We Worked and Made Beautiful Things

During the early twentieth century, Kiowa people expertly deployed material culture as symbols of themselves as a people. Beadwork specifically illustrated the significance of kinship and is use and exchange among people, which constructed family relationships and a sense of belongingness. Beadwork and other expressive forms were highlighted in the American Indian Exposition, a fair, and an event, which provided a venue of public display that encouraged intertribal competition. The chapter also examines the representation of young women as American Indian Exposition princesses.

Beyond Feathered War Bonnets

Despite the messages of power and progress that museums, exhibitions, and even Wild West shows created and encouraged, Kiowa and other Native people negotiated and transformed them, making cultural and political spaces and opportunities. Creating these spaces for cultural expression was also work, and Kiowa people engaged in cultural production as labor and as a means to maintain cultural life during the assimilation era. The spaces that Kiowa and other Native people created at the turn of the century would later be taken up by subsequent Kiowa cultural producers.

Introduction

This is an interdisciplinary study of how Kiowa men and women made, wore, displayed and discussed expressive culture. Kiowa men and women used the arts to represent new ways of understanding and representing Kiowa identity that resonated with their changed circumstances during the Progressive Era and twentieth century. Kiowas represented themselves individually and collectively through cultural production that emphasized the significance of change and cultural negotiation, gender, the ties and tensions over tribally specific and intertribal identities.

We’ll Show You Boys How to Dance

Through war-dancer imagery and its display in expressive culture in the Southwest, Kiowas and others created intertribal arenas that stretched beyond Oklahoma, and Kiowas contributed to the making of a larger intertribal, twentieth-century world. Fancy-dance imagery created a contemporary picture of Kiowa young men that was built from older Kiowa constructions of gender and the popular representation of Plains Indians. Painters forged war-dancer imagery though dance, regalia, paintings, and murals.

Circulating Silver

Silversmiths made objects that were beautiful and that could render important symbols of the Native American Church. They communicated ideas and images that served as public representations of this religion as Native people exchanged these objects. The emergence and spread of Peyotism from the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache reservation began to generate new Kiowa and American Indian identities. The jewellery and emerging identities parallel one another. Kiowas and others communicated these changes through painting, photography, clothing, and through jewellery itself.

Conclusion

Kiowas communicated the importance of their identity though expressive culture in new arenas. Expressive culture provided sites to express what nationhood meant in the past as well as what it meant to be Kiowa during the twentieth century. Painters, bead workers, and others debated these ideas with one another though visual culture. They imbued dresses, dance clothes, and adornment with substantial meaning with regard to gender, family, intertribal and intratribal spheres.