Marjorie Doornink's Black Elk's Dream

It's a canvas of significant size, probably three feet or more, up and down and sideways. You don't easily walk through the hall where it's hung without stopping to read what you can beneath the painting. I couldn't, so I did. 

It's striking, reminiscent of the later work of Oscar Howe, a Yanktonia from Crow Creek, South Dakota, who did similar things once he put behind him what he thought of as "traditional Indian painting" and began to explore motion and power in images of his own, instead of the images that satisfied white curators. Here's some of Oscar Howe's later work.

The piece at the top of the page is the one hung in the Plymouth County Museum, the one that stopped me last week when I walked through. It's a bit more formalized, a little less abstract maybe, less spirited; but that the artist didn't know something about Oscar Howe seems impossible. 

That's okay. I wasn't judging her. The text beneath the painting said it was done by a woman named Marjorie Doornink, who titled her work Black Elk's Dream. 

To me, it was joy, not because the painting was so unique, but because a woman with a name like "Doornink"--perfectly Euro-American--had taken the time to think about and then create her own interpretation of the vital dream at the heart of a famous book titled Black Elk Speaks, the memoir of a very religious Lakota man.

That a woman named Marjorie Doornink cared that much about Black Elks's dream just thrilled me. 

Later, I found her obit. There's nothing in it to suggest Native blood or to hint at her being taken with Indian lore or life. She was born in 1925, died in 2018, loved painting and music, graduated from Westmar College, was a much-loved member of LeMars Bible Church, where she and her husband, Wallace, often sang duets. Somehow, this Marjorie simply looks like someone who would care about Black Elk's dream.

Marjorie Doornink could have taken a course in art or painting from an artist named Oscar Howe, who taught art and drawing for years just across the Big Sioux River at the University of South Dakota. She may have known him. Then again, maybe she simply admired the man's work.

I don't care. What happened in the Plymouth County Museum last week when I walked through and saw a big square painting titled Black Elk's Dream, by a woman named Marjorie Doornink, was thrilling, a little lesson in caring, if such lessons can ever be "little."

It's a big painting, hard to miss. There's other things worth seeing at the museum. You should stop by sometime when you've got an hour or so to lose. You just might win. I did.