#plenty coups

[blondebrainpowered]

Seven Crow chiefs outside a building in Montana, 1887.

Men standing are Black Hawk; Hunts the Enemy (also known as Enemy Hunter) or Pretty Iron Bull (also known as Iron Bull) or Big Fork or Bell Rock; Big Shoulder (also known as Big Shoulder Blade).

Men seated are Pretty Eagle (also known as Pretty Face); Spotted Horse; Plenty Coups; and Pretty Bird (also known as Plenty Grouse).

Men observing the group include Shavings (wearing a police uniform), Bear in the Water, The Wet, and Dancing Woman.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Photograph: Plenty Coups and another Crow/Absaroka leader. 

* * * *

Speaking of having books you haven't read, I finally picked up the philosopher/psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, which focuses on how the Crow/Absaroka leader Plenty Coups found a way forward for himself and his people after the end of the world they knew, the end of their freedom to roam, of the bison hunt, and the rest. It was written in 2006 (it's been sitting on my shelf for nearly 17 years, I think), and it seems more relevant than ever as people face the end of the familiar world in wonderful and terrible ways as we exit the age of fossil fuel and enter the age of renewables, all driven by the profound impact of climate chaos. It's about how to live after the end of your world, the world in which your roles, actions, goals, principles, rites make sense, how to hope for something you can't yet imagine and keep going. (It's also making me think more about the many people here in the US now who are more recent refugees from indigenous and traditional cultures and the places on which they were lived out, whose way forward hit the same kind of wall and had to figure out how to keep living on the other side of that wall.) It was written in consultation with Crow scholars, but I'm sure the extent to which Lear imagines through this person he does not know would be considered problematic, though he does constantly say he does not know but that the words of Plenty Coups and his example set him thinking. I'm finding it a profound and useful book on hope in catastrophe. [Rebecca Solnit]

[shewhoworshipscarlin]

Plenty Coups, 1910.

[jacobwren]

"What Plenty Coups faced at the end of meaningful happenings, and what perhaps we face now on the precipice of a change that is unfathomable and indescribable, is the need for a conceptual framework with which to story the breakdown of story. We need norms of unnorming. We need the alien eye." - Matthew Salesses

[nativeamericanimages]

[everything-i-like-2014]

Plenty Coups, Crow

[steelbison]

Plenty Coups

by Edward Curtis

[quotediary]

Education is your greatest weapon. With education you are the white man's equal, without education you are his victim and so shall remain all of your lives. Study, learn, help one another always. Remember there is only poverty and misery in idleness and dreams - but in work there is self respect and independence.

Plenty Coups, 1848-1932. Leader of the Crow Indians.