Amos Bad Heart Bull
Amos Bad Heart Bull (bison bull with the bad heart), also Amos Bad Heart Buffalo , at times Eagle Bonnet (eagle hood) and Eagle Lance (eagle lance), Indian name Tatanka Chante Shicha , (* 1869 in the plains of later Nebraska ; † 3. August 1913 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota ) was a painter and historian of the Oglala - Lakota - Sioux . 407 pictures of him, drawn and painted on paper in the so-called ledger art , have survived as reproductions, on which he depicted events in the life of his people during the 19th century and the first reservation period. To make a living, Amos Bad Heart Bull has been a scout in the US Army and ranchers, among other things.
family
Amos Bad Heart Bull's family belonged to the Soreback Band led by He Dog (Shunka Bloka), a division of the Oglala camp circle, of which there were seven in all. His father Bad Heart Bull senior, brother of He Dog and nephew of Red Cloud (Maxpiya Luta), was an Oglala historian, who annually recorded the various events in tribal life with drawings on a buffalo skin. These pictographic representations were called winter counts and were of the utmost importance for the Indian experience of the world. Amos Bad Heart Bull's mother was called Red Blanket (Tasina Luta Win) and also Edith Bad Heart Bull.
When, after the Battle of Little Bighorn, the great persecution of US troops began to force the still free Lakota to live in the Great Sioux Reservation , the Soreback Band surrendered in the wake of Crazy Horse (Tashunka Witko) on May 6th 1877 in Fort Robinson and was settled with the Red Cloud Agency. At the end of the year she fled to Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotanka) in Canada . After living conditions there had deteriorated more and more, the Soreback Band returned to the United States in 1880, surrendered to Fort Keogh in Montana and settled with the Standing Rock Agency. When the Great Sioux Reservation was split into seven reservations in 1889, it moved to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Personal experiences and deeds of Amos from these times are not known.
Career
In 1890, Amos Bad Heart Bull Scout was in the US Army and stationed at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. There he bought a so-called ledger book in the nearby prairie town of Crawford in a clothing store, which was filled with his pictures in the following years. Amos Bad Heart Bull was not the first Indian to work in the Ledger Art, but the first of his tribe to use paper as a medium. During his military service he learned English and on his papers you can read some textual explanations in this language.
From about 1892 on, Amos Bad Heart Bull lived and worked on the Pine Ridge Reservation. He was there - at times probably - with the Indian police and also worked as a rancher. He married and had a daughter (Victoria) who lived only a few months. His wife, whose name is not known, died around 1910.
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During the years in Pine Ridge, Amos drew and painted Bad Heart Bull in his ledger, which consisted of 300 sheets, to which he added more, ending up with over 400 pictures depicting the social life of the Sioux and their recent battles ( Battle of Rosebud Creek , Battle of Little Bighorn) on the prairie.
Amos Bad Heart Bull was well known to the Oglala and certainly also to the other Lakota tribes through his work, which was certainly often presented on the most varied of occasions. And so the American painter and ethnographer Frederick Weygold (1870–1941) heard from him in the summer of 1909 during a visit to the Pine Ridge Reservation and noted in a note Tatanka Chante Shicha, Bad Heart Bull, a good painter. The two men probably did not meet each other personally, otherwise the note would have been a little longer and in the photo series that Weygold took of the country and its people in Pine Ridge, he would certainly have also photographed Amos Bad Heart Bull, but what apparently didn't happen.
After the death of Amos Bad Heart Bull in August 1913, his sister Fanny Bad Heart Bull, also Pretty Cloud, inherited his book with all the leaves.
Addendum
The American teacher and ethnologist Helen Heather Blish (1898–1941), who studied with Hartley Burr Alexander (1873–1939) at the University of Nebraska , then saved the work of Amos Bad Heart Bull for posterity. Between 1927 and 1940 she borrowed the book from Fanny Bad Heart Bull many times and took black and white photographs of the pictures, 30 of which were then colored in some way. Helen Heather Blish used the images for her master's thesis A Native Pictographic Historical Record of the Oglala Dakota , which was also published as a book, where Amos Bad Heart Bull is named as a co-author. - When Fanny Bad Heart Bull died in 1947, the book was added to her grave at her request. The request of the University of Nebraska in 1959 to retrieve the book so that the pictures could be retaken was rejected by the relatives.
literature
- Marc C. Carnes: American National Biography: Supplement 2 , Oxford University Press, New York 2005
- Richard Hook: Warriors at the Little Bighorn 1876 , Osprey Publishing Ltd., Oxford 2004
- Arnold Krupat: Native American Studies , University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2002
- G. Malcolm Lewis: Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Nativ American Mapmaking an Map Use , University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1998
- Richard G. Hardorff (Ed.): Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight: New Sources of Indians-Military History , University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 1997
- Russel Freedman: The Life and Death of Crazy Horse . Drawings by Amos Bad Heart Bull, Holiday House, New York 1996
- Amos Bad Heart Bull, Helen Heather Blish: A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux , University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 1967
- Wolfgang Haberland, Frederick Weygold: Ich, Dakota - Pine Ridge Reservation 1909 , Verlag Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-496-01038-X
Web links
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- The University of Oklahoma Notes (manuscript) on Amos Bad Heart Bull (Buffalo) by Stanley Vestal alias Walter Stanley Cambell, mainly dealing with the Battle of Little Bighorn
- Literature by and about Amos Bad Heart Bull in the WorldCat bibliographic database
Remarks
- ↑ The name has not been translated completely correctly from Indian. It would be more precise to speak of a sad, serious or melancholy heart. But in no way can one infer from him a character or health deficiency.
- ^ Wolfgang Haberland, Frederick Weygold: Ich, Dakota: Pine Ridge Reservation 1909 (1986), page 9
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bad Heart Bull, Amos |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bad Heart Buffalo, Amos; Eagle bonnet; Eagle Lance; Tatanka Chante Shicha |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Indian painter and historian of the Oglala-Lakota-Sioux |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1869 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Nebraska |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 3, 1913 |
| Place of death | Pine Ridge Reservation , South Dakota |