John Hitchcock

Bury the Hatchet is artist John Hitchcock’s mixed media, cross-disciplinary, multisensory installation. Hitchcock combines his interests in printmaking, Rock n’ Roll, and Kiowa and Comanche history into one visual expression that offers a re-telling of the narrative of the American Frontier. Working from the theme of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, Bury the Hatchet explores issues of assimilation, acculturation, and indoctrination through oral history and music. Bury the Hatchet develops a shared language to interrogate historic and modern institutions to prompt a re-definition and re-imagining of our present reality.

The visual and sound recordings in the exhibition work together to challenge western perspectives of the supremacy of the written word by reinforcing Indigenous views of oral history passed on from generation to generation through storytelling.

Sound recordings include the artist on pedal steel guitar with soundscapes of cello, clarinet, accordion and guitars by The Stolen Sea, Jason Cutnose (Kiowa1967-2015) narrating a story about the Cutthroat Gap massacre in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma, Juanita Pahdopony (Comanche) voice recording a Comanche prayer, Hitchcock’s grandfather Saukwaukee John Dussome Reid (Kiowa 1912-1996) telling a story of the old days on the Southern Plains, Catlin Mead reinterpretation of Cutnose’s stories through her Soprano opera voice and Intertribal War Dance Songs (recorded in 1978 on the Johnny Reid (Kiowa) and Peggy Reid (Comanche) Dance Ground). Video images include War Dancers in Medicine Park, Oklahoma and buffalo images recorded in the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge by Emily Arthur.