Who Lies Buried in Satanta's Tomb? Co-memorating a Kiowa Warrior

Abstract:The Kiowa leader Satanta gained a reputation in the 1860s and 1870s as the most reviled Native figure on the western plains—public enemy number one to post–Civil War generals like William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan, who viewed the very existence of Native people as an expendable impediment to white expansion. Satanta's incarceration at the Huntsville penitentiary in Texas was considered an innovative approach to America's ongoing "Indian problem" in its attempt to disavow tribal sovereignty and prosecute Native "criminals" through the US penal system. Satanta's contested death remains a troubling signifier of the untenable combination of political and racial forces rendering this approach both impractical and unjust. This essay reconsiders Satanta's life and career, aiming to place his actions, motives, and recorded speeches within a necessary framework of Kiowa culture and tradition. Taking for an opening text Satanta's gravestone marker, located in the prison cemetery in Huntsville, Texas, this essay also launches an interrogation into the archive of western conquest itself and the processes of historical production that work to construct negative Indigenous identities out of the violent imperatives of Manifest Destiny.