Under construction, research continues
In September [1957], Oscar Howe, who has earned an enviable reputation for his painting, joined the faculty of the State University of South Dakota. Professor Howe is teaching a course on art appreciation. In addition, Professor Howe is assisting in the work of the William H. Over Museum and he is serving on the executive committee of the Institute of Indian Studies.
[Reprinted from the Institute's News Report, 1957]
Professor Oscar Howe is a neat, conservatively dressed, mild mannered and well-appreciated member of the faculty of the State University of South Dakota. In appearance he is rather stocky, slightly above medium height, and with features and skin color that might easily allow one to imagine he was talking to an oriental exchange professor.
Oscar Howe is, however, a full blood Sioux Indian. His parents were George T. Howe and Ella Not Afraid of Bear. He was born May 13, 1915, at Joe Creek, a small community on the Crow Creek Indian Reservation of South Dakota. His paternal grandparents were Don't Know How (grandfather) and Bone Necklace (great-grandfather). Bone Necklace was head chief of the lower Yanktonaise, and was noted for his gift of oratory. Perhaps his most famous speech was made on behalf of his people before the Northwestern Indan Commission in June, 1886 (South Dakota Historical Collections, Vol. IX, p. 466). Oscar Howe's maternal grandparents include the Yanktonaise chief, Not Afraid of Bear (grandfather) and White Bear (great-grandfather), who distinguished himself at the time of the Santee uprising in 1862 and received a plaque from the government for his services to the "whites" at that time.
Oscar Howe's pre-adolescent years were characterized by poverty, illness, and frustration. He attended Pierre Indian School until 1933. This institution at the time was under the military system. The boys wore uniforms with stiff celluloid collars. Punishment was swift and severe even for minor violations and the school sought to discourage runaways by offering a bounty for the return of "students" who sought to return to the reservation without proper authorization.
It was a violation at the Pierre Indian School for an Indian to speak his native tongue. Since Oscar Howe could speak only Sioux when he entered this institution, he soon had the opportunity of testing the corrective physical punishments administered by those in authority. Among punishments experienced were being shoved against heated radiators, which if not sufficiently effective, was often followed by the traditional rubber hose applied to his face and head.
While at this school, Oscar Howe developed a serious but unidentified skin disease. So disfiguring was this affliction that he suffered social isolation to the extent that even his own brothers completely avoided him. His misery increased when he discovered he had trachoma, a painful eye disease that almost blinded him. It is no wonder that after the school doctors informed him that his skin disease was incurable, the ten-year-old boy contemplated suicide by jumping out of the second story hospital window. There was to be no bounty on Oscar Howe, for it was the policy of the school to send "hopeless" cases back to the reservation.
The next year was one of crisis in the young Indian's life. Determined to rid himself of his skin condition he washed his entire body with a commercial soap, allowed it to dry on the skin, and then rinsed the product from his body. This procedure was repeated hour by hour, day by day, and week by week, until after many months his skin condition began to clear and finally was cured, along with his trachoma.
While Oscar Howe was now physically sound, there were still deep psychological wounds to repair. By hard work he must make up for the shame of ostracism leveled against him by his friends and relatives when ill. He must find an avenue of success, a medium to fame, so that "they would be ashamed for ever being ashamed of him."
He returned to school and finally completed his high school education in 1938 at the Santa Fe Indian School. While at this progressive institution he first took up art under the direction of Dorothy Dunn Kramer. He was an instant success, and before he graduated he had exhibited his paintings across the nation from the Brooklyn Museum's Gallery for Living Artists to San Francisco's Civic Center. Even more impressive was the fact that he also had his work exhibited overseas in both London and Paris. Many of his paintings entered private collections, and some were reproduced in magazines both at home and abroad.
Returning to his father's home (his mother died when he was nine) led to another period of despondency. To the little Indian community of Joe Creek on the Missouri, his artistic success was evaluated only in dollars and cents since South Dakota at that time offered little market to the art that had been honored in great galleries. It was during the depression and desperate for work, Oscar Howe accepted the position of art instructor at the Pierre Indian School, his pay consisting of room and board.
In 1940 Oscar Howe was assigned to the South Dakota Artists Project, where at Mitchell he painted the interior dome of the Carnegie Library with symbolic designs of sun and rain clouds over hills. After a course in mural painting at the Indian Art Center, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, he was assigned to paint in oil ten large murals, depicting in lifesize figures, the history of the Missouri River Basin. The work was to decorate the walls of the new auditorium at Mobridge, South Dakota. Although the artist had to make concessions to local tastes favoring literal portrayal, these paintings still retain several aspects of Oscar Howe's imaginative art.
With the event of World War II, Oscar Howe spent three and one-half years in the U. S. Army with combat battalions in North Africa, Italy and Germany. It was while a corporal in Germany that he first met Miss Heidi Hampel, who today is his wife and a naturalized U. S. citizen. Her trip to America was financed by Oscar Howe's first national award. In 1947, Mr. Howe entered his tempera picture, "Dakota Duck Hunt," in the second annual National Indian Painting exhibition at Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma. His entry won the grand purchase prize of $350.00. After traveling and marriage expenses were deducted, the young couple found they had but tenty dollars for a nest egg. However, it is doubted that an Indian ever had a better deal from a "white," for in addition to a wife, Heidi Howe also became a biographer, historian, business manager, and publicity agent for her husband.
Shortly after his marriage, Oscar Howe was commissioned to supply the illustrations for a two volume book entitled North American Indian Costumes. The text was written by Dr. O. B. Jacobson of the University of Oklahoma, and the book was published in Nice, France, in 1952. The money was certainly welcome because in June, 1948, their only child, a daughter, Inge Dawn, was born in the Talahina, Oklahoma Indian Hospital.
In the fall of 1948, Oscar Howe was chosen by Dakota Wesleyan University, Mitchell, South Dakota, as Artist-in-Residence. There he was an instructor as well as a student in art. More important than his formal education and recognized status was the fact that he found people in his own region who began to recognize his achievements and potentialities as an artist. Before he received his undergraduate degree, he had won the Harvey Dunn Medal in Art and had been offered a full-time position in the art department, but he decided to engage in graduate art studies at the University of Oklahoma. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1954.
The people of Mitchell more than those of any other community consider Oscar Howe their "own" since it was here he first received acceptance within the state of South Dakota. For the past decade he has yearly designed the decoration of the eleven panels at the Mitchell Corn Palace. Each of these panels depict larger than life size scenes carried out with corn in its natural colors. When the Friends of the Middle Border dedicated their new museum near the Dakota Wesleyan campus, the society presented him with a scroll naming him Artists Laureate of the region.
Beginning in September of 1953, Oscar Howe became director of art at the high school at Pierre, South Dakota, a position he held until his appointment in 1957, as an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the State University of South Dakota. He is the Artist-in-Residence at the University and also serves as Assistant Professor of Fine Arts.
In every moment that he can obtain aside from the time he must devote to carrying out the duties in these positions, Oscar Howe is busy creating new work of art. His many awards, exhibits, and other achievements are listed at the end of this article. It is suitable to close this brief biography of Oscar Howe with a statement of his work by art critic, Dorothy Dunn Kramer, on the occasion of his one man show in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1957.
"How well Oscar Howe's art progresses was clearly evident in his recent Santa Fe exhibition. The paintings demonstrate eloquently how true is Rene D'Harnoncourt's assertion that a capable, creative artist with a stong native background can become erudite in the techniques and philosophies of the art schools and come through, at last, with his original art strengthened, not harmed, by his experience. Howe's painting emerges broadened, deepened, and uncorrupted, still Sioux at the core.
"Most of Howe's compositions would be at home in any contemporary show; yet were it possible for the artist's great-grandfathers, Bone Necklace and White Bear, to see them, they could at once recognize each motif and symbol of the rites, the dancers, warriors, and other tribal figures. This seeming paradox lies not so much in the fact that Howe, through skilled use of modern media and techniques, brings his pictures up to date as in the fact that the art of the old chieftains' day appears modern. It is, so to speak, an art that was ahead of its time so far as style is concerned. In Howe's work, the resemblance of old to new is inherent rather than acquired.
"This painting states emphatically that the artist knows the value of his particular cultural heritage to the amalgam culture of the whole country; that Sioux art forms are eternal in significance to the Amerian scene."
Oscar Howe, Sioux Artist
by George Agogino and Heidi Howe
[Partial reprint from the Institute's Occasional Papers, November 1, 1959]
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21 June 1997