Keeper of the Plains: Blackbear Bosin at the Sacred Confluence
Near Wichita, Kansas
Where the Little Arkansas meets the Arkansas River, two currents of water have mixed for as long as water has run through these plains. Long before Wichita existed, before Kansas existed, this confluence was a gathering place for the Wichita people, who built their grass-lodge villages near these banks, and for other Plains nations who came to trade and council and commemorate.
In nineteen seventy-four, a forty-four-foot steel figure was placed on a rock promontory at that same confluence, arms raised toward the sky. The Keeper of the Plains was the work of Blackbear Bosin, a self-taught Kiowa and Comanche artist who had moved to Wichita in nineteen forty and spent three decades building a reputation as one of the most important Native American painters of the twentieth century.
Bosin was born in Cyril, Oklahoma in nineteen twenty-one. His Kiowa name was Tsate Kongia, which means black bear. He was largely self-taught, learning to manipulate form and proportion by studying the historical art collections at St. Patrick's Mission School in Anadarko. His paintings added motion and depth and drama to the traditional flat-style painting of the Southern Plains, and his work was displayed at the White House Festival of the Arts in nineteen sixty-five alongside work at the National Gallery.
The Keeper itself was cast in Cor-Ten steel, a material that oxidizes to a rich brown rather than rusting away, a controlled corrosion that stabilizes over time. The figure stands with hands raised to the Great Spirit, a posture of supplication and authority at once. The sculpture was installed and dedicated in May of nineteen seventy-four, as a Wichita Bicentennial project.
Most evenings, weather and river levels permitting, a ring of fire burns around the base of the Keeper for fifteen minutes, the flames meant to complete what Plains traditions call the sacred hoop of earth, air, water, and fire. The confluence was sacred before the city arrived. The city, eventually, acknowledged that.
