Spirit Beings and Sun Dancers: Black Hawks Vision of the Lakota World by Arthur Amiotte


Spirit Beings and Sun Dancers: Black Hawks Vision of the Lakota World
Title : Spirit Beings and Sun Dancers: Black Hawks Vision of the Lakota World
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0807614653
ISBN-10 : 9780807614655
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 180
Publication : First published December 1, 2000

During the winter of 1880-81, Black Hawk, a Lakota artist living on the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation, drew seventy-six vivid images depicting complex scenes of ceremonial activity, personal visions, historical events, and nature studies. Having recently emerged from obscurity, Black Hawk's drawing book now stands as the most complete visual record extant of Lakota art of the early reservation period (1875-95). It is published here in full, for the first time, with fine quality color plates of each drawing. Detailed commentary accompanies the drawings, providing insight into Lakota religion, art, and culture in the nineteenth century. Some of Black Hawk's illustrations are the only known drawings of ceremonies described in ethnographic works such as Black Elk Speaks , the famous account of visions experienced by Lakota holy man Black Elk. The ceremonies depicted in Black Hawk's drawings include the Sun Dance, buffalo transformation ceremonies, and ceremonies honoring the sacred pipe. He also recorded scenes of Lakota encounters with the Crow, of buffalo hunting, and of wildlife. An invaluable contribution to our knowledge of Native American history and art, Black Hawk's drawing book is a window unto a complex and eloquent world. 76 color illustrations, 20 b/w illustrations.

Spirit Beings and Sun Dancers: Black Hawks Vision of the Lakota World Reviews

  • Becca

    Black Hawk was an artist from the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. He created a portfolio of ledger drawings that reflects the spiritual world, the ritual practices, the warrior culture, and the ethnoscientific observations of a Lakota medicine man in the winter of 1880-1881.

    Berlo reads each of the drawings with a careful eye, placing them in historical, cultural, and ecological context. "Lakota art and language are multilayered, interlocking practices. In art, complex visual metaphors can be constructed, some of which are dependent upon the profound knowledge of artistic antecedents, the cosmological and epistemological underpinnings of the culture, and the syntax and structure of the language." (151)

    This book is an arresting glimpse of a worldview-- part of a long tradition of pictographic mnemonics. But the text doesn't read like an epitaph-- the artist Black Hawk's careful observation of clothing, animal behavior, relationships, dream-telling make his artist's point of view feel alive. "Plains artists were not merely literal historians; they were deeply spiritual men and artists in cultures where visual images and visual metaphors are powerfully meaningful. So indigenous history is a concept elastic enough to include records of spiritual encounters as well as intercultural ones, as seen in Black Hawk's drawings of Spirit beings." (150)

    It is easy for books about American Indian art to exist only in a story about loss. But it is fruitful to look at this art as the "expressive work of creative individuals participating in a well established tradition," (152) and one that continues today in music, language, ritual performance, oral history, filmmaking, and myriad other media. "Native American scholars, poets, and artists continue to insist that objects are only part of the story and that historical objects will be used, understood, reabsorbed, and transformed through the minds and hands of every new generation. Only through the continuing actions of each generation will the past stay alive." (152)

    I have always been fascinated with the portals into worldview that seemingly simple artifacts create. I love Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's books about every day objects, and the way that the daily life and work of people can spring suddenly into vividness through a close and careful reading of their material culture. I appreciated this book for the same reason. These deceptively simple drawings, are a portal into the Lakota world – a peep hole.

    "We examine the nature of life through ceremony, vision quest, mythology, and our history… And traditional ceremonies, we go back in time and start of the creation of the world, and then proceeded through mythological and sacred time to arrive, once again, where we started. It's a cyclical kind of journey… Ceremonies remind us of that process – – not as individuals, but collectively as a whole people – – of moving from the very origins of the universe and this planet to where we are now. That's a continual mode or way of looking at the world. We're constantly involved in that process." Arthur Amiotte, Page 151

    I am interested in the way traditional knowledge is passed on in a modern world. The author notes that "Lakota artists are very conscious of their artistic genealogy." Page 153. Contemporary artists are consciously in conversation with their literal and artistic ancestors. "These images will continue to nourish successive generations of Lakota historians, poets, religious practitioners, and artists well into the 21st-century, just as they will move and inspire all of us to seek the energizing power of great works of art." (155)