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Native Sun News: A rare and remarkable cowboy in Howard Hunter

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Howard Hunter Sr. in 1976. Hunter, known as Watogla Akan Yanka Wicasa, or Wild Horse Rider in the Lakota language, was inducted into the Indian National Finals Rodeo Hall of Fame in 2010. Photo courtesy Anne Hunter

A rare and remarkable cowboy
Mamas let your babies grow up to be Indian cowboys
By James Giago Davies
Native Sun News Correspondent
nsweekly.com

Children play cowboys and Indians, and the popular perception is that the Indian is diametrically opposed to the cowboy, and so to play properly, you must choose to be one or the other. In reality, many Indians choose to be cowboys, and although the cowboys can’t choose to be Indians, they develop a bond, affection, an understanding for the Indian that chooses to be a cowboy.

Farmers seldom develop that bond. Horse culture Indians never did embrace the plow, and most Wasicu farmers see the Indian as something opposing them, their land, their culture, something threatening, inferior to themselves, something impure, improper, to be avoided, corrected, or purged from their proper society.

To be fair racist Lakota do exist, racist not only against Wasicu, but against mixed blood iyeska, enrolled members of their own tribe. They call iyeska fake Indians, scheming liars, and see iyeska as something inferior to themselves, something impure, improper, to be avoided, corrected, or purged from their proper society.

Misguided Wasicu liberals would decry the farmer’s racism across the blogosphere, but do not even recognize the Lakota racism against iyeska, mistaking these back-to-the-blanket Nazis as noble protectors of tribal purity.

Although full-blood Indian cowboys do exist, most are iyeska, and in the cowboy these iyeska have found some of the freedom they lost when rounded up like cattle at Fort Robinson in 1877. As cowboys they are still wedded to the land, to nature, to open country, and blue skies, to angry, horned, snorting beasts, but mostly to T’shunka, the horse, and it is this deep, profound bond with T’shunka that probably turned them cowboy in the first place.