Hand Drum

A galloping horse and rider evoke the iconic Plains horse cultures from the pre-reservation era. Across the 19th century many Plains men created autobiographical, narrative drawings and paintings to memorialize their brave feats. As a young man in the 1860s, Oki’ cize-ta’wa garnered recognition for his achievement raiding horses from enemy camps. This figure may represent the artist himself. The design for painting his face included an upturned crescent on his chin, here visible as a dark, tapering line.

Made for trade during the reservation era, this drum demonstrates how Plains men adapted ancestral pictorial conventions to earn income under foreign economic and social contexts.