Exploring a double-narrative of Cody, WY

When the summer sets on a tourist destination like Cody, WY – where a good portion of Yellowstone National Park’s 3.1 million annual visitors either enter or leave the park by way of Cody’s “East Gate” – town springs to life; residents like myself become both observers and the ones being observed. Amongst the crowds at our nightly Gunfighters Show or the Cody Nite Rodeo (yes, every night too), it’s not uncommon to hear foreign accents or languages spoken. We put on a good show for the tourists – the restaurants add new specials to the menu, the downtown shops open up after a long winter, the parking lot at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center becomes crowded with tour buses, we celebrate the Fourth of July for the entire week, we host festivals for music lovers, river lovers, bike lovers, and beer lovers.

The Cody Gunfighters perform nightly all summer long in front of the historic Irma Hotel, at the corner of 12th Street and Sheridan. (photo by Eric Silk)

The town’s founder, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody (yes, of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show fame), would certainly be proud of the way we continue his legacy of showmanship, performing the “Wild West” for our visitors right outside his historic Irma Hotel, sometimes performing in very wild ways (read: Man loses nose in bar fight for an idea). In the essay “DissemiNation” scholar Homi Bhabha suggests narratives, or founding myths, are often constructed through a process of arbitrarily interpreted historical events and repeated signification, or performance, until “the people” emerge as one, as a collective, homogenous and standardized. In Cody, our founding myth of “Buffalo Bill,” as well as our repeated performance of that myth and our resistance to new images of the West, leads many visitors to read Cody as a modern “cowboy” town, despite the true diversity of people who have historically lived in the Big Horn Basin or the people who have the privilege of calling this outdoor playground their home today.

Buffalo Bill’s wild west and congress of rough riders of the world. A company of wild west cowboys 1899. (courtesy photo)

What happens if we explode the narrative of Cody – if we forget about the cowboys for a minute to consider the other people, the ones who lived here long before Buffalo Bill was killing buffalos, the ones who inspired Buffalo Bill’s story of the West. Bhabha suggests when we look for the stories of the people at the borderland of history, language, race, and gender, we can discover a “strange cultural survival.”

Sitting Bull and William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. (courtesy photo)

The Plains Indians once roamed Cody and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem freely; the near extinction of buffalo following white settlement in the region eroded their traditional way of life while the creation of reservations like Crow Indian Reservation in Montana and Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming erased their historic ties to the land I now get to call home. And yet, the culture of the Plains Indian people has adapted and changed and ultimately, survived. In conjunction with the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the Plains Indian people return to Cody annually for a two-day powwow and competitive dance competition. Various Plains Indian tribes are represented at the powwow, as are various ceremonial, social, and warrior dance traditions.

Each year, my friends and I love to attend this celebration – the food, the colors, the music, and the movement are inspiring. The rhythmic beat and voice of the drum circles and the steady bounce of the dancers’ feet keeps pace as the day inches on and the sun grows hotter. But inevitably, we grow cognizant of our position in the crowd and we find it hard to keep watching, to ignore the uncomfortable sense of the continued relationship of colonization: as writer David Spurr aptly notes in the introduction to his book The Rhetoric of Empire, “the relations of colonizer to colonized have neither remained the same nor have they disappeared.” We ask ourselves, are we right to be here? Is it right to watch?

The answer is not easily found. But what I continually return to is that this event in particular can be seen as an example of the Plains Indian people creating and displaying their own narrative. The curator of the museum belongs to this vibrant culture, as do many of its advisory board members. On their website, Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow, a tribal historian and board member, refers to the museum as “a living, breathing place where more than just Indian objects are on display.” The dancers of the powwow breathe life into the museum – moving it beyond walls and objects – evidencing the resilience of the Plains Indian people and showcasing their contemporary experience.

By including this nascent, but largely ignored, history of the Plains Indian people in the larger narrative of Cody, we can attempt to move beyond a colonial discourse that erases the “other” from our founding myth. As researcher Sheena lyengar suggested in her TED Talk, “Instead of replacing one story with another, we can learn from and revel in the many versions that exist and the many that have yet to be written.”