Dignity shines like a beacon

Lakota Spirit: The Life of Native American Jack Little 1920 -1985.
Introduction by Andrew Hogarth.

Independent book review by Ethol Bohnhoff November 1992.
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

In today’s crazy loveless, money-grubbing, materialistic world, for those of us who understand the expression “nobility of spirit,” Lakota, the man expresses the high degree of inner strength such nobility affords.

It is from that inner spiritual strength that Jack Little a Lakota-Sioux Native American from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota is told with devastating clarity, which also describes mankind’s inhumanity to man. Little’s analogy of the difference between white and Indian cultures strikes home with chilling accuracy.

The work should be a standard for the long-suffering underprivileged and dispossessed indigenous people of any country; their beacon of hope supported by this dignified exposition of one man’s lifetime, which includes both his natural and imposed lifestyle.

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Little gems of the Lakota rounds

Lakota Spirit: The Life of Native American Jack Little 1920-1985.
Introduction by Andrew Hogarth.

Independent book review by Rob Inder Smith November 1992.
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Life’s gems of wisdom are many and varied and a new book on the story of Native American Jack Little is full of them. The release of Lakota Spirit, the happy-sad biography of a dispossessed plains Indian who refused to change to white man's ways, coincides with the International Year of Indigenous People.

Little's is an endearing, often troubled story of a Lakota Indian, a Sioux ancestor, born in 1920 in a tepee on a South Dakota reservation. It is prophetic, as Plains Indian authority Andrew Hogarth says in his introduction.

Like thousands of other displaced families, Little's was forced onto a small pocket of mid-west land to eke out an existence as wards of the United States Government. His story is poignant, sad, uplifting, and damning of oppressors of any native people such as his summer vacations on the reservation, he said, were the only happy days during his early school years.

Even when white man and his alien system were unrelenting in trying to Westernise Indians, Little's thoughts and attitudes remained uncomplicated and instinctive. As a young, fit man playing in an Indian basketball team, he learned that on "the ball floor" Indians were in better shape than white men, and that the Lakota could beat them at their own game. "We could run a whole game and not be tired," says the man who believed running was a natural ability of the Lakota.

Little's philosophies are simple, his observations borne of anger, not bitterness. Of money, he says: "if spending it brings enjoyment to others, I will (spend) it"; on life: "take care of tomorrow when it gets here"; truth: "what is a truth for one man, may not be for another"; his oppressors: "They live in a frenzy of motion and do not stop long enough to know themselves."

He applies home-spun philosophy to people who used to visit the Indian museum on Crazy Horse Mountain, where he worked as a guide-lecturer. He said they were locked into the "white man's square", while he was looking at things through the circle of life of the Lakota. He says the Great Spirit, the Indian "God", Wakan Tanka, has put nothing on earth that is square. "All natural things are round or curved, including humans.

Our people's homes were round, our camps were round, we sat in a circle and danced, our prayers and ceremonies in a circle. "We viewed life and death in the round, hence the 'circle of life'." Lakota-speaks is easy to take a shine to.

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Tale of ‘two-legged people’

Book review by Maria Trefely-Deutch.
The Sunday Telegraph November 1992.
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

At the dawn of this so-called New Age, many people question the basic tenets of our materialistic society; some feel a spiritual vacuum and, as our physical environment becomes increasingly fragile, are beginning to question our relationship with it. There is an awareness we have lost something, that we are no longer in tune with the planet. The few indigenous peoples who still carry the wisdom of their ancestors are rapidly dying out or being assimilated in the dominant culture.

Andrew Hogarth, a Scot living in Australia, has long recognised the gifts of the indigenous peoples of North America, and has spent years studying them. He brings us a piece of marvellous oral history in the story of Jack Little. Jack, who died in 1985, leaves as his legacy his story which mirrors that of his people. He was from a branch of a nation we know of as Sioux. He explains that the word “Sioux” is actually French and has nothing to do with what he is.

He describes himself as Lakota, meaning “The People.” According to Jack “it is only a word that distinguishes the two-legged people from the four-legged and the winged people who live here with us, and yet if I tell a man from any tribe here that I am Lakota, he knows where I am from.

In a way Jack serves as a link between the time the Sioux were a free nation and the state of cultural suppression and near extinction in which they find themselves. Jack was actually born in a tepee and as a child knew survivors of the resounding defeat at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890. Until six he lived the life of his ancestors. Then came the rude shock when he was sent to mission school. These were years of turmoil when Jack was told that the “old ways” were no good.

After leaving school Jack was to see a lot of the White Man’s world. He travelled the country playing basketball. Later he drifted from job to job, increasingly aware of the spiritual bankruptcy of the White Man’s world. Like many of his people, he succumbed to alcohol in a frenzy of despair, hurt, bewilderment and fear. He eventually married a white women he met in a detox unit and they became alcoholic counsellors to the Lakota.

By the time of his death, Jack Little had in a sense come home, as he was working as a guide and lecturer at the Indian Museum at Crazy Horse Mountain in South Dakota. Although at peace with himself, Jack Little’s parting message is pessimistic: The white man in his greed has gone too far and is on a path to destruction that will take all other people and forms of life with him. But on a cryptic note he points out that, like the coyote, the Indian is hard to exterminate.

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A determined survival

Battlefields, Monuments and Markers.
A Guide to Native American and United States Army Engagements
From 1854 –1890 by Andrew Hogarth & Kim Vaughan.

Independent book review by Ethol Bohnhoff December 1993.
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

All through recorded history of mankind the tenacity of the human spirit evidences itself against calamitous odds and events, leading to intended wholesale extinction of a class or nation, with survivors bruised, unbowed and unbroken, to record for future generations the monstrosity of human endeavours against them.

It is with surprise one reads of a “holocaust” preceding World War II – a “holocaust” of an earlier era whereby 6,000,000 native Americans were virtually exterminated. Some coincidence!

The present work is a guide to the resistance and battlefields of disjointed or combined tribes of American Indians against the aggressive newcomer in defending their native lands and lives. The conflicts, with heroism, treachery and loss of life on both sides, ceasing 100-odd years ago.

Still in living memory of oral history of the American Indian and given rise to historical Societies of USA citizens preserving physical evidence of deaths, garrisons and forts, besides enshrinement in printed works for posterity.

The authors provide a valuable objective guide to this unfolding segment of United States history and the native American Indian.

Arrow straight in its direction, both in the printed word and visual content. Either as an historical landmark of general interest, or a stimulant to the curious and / or budding historian as a first guided step towards objective facts, including hidden truths now surfaced.

Simply a must: to be explored and cherished.

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Windows to another world.

Native Lands exhibition review by Cathryn Harris.
The Wentworth Courier November 1994.
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Andrew Hogarth, a photographer with a life long passion for Native American culture, currently has a collection of his works on display. This is not just any exhibition. It is Hogarth's personal look at Native America, 92,000 miles across the Great Plains to the Southwest. He concentrates particularly on the Four Corners region of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado.

The photographs represent the life and history of an indigenous people whose culture has been overshadowed for years by urban America. Hogarth's exhibition serves as a visual text book, introducing the viewer to the Natives dwellings, religious beliefs, and monuments of present and past.

The 'Wounded Knee Memorial, Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, 1985' is a prime example. The monument depicted represents, "the survivors of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, where four men and forty-seven women and children were taken to the Episcopal Mission to shelter from the bitter winter weather. Above the pulpit amid the Christmas decorations a banner read: “Peace On Earth, Good Will To Men.”

Many different Native tribes are covered in the exhibition; the Sioux (Lakota), Cheyenne, Navajo, Pueblo, Arapaho and Shoshone, to name a few. The unique nature of each is successfully captured, some with quotes from their great Chiefs. A wonderful example incorporates a photograph of a girl, 'Myrcine Deer, Cheyenne and Ponca, Oklahoma, 1992', with a quote from esteemed Chief Jack Little:

"Young girls sometimes had dreams or visions, but more often their names were derived from some personality trait, or something unusual they had done. Their names were such as Mountain Wolf Woman, Gentle Bird, Bird Woman and Morning Star. A woman kept her name for life. She did not have the name of a parent when she was a child, and she did not take the name of her husband when she was married. Like the men, she was an individual with her own name."

This exhibition is a powerful tribute to those who truly understand the land. Showing at Graphis Fine Art Gallery, 150 Edgecliff Road, Woollahra - 11th October - 5th November, 1994.

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