A few days ago, a friend, my husband and I went to the Cantor Center at Stanford to see the art and sculpture. There was a special exhibit of Red Horse's ledger drawings of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and it a was a rare treat, as they have not been out of the Smithsonian archives since 1976. They are powerful, emotional and immediate, and they show a fight of bloody, tragic porportions. All these years later, they speak of war, eternal war, and it's great cost.
They also speak of a story that contradicts the glorification of Custer. His plan to use Native women and children to be shields for his soldiers ushers in an era of the killing of innocents that still occurs. Red Horse has no poems written about him, but Custer lives on in film and poetry and books, a new one out this year.
Right speech is telling not just the facts of an event, but the human cost. Red Horse shows us both soldiers and warriors dying, blood everywhere. But perhaps the most poignant drawing is of the horses only, a huge field of them maimed and dead. They represent the innocent casualties of all wars, and the sight is deeply disturbing. Through these images, Red Horse speaks to us still, righting the record, showing the pain and waste and tragedy that was the defeat of the original peoples of this country.
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