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Iron Tail (1862-1955), Sioux Veteran of Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee / Brummett Echohawk

Essay/Description

For this portrait, Brummett Echohawk (Pawnee) chose to depict Oglala Lakota Chief Iron Tail realistically, creating a humanizing and empathetic likeness. Chief Iron Tail had been forced to appear in the notorious Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, an exploitative touring exhibition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that was intended to display Indigenous Americans as the vanquished, racially inferior Other.1 Chief Iron Tail’s image was widely documented and distributed by white society during this period for entertainment. In fact, Buffalo Bill’s colonial propaganda caught the attention of aspiring American sculptor James Earle Fraser, who combined the likenesses of three prominent but unrelated Indigenous Chiefs—Two Moons, Big Tree, and Iron Tail—to create the profile image on the 1913 Buffalo Indian nickel.2

Echohawk’s true-to-life drawings are an extension of his World War II battlefield sketches, which were widely referenced by contemporary media for honestly capturing the reality and brutality of war. In this portrait, his meticulous attention to accuracy and detail can be strongly juxtaposed with the extractive, inaccurate, and voyeuristic representations produced by non-Indigenous artists throughout Chief Iron Tail’s lifetime.

In the same way that Gilcrease’s collection of Indigenous paintings upends clichéd Western depictions by providing decades of visual history and narrative-based self-representations, Echohawk’s portrait lends a restorative quality to images of Iron Tail.

—Jordan Poorman Cocker, Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Scholar for Indigenous Painting Collection Research, 2021

This text was developed from an interview with author and attorney Walter Echohawk, nephew of Brummett Echohawk, by Jordan Poorman Cocker, June 21, 2021

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1 Dreesbach, Colonial Exhibitions.
2 MacDonald, “The Buffalo Nickel Indian,” 79.

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Title(s): 
Iron Tail (1862-1955), Sioux Veteran of Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee
Creator(s): 
Brummett Echohawk (Artist)
Culture: 
Native American; Pawnee
Date: 
1955
Materials/Techniques: 
graphite on illustration board
Paper/Support: 
Portrait; single-sided 1.832-1.842mm White colored illustration board
Classification: 
Object Type: 
Credit Line: 
Gift of Otha H. Grimes
Accession No: 
13.1260
Previous Number(s): 
1981; 1327.1260; 28930
Department: 
Not On View

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