A World of Knowledge. Recreating Lakota Horse Effigies
Résumé
I met Wallace "Butch" Thunder Hawk on a baseball diamond in Mandan, North Dakota, in 2017. His team's jerseys were imprinted with a warrior on horse of his own design. At the Indian technical college where he teaches art, at a local fair where he sold drawings inspired by ledger art, in the pamphlets announcing funerals that a local undertaker serving Native American families liked to adorn with Indian designs, at the local historical society, I came across Butch and his art. Though a fixture of the rather informal local "tribal art" scene, he once told me: "People say I'm famous, but I'm not," While he never reached the status of artists Oscar Howe or Arthur Amiotte, his role models, he is a recognized authority on Lakota art and culture, and representative of a category of locally respected Native artists that staff tribal colleges and have enjoyed some recognition at the national level. Butch's productions have been exhibited in his home state of North Dakota, but also at Thomas Jefferson's home in Virginia, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas, and Harvard's Peabody Museum. Butch's itinerary could be understood as the making of a local career in traditional Native American arts and crafts.¹ A full reconstitution of this itinerary, and of the specific and nonspecific travails of becoming a tribal artist, however, is outside of the scope of this article. Here, I want to focus on a specific piece that Butch started making in the 1990s: the horse memorial effigy. Such effigies were once carved out of cottonwood branches by Butch's ancestors to honor the memory of a horse of theirs that was wounded or killed in battle. These sticks were exhibited during dances, and even ridden on.² Butch now makes these effigies for museums and horse owners, both Lakota and non-Lakota. His total output is not much more than twenty pieces. Yet his production gives a fascinating insight into the institutional and social framework
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