Ankopaaingyadete (d. early 1900s), commonly called Anko or In The Middle Of Many Tracks, was a Kiowa artist and historian known for his pictographic

winter count Winter counts (Lakota: ''waníyetu wówapi'' or ''waníyetu iyáwapi'') are pictorial calendars or histories in which tribal records and events were recorded by Native Americans in North America. The Blackfeet, Mandan, Kiowa, Lakota, and other Pla ...

calendars. A seasonal calendar, originally created on brown wrapping paper, covered the time from winter 1863 to spring 1885. Another, a monthly record made with pencil in a ledger notebook, shows 39 months in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Anko made several copies of his calendars on buckskin, including one with colored inks for

ethnologist Ethnology (from the grc-gre, ἔθνος, meaning 'nation') is an academic field that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural, social, or sociocultural anthropolog ...

James Mooney James Mooney (February 10, 1861 – December 22, 1921) was an American ethnographer who lived for several years among the Cherokee. Known as "The Indian Man", he conducted major studies of Southeastern Indians, as well as of tribes on the ...

. On this copy for Mooney, Anko combined his yearly and monthly calendars onto one piece. The original monthly calendar was depicted in blank ink in a continuous spiral. On the original and in the copies, the months are marked with crescent moons, symbols representing each moon's name (such as "Geese-going Moon" for October). Many of the events Anko recorded at this time chronicle the illness of his young wife, who was home with tuberculosis. One of these buckskin calendars was originally in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian, but has been lost. A 1965 copy of Anko's calendar, made by Kiowa artist Charles Rowell, is held at the

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History The National Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. It has free admission and is open 364 days a year. In 2021, with ...

References

19th-century births 20th-century deaths Native American painters Kiowa people 19th-century indigenous painters of the Americas {{NorthAm-native-bio-stub