Alan Michelson
Pehin Hanska ktepi (They Killed Long Hair)
2020
Scroll
Alan Michelson
Pehin Hanska ktepi (They Killed Long Hair)
2020
Physical Qualities
Single-channel video (black and white, no sound) and wool trade blanket, Duration: 1 minutes, 5 seconds, continuous loop
Blanket: 84 × 68 in. (213.4 × 172.7 cm.)
Credit Line
Art Fund established with exchange funds from gifts of Dr. and Mrs. Edgar F. Berman, Equitable Bank, N.A., Geoffrey Gates, Sandra O. Moose, National Endowment for the Arts, Lawrence Rubin, Philip M. Stern, and Alan J. Zakon
Object Number
2022.144
Mounted Native veterans of the Battle of the Greasy Grass (also known as the Battle of Little Bighorn, fought in present-day Montana), ride in a continuous loop of black-and-white archival footage projected onto a dyed wool trade blanket. The footage documents a 1926 procession commemorating the 50th anniversary of the battle, in which Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors overwhelmingly defeated the U.S. 7th Cavalry commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876). The coiling cycle of riders references Winter Counts, the pictorial calendars used by Plains tribes to record their history in an annual cycle. Alan Michelson titled the work as a reference to the Lakota name for the 1876 entry that memorializes the defeat of "Long Hair", or Custer. This work honors the warrior spirit of Indigenous resistance embodied in these veterans, as well as Indigenous means of recording history.
The Baltimore Museum of Art by purchase, 2022; the artist
Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum
Artist
Alan Michelson
1952–2000
(Six Nations of the Grand River) b. 1953, Buffalo, New York, U.S.A.
Meet Alan →
