Ousmane Sow’s Battle of Little Big Horn (1999) is a sculptural tableaux of the famous battle scene in which the combined force of Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors defeated General George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry near Little Big Horn River in Montana on 25 June 1876. Custer was killed during this battle, and the instance of his death is portrayed in one of the fourteen scenes that Sow sculpturally reenacts in his reinterpretation of the incident. The Battle of Little Big Horn is a culmination of an important trajectory in Sow’s depiction of various African tribes, liberated from the diorama setting of the natural history museum. Born in Dakar, Senegal, Ousmane Sow (b. 1935-) lived in Paris for twenty years, establishing himself as a physical therapist, before returning to Senegal in 1978 where he works as a practicing full-time sculptor.

My paper addresses the sources and significance of Sow’s depiction of this symbolic event in the history of the American West. I discuss how Sow’s battle scene reverses Custer’s defeat as the victory of Crazy Horse, Chief Gall, Two Moons, and Sitting Bull for colonized peoples. These Indian figures are portrayed as heroic figures reminiscent of French classical sculpture, while Custer stands desiccated and isolated. An important element in Sow’s sculptural tableaux is how he positions these figures as part of a counter-narrative to Western settler hegemony. Through Sow’s work, I describe successive representations of the Battle of Little Bighorn as a shifting historical referent in American Western films depicting the incident. The presentation will incorporate clips from American Westerns that depict this famous battle scene, and Béatrice Soulé documentary about Sow’s work entitled Ousmane Sow (1996). Finally, I address how Sow’s depiction of the battle scene is part of an aesthetic and political dialogue that demonstrates how Anglo and Indian figures are coterminous with French settler and colonized stereotypes.
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