Summary:Video Guide
Color, running time 28 minutes. Nebraska Public Television. Mike Farrell, producer, director, writer. Roger Welsch, narrator.
Summary:
Doran Morris is Omaha Tribal Chairman, but also great-great grandson of Yellow Smoke, the last Keeper of the Sacred Pole. He made it a personal cause to have the Sacred Pole returned to his people. This video documents the return of the pole.
The Sacred Pole is known as Umon'hon'ti, the Venerable Man, to the Omaha people. He is also called the Real Omaha, and is a living being. He was formed generations ago from a burning bush that was not consumed. He traveled with the Omaha on their hunts and was the core of their unity as a people. But, in the late 1880s, as the Omaha had been decimated by disease and their lands had been terribly diminished, Yellow Smoke agreed to turn Umon'hon'ti over to ethnographer Alice Fletcher and her informant, Francis La Flesche (some say he was Omaha and others, Ponca) for safekeeping. They took Umon'hon'ti to the Peabody Museum at Harvard, along with nearly 200 other sacred objects.
In the late 1960s several Omaha started asking for return of the objects, but the Peabody refused to return them until their safety could be assured. On July 12, 1989, Umon'hon'ti was return to the Omaha. The video documents the return of Venerable Man to the people in some detail, as well as its formal presentation from the Peabody at the Omaha Powwow a bit later. Several officials of the Peabody, including Stephen Williams and Ian Brown, Omaha members Dennis Hastings and Doran Morris, and anthropologist Robin Ridington are interviewed. The video also gives a good history of the work of Fletcher and La Flesche and the period in which the pole was returned. The pole is now kept in the archives at the University of Nebraska awaiting construction of a museum on the Omaha Reservation.
Questions:
What is the significance of Umon'hon'ti to the Omaha? What are its origins?
What was the controversy surrounding the taking of the Sacred Pole to the Peabody? Do you think Yellow Smoke did the right thing? What were the motives of Fletcher and La Flesche? Do you think they acted honorably?
How can Umon'hon'ti be living person?
How did the Omaha react on the return of the pole?
What was the response of museum officials to the Omaha request for the return of the pole and other objects? How did their attitudes change through time?
For additional information, see Blessing for a Long Time: The Sacred Pole of the Omaha Tribe by Robin Ridington and Dennis Hastings (In'aska), 1997, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. See also, The Omaha Tribe by Alice Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, 2 volumes, 27th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, reprinted 1992 by University of Nebraska Press.
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larry-zimmerman@uiowa.edu
University of Iowa Anthropology
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