By McAYE FEGLER, CSC COLLEGE RELATIONS
CHADRON – To honor National Native American Heritage Month at Chadron State College, the Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center is featuring exhibits of work by Nathan Blindman, a CSC alum, and the late Amos Bad Heart Bull. The exhibit is open until Dec. 13, Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4 p.m., except the week of Thanksgiving, Nov. 25-29.
Blindman is a creative artist from the southwest corner of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He is a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe and is inspired by his family to continue creating art.
“It was through my oldest brother’s encouragement and support from our mother that I embarked on pursuing my higher education in art, 2-D drawing, and painting,” Blindman said.
Blindman graduated from Chadron State College in 1991 with a bachelor’s degree in art as a nontraditional student. Before attending CSC, he graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in 1986 with a Certificate of Fine Arts, specifically two-dimensional.
Blindman has entered multiple art shows at the local level and his art has won placings at the Red Cloud Art Show on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
Blindman was hesitant to accept the invitation to share an exhibit at the Mari Sandoz Center.
“At the time I received the invitation to exhibit at the Mari Sandoz Center, I hadn’t put a one-person show together for over 20 years, so it was a challenge. I had to think about it, then decided to accept the offer,” Blindman said.
Blindman plans to bring more pieces to the exhibition as he finishes them.
“This opportunity has inspired me to get back into the art show scene again,” Blindman said.
Bad Heart Bull was born in 1869 and died in 1913. A relative of Crazy Horse, Bad Heart Bull, lived on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and met his wife there. They had one child together, who died during infancy.
Bad Heart Bull enlisted at Fort Robinson as a scout for the U.S. Army in the 1890s.
He produced approximately 415 ledger drawings in a book between 1890 and 1913. The book was passed to his sister, Dolly Pretty Cloud, after his death. The book was buried with Pretty Cloud after she died in 1947.
Helen Blish, an alum of the University of Nebraska, learned about Bad Heart Bull’s book in 1927. Blish received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska in 1922. She returned to the university for her master’s degree in 1928 and completed her thesis on Bad Heart Bull’s drawings.
Blish lived on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for about four years and learned about Native American culture. She arranged to borrow the book from Pretty Cloud to further investigate Bad Heart Bull’s work. Working from prints, Blish produced a manuscript with interpretations of each drawing based on interviews conducted at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Before returning the book, Blish had the drawings photographed in black and white to accompany her findings and interpretations.
In 1967, the University of Nebraska Press published A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux, a fully illustrated manuscript of Bad Heart Bull’s drawings and Blish’s findings.
The work of Bad Heart Bull inspired the art in the East Chamber of Nebraska's Capitol, where one of Blish’s mentors was in charge of thematic design.
Eighteen of Bad Heart Bull’s prints are on display at CSC. They were photographed from Sioux Indian Painting Part I and Part II, two large-format books printed in 1938 in France. One book is numbered 146/400, and the other is 255/400. Both are signed and in the Sandoz Center's archives. One of the books includes an undated, typed document signed by Mari Sandoz.
Bad Heart Bull’s drawings provide overviews of Lakota life. The drawings represent warfare, religion, domestic and social life, hunting, ranching, and other events that have either been experienced or passed on through storytelling. Some drawings have inscriptions in Lakota depicting the people involved or the event that is taking place.