Historical Geography

Born in 1869 in present-day Wyoming, the Oglala Lakota artist Amos Bad Heart Bull was one of the most prolific indigenous artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His medium was ledger art, a genre of Native artwork in which different kinds of books, including ledger books, became drawing surfaces. By the time of his death in 1911, Bad Heart Bull's ledger book contained over four hundred drawings that provide a nearly unparalleled record of Lakota history.

His work first appeared in print in 1967, when the University of Nebraska Press published A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, a [End Page 297] large-scale reproduction of his drawings that included an introduction by the writer Mari Sandoz and companion essays by the ethnographer Helen Blish. Now, fifty years later, the press has published a new edition of Bad Heart Bull's work that includes new essays by scholars Emily Levine and Candace Greene.

The impetus for this new edition was not only the fiftieth anniversary of a significant publication, but also the discovery, in 2011, of the original glass negatives of photographs of the drawings. The first edition of the book had relied on photographs taken by Blish when she borrowed the ledger book from Bad Heart Bull's sister, Dollie Pretty Cloud, in the late 1920s. Pretty Cloud's family had buried the original ledger book with Pretty Cloud when she passed away, and so the press reprinted the photographs when it published the 1967 edition. Because the original edition relied on reprints, elements of Bad Heart Bull's drawings, particularly the textual annotations identifying individuals and locations, were unclear.

In 2011, a few years before the anniversary, the director of the Plains Indian Ledger Art Digital Publishing Project at the University of California–San Diego learned that the original glass negatives were in southern California. Blish's advisor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln had evidently taken the glass negatives to Scripps College in Claremont. The project director arranged the purchase of the glass negatives and their storage at the National Anthropological Archives in Washington, DC. Nearly all of the original negatives of Bad Heart Bull's four hundred drawings survived.

The fiftieth-anniversary edition of his work reproduces his drawings from the glass negatives and relays new insights about the significance of his work to understanding Lakota history in the Great Plains. Levine's essay about Bad Heart Bull and Blish draws from the latest scholarship in Lakota history to situate his life within the longer trajectory of Lakota history dating back to the eighteenth century. It explains the genealogy of Bad Heart Bull's family, its position in Oglala society, and why Bad Heart Bull had access to first-person testimonies about significant events in Lakota history. The background information about Blish reveals how her work anticipated the ethnohistorical methods of the mid-twentieth century, especially in her recognition of Bad Heart Bull's work as a historical record.

The introduction by Greene provides further context about the significance [End Page 298] of his work. As Greene explains, Sandoz and Blish understood Bad Heart Bull's drawings as the product of an individual artist, yet the drawings were the result of a collaborative effort. He consulted Lakota elders about particular incidents and showed them his drawings to make sure they were accurate. Greene also establishes the uniqueness of Bad Heart Bull's work in the field of ledger art. He was a "master of visual storytelling" (xxxi) who recounted single events through sets of drawings. He also annotated his drawings in detail. While Lakota winter counts, or calendars, sometimes contained brief annotations, Bad Heart Bull wrote down extended descriptions of the illustrations using a writing system developed by a missionary on the Pine Ridge Reservation. As Greene concludes, these annotations reveal Bad Heart Bull's efforts to record his own people's history.

This new edition reproduces Blish's original text from the 1967 edition and keeps her arrangement of the drawings. Blish had organized the drawings into categories—"Events Perhaps Earlier than 1856," "Sioux-Crow Fights," and others—that roughly followed the order of the drawings in the original ledger book. Compared to images in the original edition, the new reproductions of the drawings make Bad Heart Bull's writing and annotations much clearer. The new edition also provides a sharper view of the iconography in his drawings, especially in his maps. Scattered throughout the drawings were eleven illustrations that Blish described as "topographical" illustrations. They include maps of the Little Bighorn battle site, the Black Hills, Fort Robinson, and battles with Crow and American forces. Here especially, the new reproductions allow readers to see detailed features of local places across Lakota territory.

Bad Heart Bull's extensive drawings document a period of loss and dispossession for the Lakota people, encompassing the Lakota victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn but also the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 and the removal to reservations. Sandoz and Blish both describe how Bad Heart Bull directly experienced American settler colonialism over the course of his lifetime. His drawings document the period that Blish calls "Early Social Life and Its Reorganization," when reservation agents sought to erase Lakota religious and cultural practices. Yet his last drawings in the ledger book also show the Lakota people holding on to ceremonies and traditions, such as the Grass Dance and giveaways. These later drawings, as much as the depictions of the Little Bighorn, [End Page 299] provide an important view of Lakota history and its continuation in the twentieth century.

This fiftieth-anniversary edition makes Bad Heart Bull's art and his work as a historian available to new audiences. It will remain a valuable resource for scholars in multiple fields, including Native American history, historical geography, and art history.