A plain page on NativeWeb holds four wolf drawings: Pups, Wolf Spirit, Howling Wolf, and Winter Wolves. That would already be enough to make it worth preserving. The story attached to the artist makes the page considerably more important.
Visit Black Crow’s NativeWeb pages
The surviving wolf gallery identifies the artist as Chris Black Crow Bousquet and says the page was constructed for him by Peter d’Errico. The images are credited to Bousquet with a 1995 copyright date later updated to 2021.
D’Errico’s later writing provides the historical context. Black Crow was one of the named plaintiffs in Trapp et al. v. DuBois et al., litigation involving Native American religious practice inside Massachusetts prisons. D’Errico says he visited a Native spiritual circle in prison during the winter of 1994 and, with attorney Bob Doyle, filed the case in April 1995.
The dispute concerned more than abstract theology. Native inmates described ceremonial and religious items being confiscated and restrictions on participation in their spiritual circle. The litigation became part of a longer fight over access to Native religious practice inside the prison system.
A tiny art page with a much larger context
The wolf page itself is wonderfully simple. It is basically filenames, image sizes, links, attribution, and a route back to Black Crow’s welcome page. There is no content-management system trying to turn four drawings into forty-seven components and a newsletter popup.
That simplicity helped the material survive.
Bousquet’s artwork also escaped the boundary of the website. A later educational manual on Native American learners thanks Chris Black Crow Bousquet for permission to use two of his drawings, showing that the art circulated beyond the original personal pages.
D’Errico wrote in 2023 that Black Crow was eventually granted parole in 2021. That retrospective writing makes the old NativeWeb material easier to understand, but the older web page remains valuable precisely because it is closer to the period when the artwork and litigation were current.
This is the sort of page that demonstrates why personal and advocacy websites matter to historians. Major institutions preserve court opinions and formal documents. Small websites often preserve the human material around them: drawings, names, commentary, relationships, and artifacts that otherwise disappear between the legal citations.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains plenty of old pages that look modest until you follow their context. This one is a particularly strong example.
The wolves are still there. So is the name of the person who drew them. On the old Web, sometimes that is the archive.