Small Wonder(s)--Oscar Howe and truth to power

If Oscar Howe’s Wounded Knee Massacre (1960) is rarely seen these days, it’s because Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Presidential Museum is getting a renovation. Right now, having a look at Howe’s stunning work is impossible.

But even when it’s on display, few of us may want to look at it because what happened at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890 is something most of us don’t want to know. Worse, many don’t care.

Howe’s terrifying painting is not a bit understated. Bluecoats stand above a pit and pick off Lakota warriors like fish in a barrel. The landscape behind them is littered with horror as rogue troops kill women and children in chillingly cold blood. A soldier fires the Hotchkiss (“the gun that fires in the morning and kills the next day” the Sioux called it) at a band already decimated.

Howe’s work, when he finished, got some ugly reviews because some still bought the government’s version of the story: what happened was a battle, not a massacre, and those savages were to fault for hiding arms because had they listened to the Seventh Cavalry’s orders to lay down their arms, there would have been no trouble. You know.

Oscar Howe’s startling depiction shows obscene slaughter. Little more than a century ago, right there beside Wounded Knee Creek, the U. S. Cavalry murdered the men, women, and children of Big Foot’s band, as many as 300.

Howe, whose Dakota name was Trader Boy, grew up on the Crow Creek Reservation, where his grandmother told him stories of the trouble, stories she remembered by wounds she herself suffered. Oscar Howe went to boarding school, then served three years in combat during the Second World War, returned home, and eventually spent 25 years as Artist-in-Residence just down the road at the University of South Dakota, where his art won all kinds of awards and where you can still see 200 of his paintings in a gallery that bears his name.

That his Wounded Knee Massacre is hung at the Eisenhower Museum is a strange story. Oscar Howe was chosen to be featured on This is Your Life, an old reality TV show that surprised well-known men and women by bringing in long-forgotten friends and acquaintances. The show’s staff purchased Wounded Knee Massacre, then gave it, in Howe’s name, as a gift to then President Eisenhower.

The truth? Wounded Knee Massacre is an unlikely piece to hang above a fireplace. It made a perplexing gift, I’m sure. It was and is very disturbing and meant to be.

Before the Eisenhower Museum’s renovation, a sign beside the painting explained Wounded Knee, starting this way: “During a meeting between U.S. Army representatives and members of the Sioux tribe,. . .a series of misunderstandings caused tensions between the participants.”

The U.S. Cavalry arrayed around Big Foot’s people was the largest gathering of fighting men since the Civil War. That was the backdrop for “a series of misunderstandings” at “a meeting.” That thinnest of descriptions is not the rhetoric of Oscar Howe’s memorable work.

When the staff asked Howe’s wife to choose one of her husband’s paintings as a gift for the President, she chose Wounded Knee Massacre, an odd choice?

Well, maybe. But I’d like to believe Mrs. Howe showed a bit of Old Testament prophet when she made the choice. She knew her husband’s anguish at the slaughter. She knew white folks who hated what he’d put on canvas. I’d like to think she looked over what there was of his work on hand, and chose Wounded Knee, believing, perhaps, that gift was their way—her husband’s and her own—to speak vital grinding truth to power. Give the President Wounded Knee.

It’ll be some time before the renovated museum opens. You’ll probably have to search for Wounded Knee Massacre, just as you would have in the old place--if, in fact, it’s on display at all.

Millions of Americans don’t have a clue about Wounded Knee, but then tens of millions don’t care either because hundreds of millions would much rather commemorate “the festive cowboy” and the kindler, gentler stories of the American west, stories which are ours too, in this place we lovingly, and sometimes blindly, call “Siouxland.”

It happened 128 years ago, December, 1890, not all that far away.