A Kiowa’s Odyssey: A Sketchbook From Ft. Marion considers a 32-page sketchbook of drawings by the Kiowa warrior Etahdleuh Doanmoe, which chronicle the experience of seventy-two Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Caddo who were captured at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma in 1875 during uprisings associated with the Plains Wars. To stem further uprisings, the Indian prisoners were exiled to Ft. Marion, Florida, where, under the direction of Lt. Richard Henry Pratt, they were made to adopt Western values, appearance, behavior, language, and beliefs. Etahdleuh’s drawings illustrate the capture of the Indians, their passage to Florida, and their time at Fort Marion.
The sketchbook is attributed to Etahdleuh Doanmoe (1854-1888), a mixed blood Kiowa-Mexican who was among the seventy-two detainees. It was made at Ft. Marion in 1877, presumably for Pratt, who ultimately regarded Etahdleuh as one of his most successful students. While other sketchbooks and hundreds of individual sketches survive from Ft. Marion, this one is among a select group that Pratt kept and the only one to which Pratt added type-written captions that he composed. Pratt gave the sketchbook to his son Mason, who subsequently reorganized it into a album and supplemented it with a preface and photos of Etahdleuh. Thus, the sketchbook represents a layering of “voices” that span more than a century.
Despite the importance of this sketchbook, it has not been fully understood, largely because prior to scholarly study, it was disassembled and divided between two institutions: Dickinson College and Yale University. This exhibition is the first to reunite the materials at Dickinson and Yale and to properly reconstruct the original sketchbook and the subsequent album.