Producer unknown to us
Drawing
Americas, USA, South Dakota, Rosebud Reservation, Brulé / Sioux
Prior to 1911
Paper
Frederick Weygold (painter, photographer)
Purchased by the museum from Weygold in 1911
NAm 02097
Short Bull's drawing depicts a procession on its way to the Sun Dance site. The annual Sun Dance remains to be the most important ceremony of the Plains cultures until today. Through a deprivation-filled sacrificial ritual (often involving self-mortification), the community's bond with supernatural forces and the cosmos is sealed. Despite prohibitions by the U.S. government 1883–1934, the ceremony has survived. Today, the Sun Dance is also used as a group therapy against addiction and to honor Indigenous war veterans.
Short Bull was a political and spiritual leader of the Sičaηgu (Brulé) Lakota. While touring Europe with "Buffalo Bill's" Wild West Show in 1891, he began recording his experiences in "ledger art." The regional pictograph style of old leather painting was, thus, continued in drawings with copying pencil in notebooks.
Frank Usbeck