2023 Lakota Calendar

The Lakxóta say that there is a woman in the moon. They call her Hokéwiŋ. When she stirs her spoon vigorously light spills out about her lodge. Image by Dakota Wind. 

New 2023 Lakota Calendar

December 2022 to January 2024

By Dakota Wind

Hau mitakuyapi. Greetings relatives and friends. I've been producing more arts and post with far more regularity on instagram or FaceBook. You can follow me @thefirstscout. I'll share a bit of news or a book reviews here, or anything that I feel fits what I've shared here over the years. 

Here's what I've come up with for the coming year. You can access this calendar for FREE. Here's the link. It will print out at 11"x17". 

If you are inclined, and want to, you can help this graduate student out. Help me get my books or grab a tea (I don't drink coffee). Venmo me: @Dakota-Goodhouse. 

Lakhota: An Indigenous History, A Review

Lakȟóta: An Indigenous History, A Review
A Native History Up To Current Time

By Dakota Wind

Rani-Hendrik Andersson and David C. Posthumus

Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022. xx + 415 pp. $34.95 (hardcover). Contents, illustrations, preface, pronunciation guide, afterward, glossary, abbreviations, notes, bibliography, and index.

“For writing the Lakȟóta language, we use the most current orthography, which was developed first by Indiana University’s American Indian Studies Research Institute (AISRI) and expanded upon by the Lakȟóta Language Consortium (LLC).” So begins a narrative that employs a western institutional writing system. Like Pekka Hämäläinen and his “Lakota America,” Andersson and Posthumus craft a story that relies on foreign alphabet with international accents and glottal indicators. On the surface, LLC standardization works (ex. Wiyáka means “sand,” while wíyaka means “feather”), but so do the orthographies that have been developed by Lakxota people. 

Do these standard orthographies work for speakers? Certainly not for Lakota America. The audiobook version of that fine work is absolutely marred by the efforts of that narrator, who pronounces French terms with ease and familiarity. One only hopes for correct pronunciation of Lakxóta terms in Lakȟóta: An Indigenous History since so much effort has gone in to employ a standard orthography to ensure it. 

Andersson and Posthumus begin their work with the emergence narrative of the Títxunwaŋ Lakxóta people, which is followed by the story of the White Buffalo Calf Woman and her gift of the sacred pipe. The emergence narratives of the Eastern Dakhóta and Middle Dakhóta are excluded, though their place and part of the collective Ochéti Shakówiŋ, the Seven Council Fires or Great Sioux Nation, is not. 

The authors understand how and why the pipe is important to the Lakxóta. They get it. This reader appreciates how respectful and mindful they are in their treatment of the covenant narrative. The Lakxóta place the appearance of the White Buffalo Calf Woman in many places on the Great Plains but the where and how of these stories is excluded. 

Equally important to understanding the story of place is the savior narrative of the Fallen Star cycle of stories. This reader laments that these stories are excluded. Where the White Buffalo Calf Woman story is one about peace and interrelationship it is also about how to greet others - with water; the Fallen Star story is about practice of virtue and about how to say goodbye - with proper affection and gesture. 

The strength of Lakȟóta is it’s inclusion of Lakxóta history drawn from the pictographic records known as winter counts. It is immensely gratifying that historians treat these primary resource documents as more than art pieces. 

Lakȟóta is neatly divided into three parts. Each explores themes of culture (part one), conflict (part two), and survival (part three). The authors’ work is heavily drawn from Oglála voices, though much indeed of spiritual or philosophical belief or practice is shared in common. For a work that is representative and inclusive of the Lakxóta, why draw so heavily from one of seven divisions? The answer might be that there is so much more material recorded of Oglála voices. Part one carefully constructs a window into the daily cultural life of nineteenth century Lakxóta. 

After expertly establishing the philosophies, spiritual beliefs, and organization of society, the authors pick up with the history of the Lakxóta at the turn of 1800. The Lakxóta encounter with the Corps of Discovery is only touched on; the Arikara War of 1823, the first punitive campaign against a plains Indian tribe, is passed over; the exclusion of these events minimizes the growing political, social, and military strength of the Lakxóta. 

The authors pick up the history of the nineteenth century Lakxóta in earnest in the 1840s with immigration on the Oregon Trail, but they describe it best as tension as the bison population begins to drop. Competition with cattle over water and grass? Bovine disease? The authors offer an excellent summary that it was all the above. In order to get the resources that the Lakxóta and their horses need to pursue the vanishing bison ganges and expand their ranges into other tribally occupied lands. 

There is little attention paid to the 1863-1864 punitive campaigns led by generals Sibley and Sully. The authors also split the Lakxóta into “northern” and “southern” divisions, but the Lakxóta people do this too in a manner of their own with the division coming from those who live north of the Cheyenne River and those who live south of the river. The authors construct the plains filled with rising tensions and escalating conflict that builds to a breaking point when they write of inevitable conflict. 

The authors stated that when they write of the Battle of the Little Bighorn they would write from the Lakxóta perspective, and they do just that. They also do not aggrandize this fight, rather it is merely an endcap to chapter seven. There are so many books about this fight already, this treatment of the fight describes real people in tension and worry. The outcome of the fight, a victory co-celebrated with the Cheyenne. 

The Ghost Dance, its origins, development, and practice by the Lakxóta is wonderfully broken down. The authors touch on the issue of syncretism in sharing not a Christian worldview that natives and nonnatives share a belief in one common god, but Sitting Bull’s own letter informing Agent McLaughin this very perspective. This doesn’t equate the Christian redemption narrative with sundance, rather, the Lakxóta have their own worship and tradition with the same god. 

The last third of Lakȟóta reaches past the tragedy of Sitting Bull’s death and Wounded Knee. Readers explore the Lakxóta world in the post-reservation era, deaths of the last great pre-reservation leaders, crushing poverty, ranching & farming, the legacies of the Dawes Allotment Act and the Indian Reorganization Act, and more. The struggle of Self-Determination brings the Lakxóta story up to the Dakota Access Pipeline. The authors take one step more as they wrap up their work and offer a look into life on the reservations during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Lakȟóta does not have the same scope as Lakota America and it should not. The authors shine a bright light on the story of leadership in the twentieth century and most importantly, that the Lakxóta are present and active in the modern world. 

May You Emerge Safely On The Other Side

The First To Arise, a wetplate photograph by Shane Balkowitsch, 2016. 
Uŋmáčhetkiya Yakpáptapi Kta Héčha
May You Safely Emerge On The Other Side

By Dakota Wind

Tȟokéya Inážiŋla tókhi éyaye hé? Thíyata oníčilapelo. Uŋmá ečhíyataŋhaŋ iyáye. Waŋná Čhaŋkú Wanáǧi maní. Čhaŋkú Tȟó maní. Tókša akhé waŋčhíyaŋkiŋ kte. 

Where have you gone First To Arise? They have called you home. You have gone on to the other side. Now you walk the Spirit Road. You walk on the Blue Road. I will see you again for certain. 

Lekší Kevin Locke loved the land. When he was home he regularly ran on the prairie steppe above the floodplain of the Missouri River, overlooking Lake Oahe. His home, in the community of Wakpala, S.D. overlooks the water. Day or night, light from the sun or moon stretches across the water and illuminates his home. During the darkest nights and coldest days of winter, his home is filled with earnest love for family and land.

One of his favorite places to run was at an old Sahnish (Arikara) village site close to his home. He wondered if it would be a good place to camp in the old days and looked at the site as though for the first time. Lo! There, he saw the evidence of a village from days gone by. Depressions in the ground where once stood great earthlodges. Time, erosion, and development took much of the old village. Thereafter, when he ran there he imagined running through a living village filled with laughter and singing in the air. The wind that swirled about him at the same time when he ran there, was the same wind that swirled then and there in a different distant time long ago; this same wind carried the smell of joy and prayer across the water and into the sky. 

Lekší loved to dance. He refused to contest dance. The only one in competition for excellence he danced against was himself. He was renowned for hoop dancing, storytelling, and playing the traditional northern plains Indian flute. Kevin cultivated excellence in others too. When he saw the best in others he would say so, and further, he would tell others. 

Lekší would say he was not a singer, yet he frequently sang. He loved and shared the songs he heard and learned from the elders of his youth. He listened to the mystery of creation. Swallows would swoop by and let him know he needed to brush his hair. Western Meadowlarks perched outside his home and sang in the New Year each spring, and each fall fond wishes for a safe emergence on the other side of winter. We just have to stop and listen for revelation in the quiet moments of creation. 

Lekší believed that it was important to sing. Song renewed one’s identity and connection to the landscape. Song renews cultural identity. There is an exchange of energy, like electricity, between people who sing together. Long before Scientific American studied choirs and discovered that people who sing together their heartbeats synchronize, the Očhéti Šakówiŋ made this natural observation. Kevin explained it simply as: Lowáŋpi čhaŋná čhaŋtiyapȟa akhÍptaŋ hečhé, or “When they sing together, their hearts beat as one.” 

Lekší would say he was not a singer, yet he frequently sang. The singing voice is the most precious instrument of the Očhéti Šakówiŋ. As an instrument of the Great Plains, the singing voice is known to carry several miles and still be understood. In an arid landscape with the near constant presence of the wind, the Lakȟóta language was a language of the wind. The rattle is the essence of hail; the drum the essence of thunder; the flute the essence of the wind; the voice the essence of lightning. The Lakȟóta singer’s voice carries where English falls apart. 

Day and night. Equinox and solstice. Month and year. He saw the heavens and landscape in a constant state of renewal. In late summer of 2017, a solar eclipse washed over the Beautiful Country. The Očhéti Šakówiŋ last saw one in 1868. They believed that what was in the world here below was reflected in the heavens above. The Húŋkpapȟa lit sage and smudged. They brought out their pipes and prayed. The children of the sun and moon shone from their places in the heavens and life was wondrous and mysterious. The most beautiful thing about this moment was sharing this experience with family. For Kevin it was a profound moment of renewal. Even as the sun “died” it emerged moments later victorious. 

It was important for Lekší to experience the Beautiful Country. Looking out upon the landscape to distant summits gives one a sense of atmospheric perspective, that is to say, that from a distance sites and summits become like a dream and take on a blue color. That distance, that blue color reminds the Očhéti Šakówiŋ observer of a long abiding presence of Niyá Awičhableze, or the Enlightening Breath Upon Which All Life Returns. 

The Enlightening Breath is said to arrive on the Northern Plains in the spring, but all that lives and breathes draw upon it throughout the year. The Očhéti Šakówiŋ natural observation of atmospheric perspective is perceived thusly: Tȟéhaŋtaŋhaŋ táku tȟotȟó kiŋ tȟó atȟáŋiŋ, or “That which is green, from a distance becomes blue.” It is this sacred blue perspective that reminds the observer to treat the very land and air with the same respect as one treats home. 

Lekší Kevin’s favorite conversational topics were language, culture, land, and how these each serve as metaphor for renewal and must be cultivated each and every day. The Missouri River is central to life in the Beautiful Country. The Mnišóše, or Missouri River, begins at the confluence of three rivers. This great confluence is known to the Očhéti Šakówiŋ as Mnitȟáŋka, or “The Great Water.” This Great Water flows and becomes the Mnišóše, or “The Water Astir.” It grows and turns about the landscape south, until it concludes its long journey. There it once again becomes Mnitȟáŋka. The journey of the river and its flow south is reflected in the Spirit Road of the night sky. 

A favorite topic of traditional story was that of Wičháȟpi Hiŋȟpáye, or “Fallen Star.” In the last narrative of the cycle of Fallen Star stories, this traditional hero heard his father’s voice in the heavens call out for him to take his place in the sky. The people were camped at Pahá Makȟásaŋsaŋ, what is today White Butte, and gathered in a great circle to send off their beloved hero. With his Kȟolá, Fallen Star ascended the White Butte and embraced his brother, lay down on the summit, and there he died. But his story doesn’t end there. He transformed into light and rose into the sky. From there he sends rays of light and hope to his people below. 

It is now fall. A Western Meadowlark flew by me and cried out, “Tókša akhé.” At that moment, the sun seemed to shine a little brighter, the air was filled with the intoxicating smell of spring or heaven, a breeze swirled and a little whirlwind danced and dissipated into the sky. In one breath I smelled and tasted sage. It was a holy breath. An Enlightening Breath, one filled with the promise of renewal. The Western Meadowlark said so. 

We may not see you in the here and now, but you are as close as our next breath, as close as our dreams, as close as shadow in the prairie grass, as close as reflection in the water. 

Akhé waníyetu ú. Akhé kičhíč’iŋpi kte. Ohómni wótheȟike ečhéča takómni uŋmáčhetkiya yakpáptapi kta héčha. Mitȟákuye Owás’iŋ.

Again, the winter approaches. Again, they will carry each other. Although surrounded by adversity, nonetheless, may you safely emerge on the other side. All my relatives.