Plains Indians have had a bad time. Nineteenth-century expansion drove them from the lands they had lived and roamed freely on for thousands of years. The American government confined them to reservations. A campaign of “assimilation” removed Native American children from their families for schooling. Pop culture has been equally cruel. For decades, Plains Indians were the designated enemy in Westerns, characterized as fearless “savages” who galloped out of nowhere to threaten peaceful settlers and heroic cowboys. Their ceremonial garments have been debased as children’s Halloween costumes and the props of sports teams that appropriated tribal names and images. And much, much more. Even in today’s more enlightened times, the culture of the nomadic peoples of the American West is misunderstood. We all can call up images, partly imprinted on us by the movies, of fierce equestrian warriors, buffalo hunters, beaded moccasins, feather headdresses, decorated tobacco pipes, and the like. But as the absorbing, enlightening exhibition “The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art makes clear, the history of the peoples of the Great Plains is infinitely longer, more complex, and more enduring than our mental short-hand suggests, and the objects and artifacts they produced over the centuries far subtler and richer.1

Our collective conception of the athletic