The Pawnee Bill Ranch and Museum will showcase the exhibit “Everything I Say Here is Straight and True: The Autobiographical Drawings of Chief White Bull: Art as a Historical Source,” through December 31. The exhibit highlights a collaboration between Chief White Bull (Miniconjou Lakota Sioux) (1849–1954) and University of Oklahoma professor Walter S. Campbell, better known by his pen name, Stanley Vestal.

White Bull was the nephew of Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota leader who was a symbol of Native American resistance. White Bull earned distinction as a skilled warrior known for his bravery in the 1860s and 1870s. Among the Sioux warriors, those who proved their bravery by touching the enemy in battle were recognized through an evolved coup system. White Bull had earned more than 30 coups by his mid-20s, most notably in the Battle of the Little Bighorn of 1876.

Historically, tribes would depict the coups on a tepee cover or buffalo robe. During the era of forced removals, many Plains tribes’ artists utilized discarded accounting ledgers and paper provided by the US Army as a canvas for their storytelling. White Bull created ledger art to record his memories. His drawings became a personal memoir and cultural record.

In 1932, at the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, Vestal interviewed White Bull to document his stories and encouraged the artist to make additional drawings, replicating pictographs he had drawn half a century earlier. Vestal was a student of the classics and compared White Bull to the Greek storyteller Homer, who imparted all of his stories through narration.

Walter Stanley Campbell utilized many of these drawings when writing Warpath: The True Story of the Fighting Sioux, Told in a Biography of Chief White Bull (1984), to provide vividly written descriptions of what White Bull and his contemporaries wore and carried into battle.

“Everything I Say Here is Straight and True” was created by the University of Oklahoma Libraries Western History Collections and given to the Pawnee Bill Ranch and Museum. It will run through December 31.