Koshare Indian Museum, Boy Scouts and the Plains
Colorado
In La Junta, Colorado, on the campus of Otero Junior College, stands a museum built by Boy Scouts, housed in a replica Pueblo kiva, featuring one of the most significant collections of Plains and Pueblo Native American art in southeastern Colorado. The story behind it is as unusual as the building itself.
In February of nineteen thirty-three, a La Junta scoutmaster named James F. Buck Burshears gathered a handful of boys together and started what he called the Boy Scout Indian Club, practicing dances initially in his backyard and chicken coop. The first two members, Bill Sisson and Bob Inman, helped him expand the group, and by September of nineteen thirty-three they gave their first public performance at a church in La Junta. Burshears renamed the group the Koshares, borrowing a Hopi word meaning clown or delight-maker.
What began as a novelty grew into something more serious. The troop, Boy Scout Troop Two Thirty-Two, began collecting Native American art and artifacts on their travels and correspondence. By the late nineteen forties they had outgrown every space they had used. In nineteen forty-nine they built their own kiva on the college campus, a tri-level structure topped with what is claimed to be the largest self-supporting log roof in the world, a genuine architectural achievement built largely by the scouts themselves.
The museum they assembled inside holds works by Pueblo and Plains tribal artists, including a notable collection of southwestern pottery and paintings. The Koshare Dancers still perform between fifty and sixty shows a year, making it one of the longest-running continuously active Scout performing groups in the United States.
The institution has not been without controversy. Hopi religious leaders have objected over the years to non-Native performances of ceremonial dances, arguing that sacred traditions are being presented outside their proper context. That tension, between well-intentioned admiration and appropriation of Indigenous ceremony, remains an open conversation in the museum's story.
