2022

18’ single channel video

In Their Names is documentation of a single horseback rider, my father Zane Spang, in an act of honoring our Tsitsistas/Suhtai (a.k.a. Northern Cheyenne) relatives both past and present on the 146th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In so doing, my father rekindles a memorial horseback ride to the Little Bighorn Battlefield done for many years by our family to honor a fallen relative killed at the original battle on June 25, 1876. I add the oft-dismissed and controversial perspective of Kate Bighead, a young Cheyenne girl who witnessed the battle, as a subtext to my father’s honoring ride to bring together past and present and remind the viewer we are still here thanks to the sacrifices of our relatives in the past.  The Little Bighorn Battle is one of the most obsessed-over and written-about battles in North American History because, as the experts say and as it reads on Custer’s monument, “there were no survivors.” This piece and the Tsitsistas/Suhtai Nation, Lakota Nations, and Northern Arapaho Nation beg to differ.