TALES FROM THE DALLAS HISTORY ARCHIVES Native American History in North Texas

Calvin Thunderhawk, a Sioux from the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota, was an artist and painter of Native American life. He was also an alumnus of Crozier Tech High School in Dallas, Class of 1969, where he was a student photographer and swimmer. From the Dallas Times Herald Collection, Dallas Public Library.

Brandon Murray, a librarian and archivist for the Dallas Public Library, writes a regular series for D Magazine on North Texas history. The photos he pulls from the library’s archives are always fantastic, and the feature is reliably one of my favorite things on our website.   For this installment, Murray looked to Native American Heritage Month as an apt “opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate the history and culture of the people Native to this land.” He writes:   I looked in the Dallas Public Library archive to find historical images of Dallas history that depict Native Americans, both residents of Dallas and those who spent time in this area.  The photographs attached to this gallery are part the Dallas Public Library’s Dallas History and Archives Collection. They include portraiture of Native Americans in the 1960s-1970s including a couple of images depicting Murray Rhoads and his family. Rhoads was a full-blood Southern Cheyenne, the first Native American to join the Dallas Police Department, and, after a 25-year career, became the first Native American to retire from the Dallas Police Department.   Among the various photographs depicted are images from an archeological excavation of a Native American site in North Texas in 1968, as well as images of notable and national figures such as Forrest Kassanavoid, the founding president of the American Indian Society and a leader in Dallas Comanche Indian affairs, and activist Vernon Bellecourt, who was born on the White Earth reservation in Minnesota.   Read more and see the photos