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Emerging on the heels of the US military’s campaigns against the Plains Indians, Wild West exhibitions such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West sought to capitalize on growing public nostalgia for a vanishing American frontier with American Indians at its mythic center. As the longest-running and most prominent Wild West show, its history is singularly intertwined with the community of Pine Ridge, beginning in 1885 when Sitting Bull joined the tour as a featured performer for one season. The Lakota leader’s notoriety elevated the exhibition to a position of commercial viability and helped cement its sustained professional interest in this community.

Photo Details: Sitting Bull and William F. Cody. Photograph, ca. 1885. D. F. (David Francis) Barry, 1854-1934. Buffalo Bill Online Archive MS6 William F. Cody Collection, McCracken Research Library, Buffalo Bill Center of the West

This Collaborative Digital Editions Start-Up planning grant project, funded by a new program from National Historical Publications and Records Commission (National Archives) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, invites wider community conversations about the importance of Lakota performance, the circulation of Lakota arts and culture, and the legacy of these Wild West show travels today. It dovetails with the objectives of the grant that are aimed at expanding cultural diversity in American history by funding collaborative teams at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges, and/or other Indigenous and Native American tribal scholars and community members, and members of the Asian American community.

Our proposed digital edition of primary sources (texts, images, oral histories, and artifacts), focuses on Lakota community members who traveled across Canada, the United States, and Europe as Wild performing in over 3,000 locations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It will demonstrate to scholars, students, and local community members just how unique and significant these performers’ experiences were to their families, to American culture, and to European conceptions of Lakota people. Taken as a whole, the digitized items in this archival project will tell the important but little-known history of these Lakota performers from the perspectives of their own communities in a way that will both educate and inspire future generations.

Wičhóoyake kiη aglí—They Bring the Stories Back: Connecting Lakota Wild West Performers to Pine Ridge Community has been awarded a two-year NHPRC-Mellon planning grant of $120,000 in the inaugural cohort of the Collaborative Digital Editions in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American History category. The project will be co-directed by Valerie Janis, Archivist at the Woksape Tipi Library and Archives at the Oglala Lakota College and Douglas Seefeldt, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Digital History PhD program at Clemson University. Project partners include staff from the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the McCracken Research Library at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, as well as faculty from Brigham Young University, the University of Cincinnati, the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and Oklahoma University.

With an overarching goal to broaden participation in the production and publication of historical and scholarly digital editions, the program is designed:

• To provide opportunities that augment the preparation and training of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color new to the work of historical documentary editing, especially those currently working in history or related area and ethnic studies departments.
• To encourage the innovative and collaborative re-thinking of the historical and scholarly digital edition itself—how it is conceived, whose voices it centers, and for what purposes.
• To support planning activities essential for successful development of significant, innovative, and well-conceived digital edition projects rooted in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American history and ethnic studies.
• To stimulate meaningful, mutually beneficial, and respectful collaborations that help to bridge longstanding institutional inequalities by promoting resource sharing and capacity building at all levels. 
• To sustain projects that build meaningful community and user engagement into their plans.

Grants are awarded to collaborative teams consisting of at least two scholar-editors, as well as one or more archivists, digital scholars, data curators, and/or other support and technical staff, as appropriate to fulfill the planning goals and prepare the project team for implementation at a later stage. We strongly encourage applications from collaborative teams that include diverse faculty and staff in key positions, and that include editorial, archival, and technical staff at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic- and Minority-Serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges, and/or other Indigenous and Native American tribal scholars and community members, and members of the Asian American community. We also encourage projects to seek out community members as well as undergraduate and graduate students to contribute to (and benefit from) participation in all phases of the project planning.

A traveling exhibit with retractable banners was set-up at a couple of centers in 2024 and is now set up for the summer of 2025 in the archives.