The 159 year old musket becomes symbol for healing

RAPID CITY—“As far as I know,” Joann Mae Spotted Bear told NSNT, “this gun has never murdered anybody.”

Spotted Bear sees the 159 year old musket she sometimes displays at places like Black Hills Pow Wow as a symbol of peace. She says it can still fire but not firing is its purpose. In this musket she sees the deadly handiwork of an alien culture repurposed as a symbol of peaceful defiance.

How and why the musket came into her permission is not something she focuses on when she talks about the weapon. Because it is a weapon, and yet when held aloft by Frances Eagle Tail Dupris (Northern Arapaho/Sicangu), Spotted Bear by her side at the Black Hills Pow Wow, the musket becomes an elegant and nostalgic symbol of healing and transformation. She no longer sees it as an instrument of destruction, and when you look at it through her eyes, the historical journey of this musket had ennobled it to a new function and purpose. A symbol of who the tribe was, what the tribe endured, how the tribe is healing, and how they are the power that gives the musket its reimagined identity.

The history of this musket cannot be traced back to a single inventor. Like most great inventions many inventors contributed many fundamental inventions over millennia to create this musket.

The Chinese created the gunpowder, and the Europeans created the technology to turn that gunpowder into the stuff which propels musket balls. By the 1600’s flintlock muskets were standard armament for the military.

The 1842 U.S. Model 69-caliber percussion musket began being manufactured by the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts in 1847. The musket was called the Musketoon. Between 1866 and 1873, the US military transitioned from muskets into breach loading “trap door” rifles. At some point during that time Spotted Bear’s musket was either retired or put to private use as a hunting rifle. But whatever the case, it survived decade after decade until nothing remained of the world that had created it, and it became a symbol of that world, a symbol which could have been refined to point in a dozen different direction, but with this musket, Spotted Bear chose peace.

The Musketoon has many pow wows and related functions ahead, and a much longer peaceful future perhaps lies ahead, than the turbulent past that created it.

(James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of OST. Contract him at skindiesel@msn.com)

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