and the people knew that he did not die”; and still, he is “living and stands in the north…”  And the infant boy became Arikaraaru.  And he became Riítahkaackarahaaru.  And one day he became Rush Roberts.  And he lived to a great age – he grew very old in Pawneeland, a beautiful realm “in the light of the setting sun… which no pen could adequately describe.”

Photo by Thomas Smillie: “Ray-Tah-Cots-Tey-Sah-Ru, Fancy Eagle, called Rush Roberts,” January 21, 1905

The Moon Magic

Envisioning how I am connected to the past, I sort through the forever unfolding historical geography that has shaped my immediate world.  I focus on various inner pathways that give me a sense of depth as a person – a shifting map of identities and moments and life-narratives.  But many trajectories of history have shaped me, including things that I don’t often ponder.  One such arc of definition has to do with the invasion of Pawneeland.  To sort out what I think this means, it seems useful to examine a somewhat mysterious incident that happened long ago.

During the early 1840s an American trader set down a memoir of his travels.  Josiah Gregg had “crossed and recrossed the Great Plains four times” from 1831 to 1840, and on his first journey he heard a story about the Pawnees.  Arriving at a small eminence called Pawnee Rock, he learned it was so named after a battle that had been fought there “between the Pawnees and some other tribe.”  Gregg didn’t set down any detail, but it was a story that had some currency in those days.

In August 1835 the diary of an American dragoon named Lemuel Ford made brief mention of “a noted Rock Sandy called Pawney rock[.]”  And in September 1843 another dragoon named Philip Cooke found himself at Pawnee Rock – he knew something about its history, reporting a rumored battle there in which the Pawnees had fought “Camanche hordes.”  He told a dramatic tale of how “a small party of Pawnees” took refuge on the “rocky mound” and suffered there from thirst and finally charged to a “heroic death…”  This tale, he said, explained how the “rocky mound” got its name.

Lewis Garrard visited Pawnee Rock in the fall of 1846.  He said nothing about the Pawnees, but he did find “a point of friable sandstone jutting out from the rising ground… thirty-five or forty feet in height…”  The landmark today is a humble remnant of the original hill that these American travelers saw – during the 1870s the Americans began to mine the jutting rocky hill for construction materials.

Pawnee Rock circa 1870s, JR Riddle

The Pawnee story accounting for the name of the hill faded from American memory.  But the tale did not die away in Pawneeland.  Sometime during the 1860s / 1870s two American brothers heard very similar narratives about Pawnee Buttes in Colorado and Courthouse Rock in Nebraska.  These brothers spoke Pawnee, and we can assume that they heard their accounts from unidentified Pawnee storytellers.

A memoir of the life of Frank North told of a “running fight” between a Pawnee war expedition and the Sioux during the 1850s.  The Pawnees ultimately took refuge on a butte in Colorado that was “almost perpendicular on all sides except one,” and there they suffered from thirst and hunger.  But one night they tied their lariats together and slipped away in the dark.  Ever after, the area became known as Pawnee Buttes.

Frank’s brother Luther was also aware of the Pawnee Buttes story, and he visited Courthouse Rock in January 1877 with some Pawnee Scouts.  He mentioned hearing an account about Courthouse Rock similar to the Pawnee Buttes narrative: “…a story of a war party of Pawnees that was driven up there by the Sioux, and after having been kept there for several days escaped down the cliff by tying their ropes together and sliding down.”  He felt doubtful about both accounts, picturing light-weight Pawnee “hair ropes.”  He also wondered why the Pawnees could not name anyone involved in the incident or incidents.

Ten years later George Bird Grinnell visited Pawneeland in Oklahoma and he heard the Courthouse Rock version.  He wrote that “a war party of Skidi” had camped near Courthouse Rock and they were driven to the hill by the Sioux.  There was only one way up to the top, and the Sioux stood guard and the Skidi men “suffered terribly from hunger… and thirst.”  The leader prayed and “something” told him to seek a place to climb down.  He carved a notch in a “soft clay rock” and the men tied their lariats together and escaped.

Grinnell was also aware of the Pawnee Buttes version – he later edited Frank North’s biography and he became aware of Luther North’s skepticism about the stories.  Pawnee men carried two kinds of ropes, said Grinnell, and the rawhide type could have sufficed to bear the weight of escaping men.  And considering the attributed locales of Courthouse Rock and Pawnee Buttes, he thought that similar incidents could “have happened more than once.”

The Pawnee scholar, James R. Murie, set down what can be taken as the most authoritative account of the hilltop siege.  He heard an account told by an old Pawnee priest named Roaming Scout, and George Dorsey published it in Traditions of the Skidi Pawnee (1904) as “The Moon Medicine.”  In choosing this title for the story, Murie and Dorsey translated the Pawnee term waruksti as “medicine.”  But this Pawnee term refers to a range of more esoteric ideas like holy, full of wonder, mysterious.  In the present circumstance, a more supernatural context is arguable, as with the term “magic.”

In Roaming Scout’s narrative, a Skidi man called Taihipirus had been blessed by Spider Woman as a youth, and he had grown up with “womanish ways.”  Becoming respected as a war leader, he took an expedition into the south of Pawneeland and there they were driven onto Pawnee Rock by a vast coalition of “ten or eleven tribes” who encamped around the hill.

It is convenient to refer to this tradition as a war story, but only one Pawnee died in the incident.  A “little fellow” who was an errand man “rose up and ran down the hill” and was captured and executed.  In the course of the siege two Skidis slipped down the pathway and met some Cheyennes who had a ceremonial kinship with the Pawnees, and they arranged for the two men to shake hands with the leaders of the other tribes.  But this friendly gesture did not resolve the situation.

The Skidis endured great thirst, and one night Taihipirus received a vision from Spider Woman.  He watched her come down her rope from the moon, and she told him about a “great rock” that could be moved to one of the sheer edges of the hill.  Following Spider Woman’s instructions, Taihipirus and his companions escaped by tying together their ropes and attaching them to the stone.

From the various extant accounts, it is evident that by the 1830s a Pawnee story about a war expedition and Pawnee Rock was widely known among Americans in the central Plains.  The reports by Josiah Gregg and Philip Cooke do not contain much detail, but they refer to an incident that happened sometime before circa 1831.  The stories must have originated from Pawnee storytellers, spreading to fur traders and American officials who had dealings in Pawneeland.

By the 1870s a similar story about Pawnee Buttes and Courthouse Rock had appeared, reported by the North brothers.  George Bird Grinnell in 1889 and James Murie in 1904 both published more detailed stories.  Grinnell did not specify his source and did not name any Pawnee participant, but he said the Pawnee party was Skidi.  The Murie / Dorsey narrative came from Roaming Scout, a Skidi man who was born about 1839.  He identified the war expedition as a Skidi group and its leader as Taihipirus, and he associated the incident with Pawnee Rock.

The similarities among these various narratives tend to suggest some form of diffusion of an original story into divergent variations.  Both Luther North and Grinnell knew of more than one version, and they disagreed about how to interpret the tales.  But given the chronology of known accounts, we can surmise that the Pawnee Rock story described the original event, and it happened sometime before circa 1831.

Beyond the obvious similarities, another slight clue in the Frank North story hints at diffusion of the story.  The Murie story about Taihipirus tells of the influence of Spider Woman.  None of the other accounts mention that element, but the Frank North story says that after the Pawnees escaped from Pawnee Buttes, a spring-fed stream emerged from the butte, “and the Pawnees claim that there was no stream there at the time they were besieged…”  As Murie explained in a note in Traditions of the Skidi Pawnee (p. 335), Spider Women “inhabited the sides of mountains, where they stayed with their legs far apart, and were the source of springs which furnished sweet water.”  The mention of a new spring at Pawnee Buttes could be taken as a veiled reference to Spider Woman.

Why would a Pawnee war story become more a matter of myth than history?  It isn’t certain that this is the case – we can’t entirely rule out the possibility of multiple similar events occurring at three different locations over time.  But the basic structure of the tale could easily have lent itself to mythologizing processes, and that seems to be what happened.  Between about 1830 and 1870, the invading Sioux and their allies engulfed the Pawnee homeland, wresting away control of large swathes of territory at the periphery of the realm – the lands that contained Pawnee Rock, Pawnee Buttes, and Courthouse Rock.

The originating incident at Pawnee Rock must have occurred in the years before the Sioux colonization of Pawneeland.  During the decades that followed, the encroaching Sioux empire and their many allies surrounded the Pawnee realm, and this invasion was not merely a slow demographic shift.  It was not merely a gradual interplay of complex interactions marked by occasional rivalry.  It took the form of a brutal war driven by genocidal colonialism.  Pawnee families were slaughtered in their cities, in their hunting camps.

The Pawnees resisted the invasion.  The Pawnee bands unified; they took refuge in consolidated cities and they finally forged a military alliance with the United States.  And at last during the 1870s they escaped to Oklahoma Indian Territory.  There the Pawnee people continued to slide down an implacable demographic decline, devastated by epidemics and economic collapse.  But in the end, Pawneeland endured.  Remnants of the Pawnee Confederacy survived.

Through those years the Pawnee Rock story underwent a transformation, diffusing from Pawnee Rock to Pawnee Buttes and Courthouse Rock.  In this story, a retreating embattled group sought refuge in the midst of a sea of enemies, and they escaped safely.  This eventually gave rise to a crescent of narratives across the old Pawnee homeland, tales of resistance dimly lit by the wonder of the Moon, visions of Spider Woman.  By the end of the century, the extant versions of the story roughly approximated the map of Pawneeland that had been overwhelmed by Sioux colonialism.

The tradition of Taihipurus and Pawnee Rock ultimately memorialized the enduring Pawnee struggle for survival.  The making of a mythologized geography served to refine the telling of this history into storytelling.  Relating versions of this story, the Pawnee people could feel optimism about the challenge to preserve what it meant to be Pawnee in an embattled world.  That world ultimately gave rise to the world in which I was born.

But the tale does not end there.  It has recently become evident that sometime around 1960 the legend of Pawnee Rock took an unexpected turn.  With the release in 2007 of JRR Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin, I realized that he drew on this particular war story of Pawneeland to colorize a fantasy battleground of Middle-earth – the story of Mîm the Dwarf and his hilltop refuge.  With this development, the Pawnee memoir of Taihipirus and the Moon Magic has found new momentum in the world.  When we observe the journey of this tale of wonder and vision and mystery, we glimpse a slow transformation of a moment of history into myth.

My related Tolkienland essay: “Mîm and the Moon Medicine”

My related essay at The Wandering Company: “The Spider’s Springs”

The Ghosts of History Past

Arthur Redcloud as Hikuc, a Pawnee on his way to the Kitkahahki

Watching The Revenant do so well at the Oscars tonight, I feel a sense of complicated pleasure.  It is a film that visits a newly imagined version of Pawneeland.  The award-winning cinematography summons up a mountainish world that feels like a real place.  But it isn’t; not really.  What matters most to me at this moment is that the film features a number of Pawnee characters, a range of roles – this is rare for films that have touched on Pawneeland in recent decades.  And those Pawnee characters have been finely crafted, nicely acted.  Believable and human.

In all of its extravagantly crafted details The Revenant aims at a specific visual texture that the director has termed “authenticity.”  The purpose is for this film to suspend us in the midst of a story that feels propelled by history.  We are not to worry much about trying to sort out history from pseudo-history.  Entering the theater, we already know it represents a rewritten past.

 The Revenant was carefully designed to resonate with present-day racial storytelling, not with history.  But we are encouraged by the rich detailing to equate this kind of story with history – a past that has racial Indians oppressed by racial whites.  Hugh Glass serves as the moral compass.  We, the audience, peer through his eyes.  We hope for guidance toward our most uplifting contemporary multicultural values.  What we demand from pseudo-history is something more real than history.

Many Pawnees today are descended from French-American fur traders from St. Louis.  The residents of St. Louis were very diverse, dominated by French ancestry from Canada and New Orleans.  The ties of the St. Louis families to Pawneeland were deep by the 1820s.  In fact, Pawnees could be found there as residents not long after the founding of the city.  If you have St. Louis ancestors going back to circa 1770, it is likely that you have Pawnee ancestors.  There was no endemic warfare between the Pawnees and the St. Louis French-Americans.  Nor were there ever any assaults on Pawneeland by French or American military forces.

But in early June 1823 the Arikaras did attack an American trade expedition on the Missouri River – this was an American group that included a good number of French-American traders.  And an American military expedition did subsequently lay siege to an Arikara earthlodge city; they shelled the city by cannon-fire.  They were accompanied and assisted by a large Sioux military force – along the Missouri River the Sioux were the first military allies of the Americans.  A complex set of evolving relationships between the Arikara, Sioux, and Americans drove these events.  It is impossible to frame this history as a racial rivalry of “Indians” versus “whites.”  To accomplish this impossibility, The Revenant twists all of these details into an entirely new configuration of the past.

During the 1820s race was still a new idea in Pawneeland.  The Pawnees had a long way to go before they would become full-fledged “Indians,” before they would completely absorb the tenets of racial identity systems.  But the obscure and elaborate and simple historical mechanisms of race… this topic is not the primary theme of The Revenant.  It really has to do with surviving an implacable narrative of social violence, a tale fraught with the mechanisms of war, vengeance, and slaughter.

In this movie, in this re-imagined Pawneeland, one must kill or be killed.  And so, even though the Pawnees come across as humanized in the film, and even though this happens in a way that we haven’t seen in other films, all the Pawnee characters get murdered and massacred.  That is, with the exception of one ghostly starving woman who survives, maybe.

Tonight I’m glad this film won a few awards.  I’m glad for Pawneeland.  I’m pleased to find a film contemplating a version of that world.  It does matter when historical narratives get rewritten to suit film-narratives, but it is true enough that the complexities of history are sometimes not as real as the appeal of pseudo-history.  Tonight, I suppose, feeling pleased that a film with Pawneeland at its heart has won Oscars for cinematography, best director, and best actor, perhaps it could be argued that not everything that is important in our storytelling is necessarily real.  Not really.

White Fox the Indianer

When three Skidi Pawnees traveled to Sweden in the summer of 1874, they entered an interesting moment in Pawnee history.  They found that people saw them not as Pawnees – and certainly not as Skidi Pawnees – but rather as Indians.  They saw themselves that way, too.  As Indians.  But in Sweden, in those days, they encountered a whole new level of enthusiasm for race.  After two of these Skidis returned to Pawneeland, they helped to lead the Pawnee people into the heart of the American racial agenda.

White Fox probably thought of himself as an Indian when he traveled to Sweden with his relatives White Eagle and John Box.  But we can only vaguely glimpse the options of identity that shaped his social world.  We know that White Fox was born about 1846.  He grew up as a member of an extended Skidi family, probably Pumpkin Vine Skidi, and he was a citizen of the Pawnee Confederacy.  As an adult he took up doctoring and he served in the Pawnee Scouts.  And in the final days of his life he became one of the Pawnee discoverers of Sweden.

We construct identity from ephemeral slippery surfaces.  And negotiating the fickle meanings of identity, selfhood is completely dependent upon a sense of history.  When our sense of history is complex and nuanced, we have complex and nuanced options for being and becoming.

But peering back at people in the past, when we can only glimpse a few details of their lives, we necessarily must guess at what circles of identity they surrounded themselves with in life.  Yet we can consult history to fill in that picture.  In so doing, we tend to look for the threads that most clearly connect the past to our sense of the present.

Today racial identity systems provide a primary thread that links the Pawnees to their past.  Believing that today one cannot be Pawnee without also being Indian – meaning an adherent to the identity system of racial Indianhood – it is easy to suppose that this has always been true.  But in the days of White Fox, this racial system was not at all what it is today, here in the second decade of the 21st century.

This is due in large part to a war that the Pawnees fought during White Fox’s lifetime.  Since racial identity consists of the production of bonding processes, to be Indian one must engage in bonding activities with other Indians.  But in the case of White Fox and his contemporaries, they fought and killed Sioux enemies and they rejected the idea of bonding with the Sioux through race.  Resisting the invasion of the Sioux empire, the Pawnees instead formed political and military bonds with the American empire.  This necessarily inserted ambiguity in the meanings of racial Indianhood.

It would have been consistent with Pawnee war practices of his day for White Fox to have killed and scalped enemies on the battlefields of the Pawnee homeland.  It seems likely that White Fox scalped one or more enemies, given the fact that he wore a war shirt to Sweden – a shirt with pieces of human scalp attached.  This means that he would have slain or wounded an enemy.  With a knife he made a deep incision around the hairline down to the skull.  Grasping the hair, White Fox pulled vigorously to tear the hair and flesh away from the underlying bone.

Pawnee members of the hereditary ruling class engaged in war, but they were generally expected to bend their thoughts and intentions to less gruesome interests.  Gene Weltfish discusses this in The Lost Universe (p. 354-355).  A leader named Eagle Chief tells a story about striking an enemy with a pipestem taken from a Pipe Dance bundle.  But the next storyteller was “a rough character” named War Cry who “was a brave and his whole outlook was toward aggression and violence compared with a chief who was a man of peace and conciliation.”

The spectrum of cultural options among the Pawnees during the mid-19th century was real, just as it is real today.  And in terms of racial identity, there was not just one way of being “Indian” among the Pawnees then, just as there is not merely one way of being “Indian” today.  I presume that as late as the 1870s, some Pawnees did not identify as Indian, or did so very rarely in their daily lives.  Today, however, to be Pawnee one must also be an Indian.

When White Fox, White Eagle, and John Box traveled to Sweden in 1874, they journeyed deep into the world of race.  There in that alien realm they were not Skidi; nor were they Pawnee.  In Sweden they were “Indianer” – the Swedish term for Indian.  Race in Europe in those days had become a powerful shaper of society, a weighty matter of much discussion in the academies and streets of Europe.

In the streets and intellectual forums of Pawneeland, race had less authority.  Racial Indianhood was merely an optional identity – something that happened in specific situations, rather than a matter of daily life.

Among the ideas that gave shape to race in European and American lifeways, by the time the Pawnees discovered Sweden, a thriving debate had to do with the extent to which races and nations could be conflated, and whether language groupings could be described in terms of race.  It became popular, for example, to compare and contrast the idea of a “Nordic” race versus the idea of a “Celtic” race.

Academicians encouraged one another to inquire into these matters through scientific means.  So when White Fox took sick and died in Sweden in January 1875, Swedish authorities responded by turning over his remains to the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, their leading scientific institution for anatomical study.

According to an article written by researcher Dan Jibréus (translation provided by Ivona Elenton), a physician / ethnographer named Gustaf von Dubën removed the skin of White Fox’s upper torso and head and set this flesh on a plaster cast.  Several months later von Duben used this gruesome bust to illustrate a lecture on “the general characteristics of the North American Indians.”

In the decades that followed the death of White Fox the Indianer, the Pawnees gave up the grisly custom of scalping enemies.  But after race suggested to the Swedes that they ought to skin White Fox and remake him in the image of race – a particularly grisly image – race decided that it didn’t want to stop there.

White Eagle and John Box returned to Pawneeland in 1875 without White Fox.  They joined the last group of Pawnees to leave Nebraska for Oklahoma.  And in that realm, in a new homeland between the Long River and the Salt River, the Pawnees slowly wandered into a strange moment in Pawnee history.  They found themselves listening to what race said to them, and they liked what they heard.

In Oklahoma they heard again and again the sayings of race.  Race slowly remade all the Pawnee people.  And long before I was born, the Pawnees began to say that they had always been on this journey.  Now they believed they had always said the racial things that everyone said to each other in Oklahoma.  This meant something very interesting.  It meant they were not just Pawnees anymore.  The Pawnees had all become Pawnee Indians.

Newspaper report of a 1994 exhibit involving White Fox in Sweden (courtesy of Katarina Moro)