Guest Opinion: History lessons: Requiem for a round hall

Published on Saturday, June 02, 2007
Last modified on 6/2/2007 at 2:50 am
By PETER NABOKOV

Although the Northern Cheyennes won the intertribal hand game tournament at Crow Agency last month, besting the Crows' Wyola District in all categories, things were not the same. Many looked around the rectangular community hall in which the song-filled competitions were held with a keen sense of nostalgia and loss.

For only eight weeks earlier, with little warning to the community, the Crow tribal administration ordered the destruction of the Ivan Hoops Memorial Hall. In a matter of hours, the beautiful, octagonal log building, which had stood for over 80 years in the Crow Fairgrounds as the centerpiece of Crow social, political and ceremonial life, was torn down. Starting with the uppermost turret, by the end of the day all that remained was a pile of logs and, rumor had it, a ventilation shaft with the penciled-in names of Crow workers who had helped put it up in the 1930s.

A treasure trove of history

And so was lost the last example in the Northern Plains of a uniquely American Indian architectural creation. Named for the first Crow soldier to fall in World War II, for many decades this building had housed political debates and elections as Crows "walked the line" through its four doors in one of the most remarkably public exercises of participatory democracy in the United States. Under its circular roof, Crow families, clans and political parties held "feeds" and immense giveaways to honor relatives and veterans returning from WWII, Korea and Vietnam. Here they celebrated adoptions and marriages, "beaver dances" of the Tobacco Society when the weather was bad, "daytime" dances and powwows, New Year's "return of the sun" celebrations, Halloween "masquerade" dances, "box socials" and the Crow version of the foxtrot known as the "push" dance, and they converged in the bleachers during the hand game season.

The widespread reputation of this building made it a natural climax for Lawrence Johnson's award-winning film, "Hand Game: The Native North American Game of Power and Chance" (1999), with the exciting games photographed inside amid the echoing trill of female singers and clamor of hand drums and triumphant shaking of rattles.

But the Hoops Memorial Hall also represented the last stand in the Northern Plains for a building type whose historical significance extended deeper and farther across Indian Country. As tribes were confined on reservations in the late 19th century, and the U.S. government outlawed their "traditional" social and ritual activities, Indian communities from the Great Lakes, the Southern Plains, the Northern Plains and even California constructed such large round wooden community buildings in order to protect their age-old cultural activities from the prying eyes of reservation officials. After the great ghost dances died out, in these circular buildings were held grass dances, dream drum dances, hand game gatherings, various forms of war dances, powwows, and other uniquely Indian functions that lent cohesion and hope to native groups who had barely survived through terrible times.

Even today a new generation of these ceremonial buildings still houses the drum gatherings in the Great Lakes, the Ilonksha dance of the Ponca and the Native American Church meetings of the Osage in Oklahoma, and as well as various revivals of traditional native celebrations in north-central California. But in the Northern Plains, the Crow's round hall was especially renowned as the region's last survivor of this great tradition.

'New Deal' construction

It was in the fall of 1882 that the Crow first received the formal rights to hold grass dances - what they called "hot" dances - transferred from their "parent" tribe, the Hidatsa of North Dakota, from whom they had broken off in the misty past. After that, round halls built of available materials sprang up at Lodge Grass, St. Xavier and Black Lodge. But in the 1930s, with Robbie Yellowtail as Crow superintendent and the "Indian New Deal" smiling on pro-cultural activities, this round hall was built using logs trucked in from the southern Bighorn Mountains and a volunteer Crow work crew under the direction of agency-carpenter "Windy" Nelson, draftsman C.D. Paxton and Clarence "WPA" Smith, a well-liked crew boss from Absarokee.

Over time, the structure underwent modifications: tearing out original fireplaces, adding fresh concrete footings, sealing doors, sweeping the interior walls with plywood sheeting, attaching a new log vestibule. But a "black mold" had contaminated the building, and it was reportedly on the verge of condemnation as a health hazard. Even though older and far more fragile log structures in designated heritage sites across the United States have been stabilized through modern preservation techniques, the Hoops Memorial Hall was never given a shot. I hope the Crow tribal administration will realize all the history and culture embodied by this structure and put up another round hall in its place.

Meanwhile, throughout this late spring, tribal cars pull up and park, occupants stare at the strange vacancy where the round hall stood as if wondering where an old friend has gone. Wafting clouds of cottonwood seed carry their memories of the building's songs and prayers, oratory and laughter up the Little Bighorn Valley.

Peter Nabokov is a professor of world arts and cultures and American Indian studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has been visiting Crow Agency since 1962 when he worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

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June 2007 Reports

Last updated on July 1, 2007