The Object at Hand



A famed Sioux warrior-prophet named Kicking Bear, who died in 1904, is still
much on view in Washington, DC.

First the Smithsonian anthropologists lathered the Indian prophet's face
with gelatin. They inserted straws in his nostrils for breathing. Then they
wrapped his head with strips of cloth soaked in plaster. Throughout the
ordeal of fashioning his life mask, Kicking Bear remained stoic. he raised
his chin high, closed his eyes, and struck a commanding pose no doubt
familiar to the hundreds of warriors who had fought alongside him just five
years earlier, in 1891, during the Sioux's last, desperate uprising against
the U.S. Army.
Since that day, millions of Americans have also gazed at Kicking Bear's
strong, inscrutable features. But few have realized it. For decades, painted
in copper skin tones and framed by a black wig, Kicking Bear's head, molded
from his life mask, has sat atop the figure of an Indian in a display case
at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Today, he is
identified only as a "Sioux Warrior." The face is frowning slightly, perhaps
as a lingering display of defiance by a great warrior, perhaps simply from
discomfort at being half smothered in plaster.

Millions more, zipping up and down Rock Creek Parkway in Washington, DC,
have unwittingly seen Kicking Bear's face reproduced many times over, on the
ornate bridge that spans Rock Creek Park at Q Street. under each of the
bridge's repeating stone arches, Kicking Bear looks down impassively on the
traffic. The 56 heads, each with a stylized Sioux warbonnet, were fashioned
from the Smithsonian's life mask in 1914 by sculptor A. Phimister Proctor.

Well before the turn of the century, Mato Wanahtaka - Kicking Bear - had
become a famous man. He was born about 1847, the son of a chief of a band of
Oglala Sioux. Kicking Bear was a warrior and a medicine man, first fighting
against rival indian tribes, then, during the Indian Wars, against the U.S.
Army. In his early days, he was notable not only as a warrior but also as an
artist. In 1876, shortly after the battle of Little Bighorn (Smithsonian,
June 1976), Kicking Bear painted a now famous pictograph of his role in the
refeat of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer. This painting, now housed in the
Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, shows Mato Wanahtaka, who has just killed
an Arikara scout, joining Crazy Horse, his first cousin, to ambush an
oncoming cavalry battalion.

Early in 1890, Kicking Bear achieved some national notoriety as a preacher
of a new religion that the Sioux called Wanagi Wacipi, or "Ghost Dance."
Sent to Nevada to investigate the new religion, he listened to its
self-proclaimed messiah, a Paiute known as Wokova, and returned to the
reservation with a spiritual message: God would soon destroy the whites and
revive the old ways. He would restore the buffalo, and reunite living
Indians with their dead relatives. To insure the coming of this new world,
Kicking Bear told believers, they must perform the Ghost Dance.

These were increasingly desperate times for the Sioux. Just 13 years after
the victory at Little Bighorn, they faced a bleak future. So when Kicking
Bear returned home in the spring of 1890, he found his people hungry for
Wokova's words. Eagerly they danced the Ghost Dance and sang a song that
Kicking Bear composed for them:

  Over the glad new earth they are coming,
  Our dead come driving the elk and the deer.
  See them hurrying the herds of buffalo!
  This the Father has promised,
  This the Father has given.

Many Sioux spent the summer and fall of 18980 listening to Kicking Bear and
other "apostles." For days on end they abandoned their farm work and took
their children out of school to dance the Wanagi Wacipi, praying and
shouting and singing for the return of their lost world.

By mid-autumn, newspapers like the Rapid City Journal were printing lurid -
and totally incorrect - stories predicting an imminent Sioux rebellion.
After orders to stop the Ghost Dance had gone unheeded, soldiers were
dispatched.

And thus began the tragic chain of events that led to Wounded Knee, the last
major Indian battle fought in the United States. It was hardly a battle, of
course. Many of the Sioux, unnerved by the appearance of several thousand
soldiers, fled into the Badlands, where they quickly realized their cause
was hopeless and prepared to surrender.

What followed is a grim and oft-repeated story. On the morning of December
29, several dozen warriors and their families, surrounded by soldiers at
Wounded Knee Creek, were in the process of giving up their rifles when a
shot rang out. Who fired it is still a mystery. But within seconds both
sides were shooting wildly. The Indian warriors, hopelessly outnumbered and
trapped in an indefensible hollow, were mowed down by ranks of soldiers.

Kicking Bear and a band of 1,300 warriors were a few miles away. When they
heard the crack of rifles and the boom of four Hotchkiss machine guns, which
fired two-pound explosive shells, they were terrified - and angry. For the
next 18 days, Kicking Bear led the last uprising of the Sioux. Though U.S.
forces outnumbered them seven to one, the Sioux managed to stage several
raids against isolated posts and Army columns, killing a few soldiers and
inflicting minor damage. But the Sioux warriors and their 2,700 dependents
had little food and no real shelter against the bitterly cold Dakota winter.
On January 16, 1891, Kicking Bear and 3,500 starving followers surrendered.
The brief, bloody war had cost the lives of more than 300 Indians, and 49
soldiers and government agents, most of the latter killed by their own
comrades' crossfire at Wounded Knee.

For most of the past century, the figure topped by Kicking Bear's plaster
head wore the warrior's own full-dress buckskin shirt, which he gave to
James Mooney, Smithsonian anthropologist and Ghost Dance specialist, when
Kicking Bear visited Washington in 1896. the figure also wore the the
Indian's own leggings, quill ornaments, and tobacco pouch. It was only in
the 1950s that the magnificent yellow-and-blue shirt decorated with strips
of beads, hair and eagle featthers, deemed too fragile for display, was put
in storage. At the same time, the Kicking Bear figure was moved to a new
exhibit, where it ceased to be identified by name. Kicking Bear became
simple the anonymous "Sioux Warrior" he is today.

Many figures in the Natural History Museum are generic "types." But, like
Kicking Bear, several were taken from the life masks of celebrated
individuals. (At the turn of the century, the museum was paying subjects
from 50 cents to one dollar per sitting.) Thomas Kavanagh, a Smithsonian
expert on Plains Indians, has been able to attach real names to a number of
the plaster faces in the exhibit case. Among them: Rosa White Thunder, a
young Sioux student whose face was cast in the 1880s at the Carlisle Indian
School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Two Guns White Calf, a Blackfoot
chief; both share Kicking Bear's exhibit case.

Most of the figures are an outgrowth of a much larger collection, nearly 500
plaster life masks, busts and statues made between 1880 and 1920. Packed
away in boxes are faces not only of native Americans, but of Africans,
Polynesians, Asians, Europeans, and even casual visitors to the Smithsonian,
including a politician or two, and several anthropologists who apparently
"plastered" one another.

The original purpose of the masks, as G. Brown Goode wrote in 1895, was to
"show the characteristics of the different races . . . display costumes . .
. and to illustrate the methods and use of weapons." it was a time when
physical anthropologists were busy collecting and measuring all sorts of
specimens and trying to compare a diversity of races. Whatever the reason,
the museum stopped making life masks in the 1920s. Since then, no one has
quite known what to do with them, though recently the Smithsonian and other
museums around the country have used the masks to serve as models for new
displays.

Kicking Bear was chosen as the subject of a life mask because of his fame,
for neither his prominence among the Sioux nor his personal religious quest
ended with surrender in 1891. After several months as a prisoner at Fort
Sheridan near Chicago, he was freed to tour Europe with Buffalo Bill Cody's
Wild West show. When anthropologists fashioned his life mask in 1896, he
happened to be in Washington, DC as one of three delegates taking Sioux
grievances to the Office of Indian Affairs.

Transcripts from the Indian Affairs meetings the week of March 4, 1896, show
that he respectfully chastised the commissioner about white traders who got
"drunk and foolish" on the reservation, and asked that Indians have more
leeway to make their own decisions.

Soon after his Washington visit, he turned up in Montana as a Presbyterian
missionary, preaching, among other things, the story of Jonah and the Whale.
But by 1902 he had abandoned Christianity and was teaching new converts the
the ways of the Ghost Dance again.

Before Kicking Bear died, he went out to the grave of his father, Black Fox,
lifted Black Fox's skull from its resting place and dislodged the Crow
arrowhead that had killed him. When Kicking Bear, one of the last of the
Sioux fighting men, died in 1904 at the age of 58, he was buried with this
arrowhead, a symbol of the lost world he had longed so passionately to
resurrect.