After his remarkable eight-second ride at the 1996 Indian
National Finals Rodeo, an elated American Indian world champion
bullrider from Pine Ridge, South Dakota, threw his cowboy hat in
the air. Everyone in the almost exclusively Indian audience erupted
in applause. Over the course of the twentieth century, rodeos have
joined tribal fairs and powwows as events where American Indians
gather to celebrate community and equestrian competition. In Riding
Buffaloes and Broncos, Allison Fuss Mellis reveals how northern
Plains Indians have used rodeo to strengthen tribal and intertribal
ties and Native solidarity.
In the late nineteenth century, Indian agents outlawed most
traditional Native gatherings but allowed rodeo, which they viewed
as a means to assimilate Indians into white culture. Mistakenly,
they treated rodeo as nothing more than a demonstration of ranching
skills. Yet through selective adaptation, northern Plains horsemen
and audiences used rodeo to sidestep federally sanctioned
acculturation. Rodeo now enabled Indians to reinforce their
commitment to the very Native values--a reverence for horses,
family, community, generosity, and competition--that federal
agencies sought to destroy.
Mellis has mined archival sources and interviewed American
Indian rodeo participants and spectators throughout the northern
Great Plains, Southwest, and Canada, including Crow, Northern
Cheyenne, and Lakota reservations. The book features numerous
photographs of Indian rodeos from the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries and maps illustrating the all-Indian rodeo circuit in the
United States and Canada.
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