A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Studia Historiae Literarum et Artium, 4. (Szeged, 2004)

Nagy Imre: A Preliminary Report on the Friedman Kein Canvas

1874 - which might be the year of the actual Sun Dance depicted - Eagle Head was the chief of the Bowstring Society, while White Horse was the chief of the Dog Soldier Society. There is another well documented Southern Cheyenne shield with a design of vertical stripe in the middle, and horizontal stripes on the fields (Plate 1 : f). This shield was originated by Big Head (also known as Sleeping Bear), a noted Southern Cheyenne chief who died in 1867 (Mooney MS #2531, Vol. 5:40). He gave the so-called „Battle Picture Tipi" to To 'hausen (Dohasan), the Kiowa chief in 1845, after the Cheyennes and Kiowas made a permanent peace (Petersen 1971: 23-24). The southern half of the tipi was painted with alternating yellow and black stripes, to which Mooney's informants referred the following way: „The Battle Picture Tipi has stripes like this shield, and probably it is connected with it" (i.e.: to the stripes of the shield and consequently to the war deeds of the dreamer) (Mooney MS #2531, Vol.5: 40). It is quite unusual that a shield design reported from the beginning of the twentieth century might be documented in some way from the first half of the nineteenth century, but the Little Buffalo Thigh - False Lame - Old Man Tipi shield might be one. An early material culture item from the Great Plains demonstrates the age and antiquity of this shield design. A quilled, hair fringed leather shirt is preserved in the collection of the Civici Museum in Reggio Emilia, Italy. It was collected (with other pieces) by Antonio Spagni between 1840-1844, while in political exile in the United States. The shirt was first reported with black-and-white photographs by Laurencich-Minelli (1990), then in Italian, with full color photographs and line drawings by the same author in 1992. Both the front (Fig. 8) and the back (Fig. 9) of the shirt is decorated with pictographic battle scenes, where the shield design in question appears four times - two times on the front, and two times on the back

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. The style of the paintings on the shirt might be classified as an example of the early biographic tradition (Keyser and Klassen 2001: 17-22), and the classic V-neck human figures, and the simplified horses are dated pre1700 by the same authors. There are very few clues for firm tribal identification on the shirt but some of the human figures (three on the front, and four on the back) are identifiable as Pawnee enemies because of their moccasins (and their single lock of hair). Consequently, the heroes of the depicted encounters might be searched among those Central Plains tribes who were traditional enemies of the Pawnee: Sioux, Cheyenne, So'taaeo'o

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, Arapaho. There is a mounted warrior painted on the front of the shirt, who carries a red painted shield with a long, central feathered trailer - a Cheyenne shield characteristic (Fig. 8). The shield design of the red coated hero figure at the bottom left of the back of the shirt shows some similarities to an Arapaho shield (Fig. 9), but the scale of the painting does not permit an absolute identification. In their 1990 publication Laurencich-Minelli and Colin Taylor attributed the shirt to the Eastern Sioux, Yankton or Yanktonai based on supposed similarities to the painted shirt in the Musée de l'Homme, Paris (Cat. no. 17 3 32), and the painted robe on 6 Careful examination of the published photographs and tracings reveals that the black-andwhite photographs of the shirt in the 1990 publication were mirrored (Laurencich-Minelli 1990:195; Figs. 5 & 6), while in the 1992 publication, the front of the shirt was published as the back, while the back as the front (Laurencich Minelli 1992: 76-79; Plates 19-22). 7 The So'taa'e (pi. So'taaeo'o) was still an independent tribe at the collection date of the shirt, and as we shall see, False Lame, the owner and maker of these shields is the most probable hero for these scenes. 113