Tipis and Domes: Modeling the Blackfeet Cosmos at a World Fair

Chapter 4 centers on the Crow lodge, a painted tipi by Blackfeet artist Darryl Blackman that was commissioned by the US Information Agency for the US Pavilion at Expo 70 in Japan. Garnering a record-breaking sixty-four million visitors, the first Asian exposition was charged with simulating a “city of the future” in an era of whole earth images, dome mega-architecture, and dystopian accounts of Western progress. During this period, Plains tipis circulated internationally alongside domes as icons of environmental holism and countercultural resistance. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to tipis as a dynamic ecopolitical architecture in their own right. This chapter positions the Crow lodge within a longer history of exhibiting Native American architectural models in colonial exhibitions. The author demonstrates that Cold War World Fairs could became stages for Indigenous futurisms in which artists materialize ancient gifts from the earth to expand a circle of reciprocity.