Historically, the Great Plains has a rich, deep and diverse heritage. Evidence of the first Native Americans can be traced back approximately 15,000 years. Some sources estimate human habitation of the Americas to be as early as 25,000 years ago. Although considered part of the New World and today usually associated with high-tech urban culture, the Great Plains has a wealth of impressive archaeological sites.

Sites range from evidence of skeletal remains and hunting implements of the hunter gatherer societies of the Paleoindian to complex settlements such as Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. Dramatic climatic upheaval during the last Ice Age and the consequent changes to the seasons and available food sources led to broad adaptive changes in the lifestyles of the various Paleoindian cultures.

The domestication of plants laid the foundation for the development of agricultural based societies. The Hohokam, Mogollan and Anasazi emerged as contemporaries of the Maya and Aztec civilisations of Central America. Today the remains of Anasazi cliff dwellings and other more complex settlements are evident throughout the southern Great Plains region, particularly in the Four Corners region of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado.

The Anasazi built complex settlements based on religious, trade, cultural and political identities. The settlements at Chaco Canyon are distinguished by their masonry, irrigation systems and substantial road networks. Far from being detached archaeological sites, these ancient sites form a vital part of Native American life. Very few associate the United States of America with such dramatic physical evidence of their ancient past. Today the descendants of the Anasazi and their contemporaries live throughout the pueblos and desert region of the southern Great Plains.

The arrival of Europeans in the New World in 1492 dramatically influenced the face and soul of Native America and by the early part of the nineteenth century explorers, trappers and hunters were moving steadily into the northern Great Plains. The introduction of European diseases such as cholera, smallpox and syphilis decimated the Native American population. Some estimates are as high as fifty percent of the population. It is unimaginable that it was a subject of European debate and finally took a papal decree in 1512 to acknowledge Native Americans as human beings.

The potent force of colonisation and the doctrine of manifest destiny is perhaps best exemplified by the policies of President Andrew Jackson. His 1830 Indian Removal Act forced the relocation of eastern Indian tribes to territory west of the Mississippi River in present day Oklahoma without regard to lifestyle, agricultural or nomadic, cultural and religious identities, traditional enmities or political persuasion.

In 1838, 8,000 Cherokees were forcibly relocated from their traditional lands west to Indian Territory. On the 800 mile walk 4,000 Cherokees died. In an attempt to dominate the mineral rich Navajo lands in the southern Great Plains, the Navajo’s were forced to walk 300 miles to the barren Bosque Redondo in present day New Mexico. Many Navajo died en-route. The memory of these and similar events is still very much a part of Native America’s consciousness.

The 1830 Indian Removal Act formalised the setting up of reservations for the Native American population and over the next five decades it would spread across the whole of the Great Plains region as westward expansion grew in numbers.

The powerful and nomadic Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone, Crow, Comanche and Kiowa tribes considered the Great Plains their homeland. Although they inhabited and roamed freely over this region for more than a hundred years, each day and each season represented a new challenge for survival with prayer offered frequently to Wakan Tanka and the mysteries of Mother Earth.

The introduction of the horse by the Spanish into the Great Plains region led these people to become fiercely independent. Comparatively untouched by westward expansion during the early 1800’s, the Great Plains became the home for mountain trappers who lived a reclusive existence trapping beaver. The pelts of the beaver were made into felt for the manufacture of top hats on the east coast. 60,000,000 buffalo roamed the Great Plains during this period.

The buffalo was a vital part of plains Indian culture providing food, materials for shelter, clothing, utensils, and ornamentation. The buffalo was also integral to their religious beliefs and practices often figuring prominently in their creation myths. The unregulated slaughter of buffalo for their hides led to the decimation of both the northern and southern herds on the Great Plains.

By the late 1870’s the herds had been reduced to a mere fraction of their previous number. The lure of gold in California, Colorado, Montana and South Dakota and land for homesteading witnessed an unprecedented flood of emigrants across the Great Plains region.

Throughout the 1840’s and 1850’s the conflict between the Great Plains tribes and the United States government and the new settlers hungry for land and minerals intensified, as the settlers destroyed the traditional hunting grounds of the nomadic Indians. The period from 1854-1890 is commonly referred to as the Indian Wars.

The United States army pursued a relentless military campaign to subdue the so-called hostile bands, while the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and other plains tribes fought bravely and desperately to save their land and way of life. In 1864, a village of Southern Cheyenne under Peace Chief Black Kettle camped on Sand Creek, Colorado was attacked by Colonel John M. Chivington and a force of 750 militia and soldiers. During the six hour fight 140 Cheyenne were killed.

The horror of Sand Creek was vividly portrayed in the movie Soldier Blue in the early 1970’s. Four years later Black Kettle’s village was once again attacked on the Washita River, Oklahoma, by Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. As with Sand Creek the majority of fatalities were women and children and old people.

The last campaign of the Indian Wars was the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. During the harsh winter of December, 1890, Chief Big Foot and his band of Minniconjou-Lakota Sioux, en-route to the relative safety of the Pine Ridge reservation, were intercepted by Colonel Forsyth and the reformed Seventh Cavalry. Insistence by Forsyth on a military escort to the reservation was reservedly agreed to by Big Foot.

Forsyth’s men surrounded the band during the night and a weapons search the following morning resulted in an accidental shot being fired into the air. The Seventh Cavalry then engaged in an open fire on the unarmed Lakota, 298 Minniconjou men, women and children were killed.

Photographs of the scene are the most poignant and indelible testament to one of the many tragedies endured by the tribes of the Great Plains region during the second half of the nineteenth century. The massacre at Wounded Knee is considered by the Lakota as the final act in the breaking of the Sacred Hoop of Life.

The history of Native Americans on the Great Plains is a living entity and very much part of the people today. It has not been relegated to the history books as often happens in western society. It is felt rather than viewed, embraced rather than held at a detached distance. Ancestral lines are well remembered and very much part of the identity of each individual.

The photographs of Native Americans in my collections are special in two important ways. Firstly, they are a direct link to the past and secondly, they are testament to the pride in being Native American, a culture that like the great buffalo herds was almost destroyed in the recent past.

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