October 16, 2003

Plains Folk: Indian Rodeo

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

A funny thing happened on the way to the disappearance of the Indians of the North American plains. Citizens and officials in both the United States and Canada agreed, of course, that the natives were, as they commonly said, a vanishing race. Individual Indians might be saved, it was thought, by making them take up farming. Should the parents resist, then their children might yet be salvaged, if spirited away to boarding schools and made to forget they were Kiowa, Chippewa or Crow.

Nothing worked out as planned. A generation ago, when we told this story, we got caught up in the victim thing, treating Indians merely as the objects of abuse by whites. Nowadays, as Indian populations swell and Indian reservations begin to look like the future’s engines of regional renewal, we tell a different story. It is a story of perseverance and survival. It is the story of how every time white lawmakers and bureaucrats devised some scheme to erase tribal identities; Indians turned it around to serve their own ends. It is a coyote kind of story.

Allison Fuss Mellis, a Notre Dame graduate now teaching at the U.S. Naval Academy, tells a chapter of this story in a new book from the University of Oklahoma Press. It’s called "Riding Buffaloes and Broncos: Rodeo and Native Traditions in the Northern Great Plains."

The argument, in brief, is this. Plains Indians, as equestrian peoples, were not inclined to farm but took rather readily to animal husbandry. "Horses and later cattle," writes Mellis, "allowed them to demonstrate Plains Indian virtues such as bravery, generosity in gift giving, and respect for the natural world." Moreover, "rodeo resonated with their own cultural priorities of being with family and community members, in the outdoors, and on horseback."

Once Indians were on reservations, white officials outlawed their traditional gatherings for religious and social purposes. On the other hand, officials permitted and even instigated certain other gatherings, particularly agricultural fairs, intended to showcase agricultural progress. Indians didn’t care much for the exhibits, but they made the fairs into grand reunions that reinforced tribal ties and old values. By the 1920s they also had injected horse races and rodeo competitions into the fair programs. Indian Affairs officials were losing control.

Then in the 1930s, the so-called Indian New Deal encouraged the tribes to recapture tribal culture and authority. The Crow (one of three groups emphasized in Mellis’s study, along with the Lakota and the Northern Cheyenne) even got one of their own, Robert Yellowtail, appointed Indian agent. Dancing reappeared on the programs of public Indian gatherings, thus grafting powwows onto rodeos. From then right down to the present day, rodeos and powwows are the most common and visible types of tribal and intertribal gatherings on the plains.

By the 1960s, an all-Indian rodeo circuit had emerged. The Crow declared their fair rodeo to be an all-Indian event in 1962. Indian cowboys such as the Ogallala, Howard Hunter, acquired legendary status at home and modest celebrity in the wider world. In 1976 the first Indian National Finals Rodeo was held. A key organizer of that annual event was Clem McSpadden, a mixed-blood Cherokee and former U.S. congressman from Oklahoma.

That happened in public view, while back on the reservation, rodeo continued to regenerate itself by traditional means. Mellis writes, "it is usually older male relatives such as grandfathers, fathers, uncles, and brothers who provide most of the rodeo training." Thus rodeo not only helped to revive tribal identities, it also fostered family ties.

"Riding Buffaloes and Broncos" is not a perfect book. It is fascinating, but not quite transporting. It is, however, a book that serves admirably the cause of helping plains folk understand one another better.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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