Benjamin G. Rader

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Benjamin G. Rader | 'The Greatest Drama in Indian Life': Experiments in Native American Identity and Resistance at the Haskell Institute Homecoming of 1926 | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.4 | The History Cooperative

"The Greatest Drama in Indian Life": Experiments in Native American Identity and Resistance at the Haskell Institute Homecoming of 1926

This paper argues that at the Haskell Institute homecoming of 1926, Native Americans seized on the opportunities afforded by the occasion to revisit and experiment with their identities and to dramatize, ritualistically and symbolically, their resistance to white society and culture.

Este artículo sostiene que durante las celebración anual de 1926 en el Haskell Institute los Nativos Americanos aprovecharon las opportunidades que les brindaba esa ocasión para revisar y experimentar sus identidades y dramatizar ritual y simbólicamente su reistencia a la sociedad y cultura blanca.

THOUSANDS GATHERED in the tiny college town of Lawrence, Kansas, on Halloween weekend of 27–30 October 1926, to observe and participate in the Haskell Institute homecoming. Billed by a newspaper as "THE BIGGEST POWWOW IN HISTORY," the homecoming incorporated aspects of both Euro-American and Native American festive traditions.¹ From the white tradition came the homecoming itself, the Indian boarding school's first since its founding in 1884. The festival also included another white cultural invention, a football game. With its newly built stadium, Haskell was, for the first time, able to lure a major college football power to its home grounds. Composed of both Indians and whites, the spectators thoroughly enjoyed the 36–0 romp by the Haskell Institute Indians over the Bucknell College Bisons from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. In addition to the games, the homecoming also included a twofold dedication ceremony for a newly-constructed arch—a memorial to those who had died on behalf of the United States in the Great War—and for the magnificent new football stadium of concrete and steel that seated 10,500 spectators.

At the center of the homecoming, however, was a festivity springing from a newly developing Native institution, the intertribal powwow. More than 1,600 Native Americans from all over the West made their way to Lawrence. On a forty-acre stretch of prairie set aside for them on the Haskell grounds, they pitched tents and tepees, feasted on buffalo, beef, and "squaw bread," drank red soda pop, visited, danced, held a parade through the streets of downtown Lawrence, and attended special events scheduled for them by Haskell's officials. In addition, literally thousands of whites came. One estimate put the total number of visitors at 150,000; another said it was 20,000, which was apparently much closer to the truth.²

William Jacobs, a Sioux, president of the Haskell student body and a grandson of Sitting Bull, suggested an important theoretical approach for understanding the deeper meanings of the great Haskell homecoming. He told a large audience at the dedicatory ceremonies of the new stadium that "the greatest drama of Indian life is being acted before your eyes today."³ For both Native Americans and whites, the homecoming dramatized a rich, sometimes contradictory assortment of symbolic and ritual meanings. To Euro-Americans, for example, among other planned activites, the dedication ceremonies of the great stadium and memorial arch, Indians playing the white man's game of football, and Native Americans parading through downtown Lawrence provided multiple visual and aural dramatizations of society's hierarchy while simultaneously affirming white authority over Native peoples. Rather than a consideration of what whites garnered from the event, however, this essay is primarily concerned with what the drama meant to Native Americans.

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