The Wind Is The Spirit Of The Great Plains

Tȟaté’káoškokpa (Canyon Made-By-Wind), or Wind Canyon, along the Heȟáka Tȟa Wakpá (River Of Elk; Little Missouri River) in Makȟóšíća (Badlands, N.D.; Theodore Roosevelt National Park). Photo by The First Scout. 

The Wind Is The Spirit Of The Great Plains

The Sky In Language: Spoken, Drawn, and Signed

By The First Scout 

THE GREAT PLAINS - The wind has been a constant presence on the open prairie since creation and has shaped the landscape. It races across the open sky with the summer and winter storms, and flows about the landscape playfully, fitfully, and angrily. It is the very essence of the Great Plains.

The Lakota have several words for the wind and its attributes such as tȟaté (air in motion), uyá (to blow leeward of the wind), kaȟwókA (to be carried along with the wind), ikápȟaŋyaŋ (to be beaten down by the wind, as with grass) or itáglaȟweya (with the wind). When a strong wind is present, or suddenly appears, during prayer or at a gathering, the wind might even be referred to as takú wakaŋ škaŋškaŋ (something with great energy is moving). A whirlwind is called tȟatéiyumni, which some regard as a sign that a spirit is present.

There is only one word to describe a windless day, ablákela (calm or quiet).

When the wind blows cold, such as it does in the winter months, the Lakota refer to it as tȟatóšni. The cold winter wind had a story of its own. In the days of legend, before steamboats an trains, before soldiers and missionaries, when the camps moved across the prairie steppe in the fall to establish winter camps, they told the story of Wazíya, that which some call a giant, or the Power Of The North. Wazíya blew his cold breath across the world. 

They say as the summer wanes and turns to autumn, the wind changes with the weather. That change in the wind is the breath of North. The cold was and is deadly, never to be feared, but respected. The North spreads his robe across the sleeping land. The North makes hunting game easier to track. In fact, the Lakota used to dance in snowshoes in the blanket of the first snowfall. They rejoiced in the weather and embraced the deep cold. 

In the spring, the wind signals another change. The Lakȟóta call this wind Niyá Awičhableze, The Enlightening Breath. This is the first spring wind upon which the meadowlarks return. It’s the time of year in which the Lakota carefully watch for the ice to break on the Mníšoše, the Water-Astir (Missouri River), the geese return, and when the bison bear their calves. 

Read the original complete article The Wind Is The Spirit Of The Great Plains at The First Scout.

Winter Counts on the Northern Great Plains

By Aaron L. Barth

Reposted from here.

Chapter 4 of The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter
Counts at the Smithsonian (2007).

In the last couple days, Dakota Goodhouse (his blog linked here) and I have been hanging out in downtown Fargo, as he's here to expand on the Native tradition of winter counts. He crashed at my place for a couple nights, and last night we had dinner here after his talk at the Spirit Room (this collaboratively organized and funded by the Fargo-West Fargo Public Schools Indian Education Program and the North Dakota Humanities Council). Dakota and I chatted about winter counts, and about future prospects of scholarly interest and inquiry.

I'm thinking that winter counts, and the history of them, have become popular enough that I don't really need to explain them. But just in case, a winter count is an annual pictograph painted onto the larger medium of buffalo or elk hides. In the latter part of the 19th century, they were painted onto canvas. These counts provided the owner or memory group with a traceable past, the pictograph often representative of a successful high-point of that year. Dakota Goodhouse continues pushing this tradition in new directions today, in 2013.

While Dakota explained the winter counts to the group at the Spirit Room last night, he pointed to one of his buffalo hides while expanding on how he saw something different in that particular account between today and a couple years ago. Impressionistically, this account is a symmetrical series of triangles running around the circumferences of a couple circles. Some years ago, Dakota said he used to see this as a Native headdress that was laid out on the floor. Today, though, he said he perceives of it as the plains indigene narrative attached to what we call "sun dogs." He said in the Lakota tradition, "sun dogs" are thought of more as camp fires next to the sun. 

Dakota explains the stories reflected by and attached to the pictographs on the bison hide.

These stories got me thinking of something historians deal with every now and then, and that's one-dimensional thinkers who sometimes polemically say, "Well, cultures with oral traditions don't have a history, or if they do it's impossible to trace." This is always a fun question to respond to. Last night I was thinking more-so of how a person who reads a novel, or a good piece of history, is likely to walk away with different perceptions about the same text within the span of two or more readings.

A photo of Dakota Goodhouse being
hilarious.

This is similar to the winter count. Dakota explained the difference in how one individual, when looking at the bison robe laid out, might see a native headdress while another might see sun dogs, parhelia, or what the Dakota call wi'aceti, this roughly translated and defined as "when the sun makes fires." Dakota added that the winters on the northern Great Plains are often cold enough to induce the sun to make camp fires to keep it warm.

This story, in turn, induced me to abandon the sun dog phrase and replace it with wi'aceti (pronounced "we-ah-che-tee"). If anyone wants to join me on the northern Great Plains in this effort, by all means. If we hear someone say "sun dog," we can add to that wi'aceti, and with explanation.

One more note: Dakota contributed heavily to a piece of winter count scholarship that you might be interested in, chapter 4 of Candace Greene and Russell Thornton, The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Check it out at the link here.

For The Love Of North Dakota, A Review

For the Love of North Dakota and Other Essays: Sundays With Clay in the Bismarck Tribune.
By Clay Jenkinson. (Washburn, North Dakota: The Dakota Institute Press, 2012) 364 pages. A review by Aaron L. Barth. 

When writers describe a place, they explain their surroundings while they intentionally or inadvertently explain themselves. Clay Jenkinson’s For the Love of North Dakota is a sounding board for this, as a collection of his Bismarck Tribune essays are now accessible from The Dakota Institute Press, this from the northern Great Plains in Washburn, North Dakota. Jenkinson covers the deep culture of the state-wide political spectrum, including an acute and thoughtful post-mortem on North Dakota Governor Art Link, and ruminations on the sense of place at Theodore Roosevelt’s national park. This is all the more pressing considering how North Dakota is experiencing a global industrial petroleum boom (as of 2013, North Dakota is the #2 producer of petroleum in the United States, this just behind Texas).

In light of this, Jenkinson also showcases artists who literally come from the North Dakota soil. Chuck Suchy is one, a farmer and rancher with roots from Bohemia and on the upper Missouri River (not too far south of Mandan, North Dakota, to be exact). As Jenkinson describes Chuck, “He’s a working farmer, which means that… He so clearly loves this place, its history, heritage, its people, its quirkiness, its muted west-[Missouri-]river landscape beauty, that he can really be called the voice of North Dakota.” Of Chuck Suchy and his family of musicians, this is true. It is Bohemia on the northern Great Plains, something that Willa Cather alluded to in her novels, and this is why Garrison Keillor continuously calls upon Chuck’s talent when The Prairie Home Companion radio show enters North Dakota.

Another story of individual North Dakotan nature comes in the form of a slightly anonymous “Mr. R” who secured staples for his family during the famous blizzard of 1966. Jenkinson is at one of his literary peaks here, remembering how Mr. R. “bundled up in all the coats, mittens, and scarves he owned,” and “silently knelt down to buckle up his overshoes” before heading out into the blizzard abyss. Quite a while went by before Mr. R. returned to his family, and when he did he revealed his cache: “a loaf of bread, a case of Hamms beer, and two cartons of cigarettes.” Jenkinson says, “It took many years for Mr. R. to live down that story.” These otherwise humorous and anecdotal tales feel honest, and Jenkinson and other public historians are increasingly turning their attention to these local stories, memoirs and histories. (See, for example, Tammy S. Gordon’s, Private History in Public: Exhibition and the Settings of Everyday Life, AltiMira Press, 2010).

A review would not be fair without critique, though. While reading Jenkinson’s essays, a reader hopes for but never gets more than a couple of essays on Great Plains Native America — they were, after all, the first North Dakotans. In addition to this, he suggests that everything non-North Dakotan is somehow inferior to North Dakota. This is odd, especially when contextualized with his love for original non-North Dakotans such as Thomas Jefferson, C.S. Lewis, Theodore Roosevelt, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, George Frideric
Handel, Meriwether Lewis & William Clark, and Henry David Thoreau (among others). These figures are central in the culture and history of the Atlantic World, the stuff that Wallace Stegner grew up with in the first half of the 20th century. Jenkinson’s ruminations on them show intellect, but they do not speak to genuine and authentic touchstones of North Dakota culture and history, or the people who have a genealogical connection with the land.

Perhaps, though, this is the theme throughout the book: Jenkinson is a North Dakota nationalist with advanced training in Western Civilization. He is a patriotic Euro-American booster for the geo-political abstraction that is North Dakota. And this is how it has to be — a love for the abstraction — since it would be logistically impossible for him to meet and love every individual North Dakotan. This, no doubt, makes a reader eager for Jenkinson and The Dakota Press to fill in the gaps with a follow-up to For the Love of North Dakota. Considering how the booming Petroleum Industrial Complex is altering the culture of North Dakota in the second decade of the 21st century, writers such as Jenkinson are all the more important. There is an infinite amount of North Dakotans and New North Dakotans throughout the state that have individual stories worth telling, and Jenkinson has the pen and vocabulary for it.

Involved in historic preservation and cultural resource management since 2002, Aaron L. Barth is a PhD candidate in history with North Dakota State University, Fargo. His focus is on Great Plains, Public, and World History. In addition to this, he is a board member with the North Dakota Humanities Council. Barth’s blogspot can be found at The Edge Of The Village.

Remembering Greasy Grass in World History

by Aaron L. Barth
Board Member
Cross-posted at this link here.

I remember the first time I started piling over the historiography of Greasy Grass/Little Bighorn at some point in 1999 or 2000, this with a short historical article included in one of those military history readers. This article happened to be by the late Stephen Ambrose (I think he published it sometime in the 1970s), and as a reflection of the scholarly times, it focused exclusively on what we call white military history. Looking back on it, and considering how even by the 1870s the American military was such a small cross section of elite Anglo-Americans that guided policy (as opposed to the lot of our non-English-speaking immigrant great and great-great and great-great-great grandparents who were entering the country at the time), it is much more apt to refer to the traditional historiographic body of white 19th century American history as Anglo-American or Victorian Military History. This is not meant in a conspiratorial way. Rather, it is meant to point out how institutions are composed of individuals, and if the individuals within those institutions have certain outlooks on the world, then the institutions are going to operate accordingly.

For at least a couple decades, now, individual scholars within the academies have created a social structure large enough so they can shift the direction of the scholarship (archaeologists today sometimes call this "counter-modern" while historians refer to it as multivocal). For example, instead of once again combing over what happened on June 25, 1876 at Greasy Grass, scholars have taken to looking at the conflict as a broader segment that needs to be contextualized in World History. James Gump has a work out there entitled, The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and Sioux (University of Nebraska Press, 1994), and it considers how the Anglosphere mythologized themselves after a confederation of Lakota, Cheyenne and Native America decimated the 7th at the Little Bighorn in 1876, and after the Zulu wiped out a British force of 1,500 at Isandhlwana on January 22, 1879. Check out the Zulu monument to the fallen Zulu at Isandhlwana with this link here.

Isandlwana landscape from the Wikipedia public domain page.

These broadened world historical treatments help pave the way for other scholarship (for example: so we're not incessantly sitting around wondering what Custer did wrong; but rather what the Lakota and Cheyenne forces did themselves to bring about George's demise). The latest and greatest public historical treatment of Greasy Grass comes by way of Debra Buchholtz's The Battle of the Greasy Grass/Little Bighorn: Custer's Last Stand in Memory, History, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2012). This work gets a reader to think secondarily about the actual events of June 25, 1876, and primarily about how the public has remembered the events since 1876. It was, after all, a centennial year (from 1776 to 1876), and the general Anglo-American reading public was nonplussed and aghast to think that Custer (or any Anglo-American for that matter) would be capable of losing a battle within the interior of the American nation, and this so close to the centennial anniversary of the nation's declaration of independence.

Greasy Grass/Little Bighorn from Google Earth imaging.

So this is where a lot of the contemporary scholarship is at these days: not just looking at the historical event itself, but also looking at what the popular press and academically trained thought about the historical event in and of itself (for example, William Blair and David Blight, among others, have taken a hard look at Civil War memory and memorialization in this way too). And that's what I've kind of been thinking about on this 137th anniversary of the day the Lakota and Cheyenne (and others) stuck it to George at Greasy Grass in eastern Montana.

In closing, I leave you with a paragraph quote from the 1986 work of James Belich, The Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1986 and 1989). This is so you don't have to lug around numerous books while you're taking in the various Lakota and Cheyenne holiday celebrations that commemorate the defeat of Custer at the Battle of Greasy Grass — Aaron Barth Consulting does that work for you.

Okay, to quote Belich, and to consider it in the context of Custer as a trained Victorian operative for Anglo-America:

"Racial ideas are not just images of others, but of one's self and one's own society. Superiority and inferiority, inevitable victory and inevitable defeat, higher faculties or the lack of them; each are two sides to the same coin. To question one is to question the other, and thereby cast doubt on an individual and collective self image. Victorians, like other people, were not eager to ask such questions" (Belich, 1989: 327)