Stringing Rosaries, A Review

A little girl kneels in prayer on the cover of Lakimodiere's "Stringing Rosaries." The title takes its name from one of the sixteen narratives within this book that recalls a story doing just this. 

Stringing Rosaries, A Review

A Must Read For Church Leaders

By Dakota Wind

Lajimodiere, Denise K. Stringing Rosaries: the History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors. Fargo, ND: North Dakota University Press. 2019. $42.95 (hardcover). 277 pages + xiii. Preface, acknowledgments, photographs, fold-out map, appendix, bibliography, index. 

Lajimodiere shares the post-reservation Native American parochial boarding school experience of the Great Plains in an absolutely powerful and heartbreaking narrative that is certain to provoke a sense of loss, anger, sadness, and hope. This is not an easy read. 

Stringing Rosaries begins with an introduction to the methodology of militarized education that was developed by Capt. Richard Pratt following the Civil War. Pratt was the superintendent of the United States Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, PA where he subjected “new recruits” to an exhausting regime of corporal punishment to any who exhibited indigenous identity, namely that of speaking their language. 

Lajimodier’s research informs us that many children were stolen from their homes if their parents didn’t obey the mandate to send their children to school. Her work focuses on the boarding school experience of survivors from a variety of reservations, mainly in North Dakota, but all genuine and moving, and for this reader, close to home. 

Pratt’s model became the standard for native education. Lajimodiere takes readers through sixteen firsthand accounts of assimilation. Each account recalls a dehumanizing experience. Children were coldly stripped, washed, and deloused with powder regardless if they were clean on arrival. Hair was cut or shaved entirely. Children were excessively and cruelly punished mainly for disobeying authority and speaking their language. 

It would be easy to read only one or two of the survival narratives. In a sense, reading one is very much like reading them all. There is a general sameness of story, each school could be the same one but for location and name, but reading each one is part of the reader’s witness to understand the survivor’s journey. 

Boys were taught manual labor skills like carpentry and farming, girls were taught domestic skills like cooking, cleaning, and sewing. Boys and girls were strictly kept apart from each other, even in play or prayer. They were all awakened in the early hours for morning prayers. They were served coffee at every meal to keep them awake. Most disturbing of all, at any hour of the day or night, some children were sexually assaulted by both men and women of the cloth. 

Some of the first-person accounts are recalled under a pseudonym. Others employ their everyday names, and I am profoundly grateful that Dr. Ramona Klein (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa) and Dr. Erich Longie (Spirit Lake). I know both through their work and have met both on occasion; Dr. Klein when she was employed at the University of Mary in Bismarck, ND; Dr. Longie in his work with the tribal historic preservation office at Spirit Lake. 

Lajimodiere brings her work to a powerful close. She gives voice to her understanding of her father’s experience, of the native experience in assimilation: “...I came across terms I had not heard of before, terms such as historical trauma…[which] is conceptualized as a collective complex trauma.”

A year before her father took his last journey, Lajimodiere watched the documentary In the White Man’s Image with him. “The video documented the use of whistles, bells, bugles, military-style punishment and daily regimen, the building of guardhouses on school campuses, kids dying of homesickness, disease, and poor nutrition...that boarding schools left a legacy of confused and lonely children.” 

Part of Lajimodiere’s testimony is forgiveness. This is not the same as reconciliation. For reconciliation to happen there has to be an acknowledgment of wrong-doing on behalf of the Church. Lajimodiere tells us in her closing pages of well-being and story of the White Bison Wellbriety Journey of Forgiveness. 

Forgiveness, in this sense, is a deep sense of being wronged, something buried deep inside one’s soul, and a profound relief of releasing that tightly wound bundle of anger and loss. This isn’t something light or easy, nor is every person ready to forgive when neither the Church nor clergy has acknowledged these dark sins. 

Lajimodiere’s Stringing Rosaries isn’t a read for everyone, but it needs to be read by Church leaders and clergy. It should be read by people who call themselves Christian. Get your copy, or tell your minister to get one through the North Dakota State University Press.

   

Hostiles, A Film Review

Hostiles, A Film Review

“You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.”
By Dakota Wind

Hostiles. Directed by Scott Cooper. Produced by Scott Cooper, Ken Lao, and Jon Lesher. Screenplay by Scott Cooper. Based on a story by Donald Stewart. Music by Max Richter. Starring Wes Studi (Mystery Men, Last of The Mohicans, Geronimo), Adam Beach (Suicide Squad, Windtalkers, Cowboys and Aliens), Q'orianka Kilcher (How The Grinch Stole Christmas, The New World, Longmire), Xavier Horsechief, and Christian Bale (Empire of The Sun, Batman Begins). U.S.A.: Waypoint Entertainment / Le Grisbi Productions / Bloom Media, Dec. 22, 2017. Film. 133 minutes.

American Western films have a checklist, and Cooper’s Hostiles keeps to the basics. Long panning shots of an undeveloped landscape of open plains, streams, and mountains. Guns, cowboys, soldiers, horses, Indians. Check. Unrepentant violence and moody discourse. Check. The anonymity and mystery of The Man with No Name are almost gone in this narrative. The only ones without names or identity beyond who they are are the Comanche. Their presence serves only to offer up a slice of motiveless Indian depredation.

Hostiles is a movie in the tradition of Last of the Mohicans, that is to say, that it is set in a world of political change and violent conflict. As Daniel Day-Lewis learned Mohican, Christian Bale learned Cheyenne for this film. Like Day-Lewis, and by the laws of Hollywood’s western genre, Bale “out Indians the Indians.” He speaks more lines in Cheyenne than all his native counterparts combined. Blocker is a better shot, a better fighter, a better killer. He’s the protagonist so bullets miss him. The only hurt Blocker receives is a guilty conscience, but tell him he’s a good man and he falls apart.

Hostiles is largely about Blocker. How can he live in a post Civil War, post Indian Wars, America? His paternalistic needs are indulged twice: taking care of the widow Mrs. Quaid and taking care of the last Cheyenne prisoner, a boy named Little Bear. Rosamund Pike’s Mrs. Quaid can wail. She’s allowed. Mrs. Quaid’s pain and fears are fully explored. Blocker’s and Quaid’s growing affection for each other is chaste.

Cooper delivers a fine western film, but he’s paralyzed with what to do with its native cast. Studi’s Yellow Hawk and Beach’s Black Hawk, are little explored. Their narrative is constructed only from interaction with Blocker. Their narrative isn’t even their own to tell. Their struggle, their imprisonment, their pain, their recovery, and their deaths need Blocker, and that’s what hobbles what could have been a great story.

At one point Blocker says, “When we lay our heads down out here, we’re all prisoners.” There is a difference in his imprisonment and the Cheyenne’s. Blocker’s prison of obligation comes to a conclusion. Maybe he lives in a mental and emotional prison. The Cheyenne are prisoners, even when they are set free.

Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi’s presentation of the vast open landscape is poetry. He captures the majesty of Studi’s Indian Head Nickle profile from the Cheyennes' concentration at Fort Berringer in Arizona to his burial at the Valley of the Bears in Montana.

Max Richter delivers a spooky, ambient, and minimalist western score. Richter’s “Scream at the Sky,” sounds like a broken heart should, shattered and desperate. “Never Goodbye” is an emotional punch, brimming with the soul of peace and sadness.

The highlight of the film rests on the shoulders of the innocent. He too is given very little narrative in this story, but at the conclusion of the film, when Little Bear has lost his family and he’s under the care of Mrs. Quaid (paternalism), Blocker gifts him with a book about Julius Caesar. Before Little Bear accepts Blocker’s western token, he raises his hands and offers Blocker the traditional Plains Indian sign of gratitude.

Little Bear has no words, perhaps at Cooper’s direction, perhaps because Cooper wouldn’t know what Little Bear should say, but this single moment is more beautiful, powerful, and perfect than Blocker’s and Quaid’s changing resolve to the Indian plight.

I don’t know Cooper’s intended audience. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be me. The story’s narrative revolved around two characters and their struggles with redemption, but this wasn’t enough. I like western films. I also like to ask, “Where're the Indians?” when watching westerns, but Hostiles left me wanting more than Cooper could deliver. It would make a good rental.

Revisiting The John K. Bear Winter Count

Drifting Goose, chief of the Húŋkpatina, a winter count keeper, along with his people were placed onto the Crow Creek Indian Reservation. 
The Drifting Goose Winter Count
John K. Bear Winter Count Revisited
By Dakota Wind
In 1976, James H. Howard published his Yanktonai Ethnohistory And The John K. Bear Winter Count in the Plains Anthropologist. Howard counseled with native informants from native communities in South Dakota. The strength of his work is determined by two things: his informants and his scholarly research. Howard genuinely cared for the subject and people he wrote about.

There are a few things which must be revisited in Howard’s work: the arrival of the horse is one. This is important because it establishes the earliest record of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (the Great Sioux Nation) encounter with the horse, its location, which places the Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋna (the Yanktonai) at the mouth of the Čhaŋsáŋsaŋ Wakpá (the James River), and a date of 1692.

A few things must be re-interpreted. An example is the 1841 entry regarding Thamína Wé (His Bloody Knife). Howard calls this record an “anomaly,” and assumes this entry is in regard to the Arikara US Indian Scout, Bloody Knife, a friend of the infamous Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, from whom the latter learned how to converse in Lakȟóta, Sahnish (Arikara), and the Plains Indian Sign & Gesture language. This Bloody Knife is the Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋ chief, not the Arikara scout.

I’ve employed the LLC standard orthography in this “update,” and have expanded or amended some of Howard’s entries. Howard’s general format will be used: Numerical year in the Common Era, original text, the text re-written using the LLC standard orthography, a word-for-word translation, a free interpretation, followed by cultural/historical narrative.

Some biographical information about Maǧá Bobdú (Drifting Goose) can be found at American-Tribes.com. Go visit this website for its great forum on the subject of American Indian history and culture.

Download the PDF document of "Revisiting The John K. Bear Winter Count." 

For whatever odd reason, the citations didn't carry over when I converted the doc to PDF. Please contact me if you'd like a copy of the original document. 

Dakota Wind is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. He is currently a university student working on a degree in History with a focus on American Indian and Western History. He maintains the history website The First Scout.

Comanche Empire, A Book Review

As if to belie the fact that this is a history book, the cover features a modern studio photograph. 

Comanche Empire, A Book Review

First Nation Recognized As Colonial Power

By Dakota Wind

Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven, CT; Yale University Press. 2008. $40.00 (hardcover; out of print). 512 pages + viii. Introduction, abbreviations, notes, bibliography, index, illustrations, maps.

Taking a page from the late Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock), and what he said regarding native peoples making a cameo in American western history – of making a dramatic entrance and then fading away into the manifest destiny of colonial expansion, Hämäläinen makes the Comanche nation the focus of his work, which includes an inter-tribal narrative from the perspective of the Comanche people, and a narrative of the Comanche as seen from other first nations and the colonial empires.

The Comanche nation rises from quiet encounters with the Spanish at the turn of 1700 to a powerful dominate power of the American Southwest (the Spanish North?), a fiercely protected territory called by the colonial empires, Comancheria. The Spanish, Mexicans, Texans, and Americans at one point all sought aid from the Comanche on their terms, or fought long, desperate, costly campaigns against them.

The agent of change, that which made the Comanche nation, is the horse. The Comanche broke off from their relatives, the Shoshone, because of a dispute over game, but also to escape an epidemic, and to acquire the horse. Then they invaded the plains. Before the horse, the main agent of change was primarily reactionary to a changing environment (drought, the Little Ice Age). The last major agent of change was the gun.

Hämäläinen regularly describes the movements and advances of the Comanche as invasions, but how else to describe an expanding nation than an invasion? The Comanche turned west into Ute territory, but rather than invade and displace, they learned how to survive and adapt. Clearly their agenda didn’t mean the subjugation of other first nations. At that time.

Much of the premise of Comanche Empire is establishing Comancheria as a nation, recognized by Spain and the Mexico. As a nation, Comancheria did as the colonial empires did: expand or invade, displace indigenous, appropriate the landscape through military example, and absorb pacifist nations in a melting pot. In fact, because of Comancheria’s manifest destiny, because of deliberate Comanche planning, the region stabilized. They reached out to old enemies, even as natives were displaced from their homelands back east during the Indian Removal Act.

Mexico and the United States used Comancheria as a middle ground to trade. Mexico invited Americans into the region, but instead of trading with the Mexicans, they brought their trade to the Comanche. Americans moved in and discovered they wanted, needed, the landscape for its resources, resources that they didn’t see before, and after their war with Mexico, Texans turned an imperial eye to the landscape.

Comancheria was a real first nation State. Comanche Empire includes maps of this real State. Because Hämäläinen focuses on the development, invasion, expansion, and economy of this State, his work, by necessity, concludes with the collapse and deconstruction of Comancheria. In this, Hämäläinen does not carry through with a study of the Comanche Nation as a federally recognized domestic dependent nation headquartered in Lawton, OK.

There are other books out there that touch on the Comanche after the reservation era. One almost hopes that Hämäläinen decides to write a history of the Comanche that does just that. Comanche Nation. The Comanche were forced onto reservations in New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Chihuahua, Mexico. It was the only way for the United States and Mexico to deal with a powerful first nation. I’d buy that book too.

In the meantime, get yourself a copy of Comanche Empire. This is an investment for American Western historyphiles.

Dakota Wind is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. He is currently a university student working on a degree in History with a focus on American Indian and Western History. He maintains the history website The First Scout.

Forgotten Fires, A Book Review

Wíačhéič’thi, "The Sun Makes A Campfire For Itself." In English, you'd call these "Sundogs."

Forgotten Fires, A Book Review

Historic Narratives Of Fires

By Dakota Wind

Stewart, Omer C. Forgotten Fires: Native Americans and the Transient Wilderness. Edited by Henry T. Lewis. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. 364 pp. $24.95 (paperback). Illustrations, bibliography, and references.

As a boy, my younger brother and I were fascinated with fire. Sometimes, around the Fourth of July, Golf Hill (aka “Boot Hill,” “Agency Hill,” or even as the Cheyenne knew it, “The Hill That Stands Alone”) would burn. It was an annual occasion. At some point, before I cared, someone had arranged and painted white some stones to say on the hillside, “WARRIORS.” Following one of the fires, my brother and I took to rearranging the letters to spell, “ASS.” You could see it fifteen miles away.

We loved fire. Especially starting them. My enthusiasm for fire waned one day after burning myself on the smoker in the backyard. My brother’s infatuation continued unabated. He’d carefully cut open fireworks to light the powders. One day he almost burned down the house when he lit our mother’s god’s eye that hung in the corner of the dining area. I still remember him saying, “It started by itself!” I threw a pitcher of water on it, and he hung it back up after turning it around. When our mother discovered it, she thought it was the result of one of her parties.

Omer’s Forgotten Fires is a great resource for all things fire related in native North America. Historic fires, like the Chicago Fire, isn’t included here, and with good reason. One can find a number of resources on that one topic. Omer has combed through the journals of explorers, traders, trappers, and artists and has delivered an astonishing read that challenges the notion of Indians living harmoniously in a pristine Garden of Eden.  

There are several reasons to start fires on the Great Plains and Omer explores them all. From renewing the grass so that horses could consume fresh green grass and driving game to signal fires and maintaining trails.

Omer perfectly captures George Catlin’s fascination with the great prairie fires, “sparkling and brilliant chains of liquid fire.” Catlin also describes a firestorm, “…there is yet another character of burning prairies…that requires another letter, and a different pen to describe – the war, or hell of fires!” The kind of firestorm that creates and sustains its own weather, drawing in air with hurricane force winds, which overtakes the swiftest horses, and animals coming to an immutable and terrified stop when such fires cross the plains.

The German traveler Maximilian Wied-Neuwied mentions that some of the fires were caused by the natives in order to escape the pursuit of their enemies, and witnesses fire whirls or, “graceful undulations, to the zenith.” Catlin and Bodmer never seem to run out of adjectives and adverbs to describe the wildfires.

Other firsthand accounts of fires range across North America from the woodlands to the mountains, plateaus, and valleys. Omer’s book is an amazingly fast read because of it. And suffers because of it. These accounts are overwhelmingly non-native, that the book title should perhaps be instead Forgotten Fires, Forgotten Resources: Non-Native Accounts of Native Americans and the Transient Wilderness.

There is no mention of sedentary agricultural tribes like the Arikara, Hidatsa, Mandan, or Pawnee burning their fields in the fall after a harvest, or why. The resources to draw from are out there, like Bowers’ Mandan Social and Ceremonial Organization or Hidatsa Social and Ceremonial Organization. These two tribes are still with us today, it’s not as if one couldn’t ask them “why?”

While there’s some mention of fire used in warfare, there isn’t one native narrative regarding the use of fire in war. Garrick Mallery’s Picture Writing of the American Indians, Vol. 1, contains part of such a narrative when the Cheyenne resorted to prairie fires in retaliation against a Thítȟuŋwaŋ (Teton; Lakota) war party in the 1760s.

Lastly, what’s missing is an inclusion of the living memory of Native Americans regarding fires, actual and metaphorical. There are many descriptions for fire, but here’s a basic few to consider: óna (prairie fire), pȟetá (fire), and očhéthi (the council fire). Fire is for more than burning, cooking, signaling, and destruction. It’s constructive, has spiritual significance, and for gathering the community together.

If one is studying the Great Plains, one needs this book. It contains immense ecological value about establishing a balance on the Great Plains between natural and human benefit. It is worth one’s time to revisit it a few times more, and certainly worth referencing Omer’s scholarship. Forgotten Fires is a good book, it's only missing a little. If it’s worth this much time to read and re-read, get a copy for yourself. 

Dakota Wind is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. He is currently a university student working on a degree in History with a focus on American Indian and Western History. He maintains the history website The First Scout.

My Bow And Arrow Story

George Catlin's "Game Of The Arrow."

Wičhóȟ’aŋ Itázipayata

The Tradition Of The Bow

By Dakota Wind

GREAT PLAINS, N.D. & S.D. – In my young boyhood days, my mother took me and my younger brother to live on the east coast in the city of Boston. I remember the longest most boring ride in my life from the prairie to the city. My mother had gotten a job there at the Boston Indian Council, nowadays, the North American Indian Center of Boston, but I’ll always remember it as the B.I.C.

I had long hair and wore it in braids. The American Indian population in an urban area is on the order of one percent of the population of Boston, about 6000 today, but I always felt – outside the B.I.C. – like the only Indian, and at school, I probably was.

I remember one time my mother taking us to a sports shop of some kind. There she bought a compound bow for herself and some wonderfully sharp arrowheads for hunting that my brother and I were fond of getting into no matter how many times we were warned. She bought us a bow too to keep us occupied, but probably so we could learn how to shoot.

One day, early morning, we caught a bus to New Hampshire, and then a ride out to a dirt road that lead us to a cabin along a creek there. I don’t remember much about the cabin other than it had two rooms. But outside there my mother put her bow and arrows to use. She also practiced throwing knives too and could stick a tree from perhaps fifty feet away, though my young perspective wants to magnify that distance to a hundred.

There in a cabin tucked away in the eastern woodlands my brother and I learned how to shoot a bow.

We moved back after a year or so. We lived outdoors along the Missouri River for a while there, then into the Episcopal Church, before my mother found us a place to live on Golf Hill. We practiced the bow off and on during this time, but it was after we got a place to live that we practiced most often. My mom got us a square bail of hay to hit that we set up behind the house.

Karl Bodmer's "Bison Hunt." The Plains Indian draw method is not clearly seen in this image (its a variation of what's called a pinch draw, at least what I was taught), but the hunter looks pretty cool hunting from astride a horse.

One day, my Lekší (uncle) Cedric called my brother and I into my lalá’s (grandfather’s) garage. There he had finished some ash bows. He had even rolled the sinew to make the bowstring too. He gave us instruction on how to care for the bow, and even how to draw it.

It followed then, that we should bring our arrows with us the next time we went to our grandmother’s. That day came soon, and my Lekší wasn’t home, but my other other Lekší, Jimmy, was. Uncle Jimmy saw that we had brought our arrows and urged us to take up those bows in the garage.

Later that afternoon Uncle Jimmy saw us shooting into the empty lot next door, and he came out to encourage us in our progress. He nodded many times and told us about an archery game in which we should shoot the arrow up as high as possible, and that the bravest soul would be the one who didn’t move from whence he shot.

Inspired by this revelation, but downplaying my growing anticipation I continued to fire into the empty lot with exaggerated nonchalance until my uncle grew either bored of my play or tired of the sun, I couldn’t tell. Assured of his absence when I heard the weather door slam pitifully shut. I reached for an arrow, nocked it with unconcealed expectation, aimed straight up into the heart of the sky and carelessly drew and released.

I saw it go up and vanish into the blue. My eyes burned with the afterimage of a green circle from following the arrow’s flight past the sun. And I waited.

Faster than I ever thought to anticipate, the arrow cut through the sky and quietly stuck into the earth perhaps a pace or two from where I stood. I could only look at the arrow. I didn’t know what to expect to feel. Relief that I didn’t hurt myself? Bravery that I stood stock still? Fear? If anything, I felt curious for a moment. I wondered what the arrow “saw” so far up. Was the arrow I shot the same as the one that fell?

I used to wonder things like that.

And I ran out of the way after shooting an arrow into the sky.

No Two Horns' Narratives Of Apple Creek Conflict And Burnt Boat Fight

The Episcopal priest, Aaron Beede, in Fort Yates, ND, collected this piece authored by No Two Horns. The story: No Two Horns entered an enemy village, likely Crow as indicated by the hair style of the Indian peering out of his lodge, and has successfully stolen two horses. 

No Two Horns’ Narratives Of 1860's Battles
Apple Creek Conflict & Burnt Boat Fight

By Dakota Wind

BISMARCK, N.D. – Chances are that if you have ever visited the North Dakota Heritage Center you may have come across the works of Hé Núŋpa WaníčA, No Two Horns. No Two Horns is listed by the State Historical Society of North Dakota and by Standing Rock Tourism as being Húŋkpapȟa Lakȟóta.

Like many Plains Indian men, No Two Horns had another name, Kimímela Ská, White Butterfly. No Two Horns was said to have been born in 1852, or earlier. His father was Ištá Sapá, Black Eyes, who was also known as Wasú Šá, Red Hail. No Two Horns was a master artist of the Plains Indian pictograph and many of his carvings serve as evidence of a graceful careful hand. By his own account, he was quite a horse thief in his youth, and a veteran of the Little Bighorn fight.

In May of 1924, Col. A. B. Welch, adopted son of John Grass, met with No Two Horns and others ostensibly to talk about the Burnt Boat Fight between the Lakota and a group of miners who descended the Missouri River and beached their vessel on a sandbar. One story has it that the miners caught a mother bathing her child nearby and overcome with lust, raped her, and then killed her and her little one.

No Two Horns explained to Welch how the Burnt Boat Fight came about after explaining how his band of people came to be engaged there the summer following the 1863 Apple Creek Conflict.

Here is an excerpt of Colonel A.B. Welch’s War Drums (Genuine War Stories From The Sioux, Mandan, Hidatsa, And Arikara). Only minor edits have been made to the Lakȟóta text within Welch’s paper:

I have often heard several men of the Sioux make veiled remarks about this (1864) incident for some years before I finally succeeded in obtaining a story regarding it. The Indians appeared to be reticent about discussing it, apparently being afraid that they might be punished for it even at this late date, after treaties had been signed in which all acts of hostility had been mutually forgotten and forgiven. However, when I talked with them regarding the Sibley Expedition, I began to get more of the facts as the Sioux knew them.

"The Sibley Campaign 1863," by depression era artist Clell Gannon.

There are many men alive today, who were young me at that time and who were fighting at the Big Mound north of Tappen, Dead Buffalo Lake north of Dawson, and along the trail from there to where the Indians were forced across to the west side of the Missouri river, at Sibley Island. It is from these old men that I have the information as herein given, as well as stories told to me by several white men and Mandan and Arikara, who were in a position to know much regarding this affair.

The story of the white boy captive and his tragic death appears to be authentic, although I have never been able to get an Indian to tell us positively that it is a fact. Nevertheless, they will not contradict the statement and many have said that they understood or had heard about the boy and that he had died soon after the fight. They intimate that his death was caused by the hysterical demand of the woman, who cried for revenge to “cover the body” of Ištá Sapá (Black Eyes, the father of No Two Horns) who was killed in the battle. I had tried to obtain trace of this boy for years, before I finally was convinced that, if he was actually taken prisoner, he lost his life in some strange manner, soon after.

As no one of the white party survived, it is not possible to obtain any but the Indian account of the actual affair, but the story of Mr. Larned, as given, indicates that the miners might still may have been under the influence of their wild time at Fort Berthold and quite likely had much liquor aboard the craft. Roughly speaking, it is about one hundred miles from Fort Berthold by river, to the place where they met disaster and the flow of the current is about seven or eight miles per hour. If the party were not hung up on some sand bar or did not land to hunt for meat, it would have taken them some fourteen or sixteen hours to have reached the mouth of the creek where they were killed. They probably landed for the night time upon some of the many islands, as there were Sioux upon the east, or left, band and Mandans, Hidatsa and Arikara upon the west, and it stands to reason that the miners would not have invited a night attach. Meat hunting would not have taken much of their time as game was very plentiful and they had stocked up with trader’s goods at Fort Berthold and would have been glad to eat “civilized food” again for a time. I believe that they left Fort Berthold early in the morning; spent that night in the vicinity of the mouth of the Knife River and were late in the next day.

The party was composed of some fourteen or fifteen miners, presumably all Montana miners from Alder Gulch ‘diggins’ (Virginia City). Dust worth several millions of dollars was taken out of this short gulch placer mining district, and the history of the rough times there is wonderfully told in “The Vigilantes.” Wilder men never gathered together in any spot, than there. The members of this party had cleaned up and were returning with their dust to the down-river points in 1864. After their wild debauch at Fort Berthold, and universally holding the Indian in contempt, it is easily understood how they maliciously fired upon the Sioux and were overwhelmed by them when their mismanaged craft struck upon a sand bar on the eastern shore near the Sioux camp. Who they were, or information regarding their family histories, will never be known, but there can be little doubt but that this party of wild frontier miners was completely wiped out by the Sioux, at the first draw north of the present Northern Pacific Railway Mandan-Bismarck bridge in the fall of 1864.

The map is from an 1890s survey of the Missouri River, about thirty years after the Apple Creek conflict. This reproduces the movements of native civilians & warriors, and Sibley's response. 

Hé Núŋpa WaníčA (No Two Horns), a Sioux Indian in whom I place much reliance as to historical data concerning that people, had told me that he was in the fight with the Indians who confronted Gen. Sibley from Big Mound to Sibley Island. He says that, after the Indians were safely upon the west banks of the Missouri, his band of Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋna followed the Heart river to its headwaters and passed on into the Bad Lands of the Little Missouri, and that a month or two later they started back with the intention of crossing again to the east side and spending the winter in their old territory between the Missouri and the James, known to them as “The Earth Dish of Wa’anáta.”

He states that one of the mouths of the Heart was north of the present Northern Pacific railway bridge and that they crossed at that place to the east side and moved up into the first draw, where there was fresh water and wood and where they camped for a time.  This deep, steep-sided gully was a well-known Sioux camping place, and from it travois trails led by east stages up to the high lands and thence by good roads, to the valley of Apple Creek, which they followed up into the Dog Den Butte country, up into the region of Sibley Butte and as far as “Wagon Wheel Hills,” north of Steele, at the east end of which the trail divided, the main route leading along the line of lakes and high choteau (sp?) and into the Čhaŋsása, or James River valley, and another trail bearing north and east of north toward the Mníwakaŋ or Devils Lake regions. This camp site was about a mile south of a well-known Missouri river ford, where passage might be easily made without bull boats or rafts, and which was the generally-used ford in the vicinity for all Indian parties. The west entrance of the ford was just below the United States Government harbor now known as Rock Haven, and required not more than one hundred yards of swimming in the main channel. Why this ford was not used by the party of No Two Horns, at that time, is not known to me.

No Two Horns says: “We were camped in that place then. There was much water flowing out of the hills and the feed was good. Our horses would not leave the grass and shade of the trees along the little stream. There was good wood in the timber there. Many deer were in the bottom lands and antelope up on the prairie. Down on Apple Creek there were many elk. We had much meat. We had been chased across the river by the horse soldiers from the east. We crossed then just above the mouth of the Little Heart. We got across easy. We killed some of the enemy there, too. We had been in the Mníwakaŋ country. We were not Little Crow’s people. We were looking for someone to come and thank us. Inkpáduta (Scarlet Point) and several of his men were in that camp. When we got to the river, they went north on the east side. We went across. We went up the Heart River. We went into the Good Horse Grass country (the Sioux frequently speak of the Bad Lands by that name). When the Indians who followed the horse soldiers came back, we started back to our own country. We crossed the Missouri at the mouth of Heart River then. That was where the railroad bridge is now. We went up to this water-grass place. My father was with me, too. He was an old man.”

"Mackinaw Boat Under Attack On The Missouri," by William de le Montagne.

“Then we saw a boat coming down the river. It had white men in it. We wanted to trade for powder, lead, guns, coffee and cloth. We had some fine otter pelts and other skins to trade.

We waved our arms and asked them to come and trade with us. They shot us then. They killed my father. His name was Ištá Sapá (Black Eyes). We were mad then. They fired guns at us. They were working hard at shooting. The boat run on some sand where the little stream run out. We killed them all then. We set fire to the boat and it burned to the water. We got their clothes and guns and kettles. Some yellow earth, we poured out of some little sacks. We did not know it was worth anything then. But it was gold. We buried my father in a lodge there. I can show you the place where it stood. We went away. They shot at us. We were friendly people.  The leader of the horse soldiers did the same thing. He made us fight. The Government always treated the people who fought the best. It was fall before the snow came. I don’t remember any more about that time by the little stream which flowed into the Mníšoše (Missouri).”

Thaóyate Dúta, His Red Nation (aka Little Crow).

It will be remembered that, at the time of the Minnesota Massacres (1863) by Little Crow’s Santees, many members of the Iháŋktȟuŋwan and Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋna divisions moved away into the Devils Lake regions, with the expressed purpose of keeping out of the trouble. They fully expected that the Government would send a messenger to them, to thank them for that action. They nearly starved during the winter and early in the spring were in the vicinity of Steele and Dawson, Kidder County, North Dakota, hunting buffalo when they were surprised by the advance of Sibley’s column.

Their own story is that they sent forward several old, honorable men to smoke with Gen. Sibley, and that these old men were fired upon by Sibley’s men and the fight started. Many of these friendly Indians were killed in the running engagement, but the troopers were, to say the least, perfectly satisfied to see the Indians cross the river, after which the soldiers returned to Minnesota.

Inkpáduta, or Scarlet Point, pictured here, went on to fight at the Little Bighorn. 

The hostile renegade, Inkpáduta (Scarlet Point), and about twelve of his men had joined this hunting party a few days before Sibley found them, but had already been notified by the camp soldiers, that he must go away at once. When the Indians neared the Missouri, he, together with his men, left the main body and slipping through the soldiers guard, succeeded in passing north along the east bank of the stream and went off into the Devils Lake region, and north, to be close to the Canadian border. The other Indians broke up into small parties after the crossing, and went into several directions, but the camp with which No Two Horns traveled, went into the Bad Lands, which they reached about August 15th, 1864. No Two Horns argued that the Government made peace only with those who fought against them, and that his people should have done so, under the thought that they would have been treated better if they had.

Revival Of The Flute Tradition

Kevin Locke shares the background of some of the oldest flutes in his collection.

Flute Tradition Returns With The Spring

Practice Nearly Faded Away

By Dakota Wind
Standing Rock, N.D. & S.D. - Dawn hit the Land of Sky and Wind, the Land of Standing Rock, and bathed the ancient prairie steppe with warm sweet light that turned last year’s grass gold despite the cold silence of winter. The frozen air seemed to shatter with each mile I drove. Aside from my car, I imagine that the morning of the first spring must have been much like this. The cold and quiet was so sharp I could imagine a knife scraping along the backs of my exposed hands.

I pulled up to Solen High School on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation. My passenger Rich Dubé, a personal friend of my Lekši (uncle) and Wauŋšpekiyapi (teacher) Kevin Locke, and I swapped stories about the gift of Šiyotĥaŋka (the flute), where it came from, when it appeared on the steppe of the Northern Great Plains, and its growing revival.

Rich Dubé, came down from the great snows of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan to conduct a flute workshop in four of the schools on the reservation. I visited with Dubé the evening before. When I heard he was from Saskatoon, and was coming down to the Land of Sky and Wind, I prejudged who I thought I’d be meeting. Kevin raved about Dubé’s knowledge in the reconstruction of the traditional flute, how they were made, the original sound, and that Dubé even wrote his Masters thesis around the flute.

Naturally, I thought Dubé was going to be a member of the White Cap Dakota Nation who reside on a reserve just south of Saskatoon. Not that skin color matters but I was expecting to meet a native man. Who met me instead, and broke my prejudice, was an impeccable skinny white guy. He seemed used to native scrutiny however and graciously anticipated and answered my probing questions, which eased my mental lockjaw. I backed off when I was satisfied that he knew what he was about.

Dubé had never heard of the native flute until he attended a session for choir teachers...

Dubé is a music teacher. His story with the native flute begins about ten years ago in Saskatoon. He was teaching native youth in an inner city music program. Dubé had never heard of the native flute until he attended a session for choir teachers and he leafed through a book by Bryan Burton called Voices of the Wind which had native flute songs transcribed for the recorder. He was looking for something to capture the interest and inspire his senior kids and thought the native flute would be much more appealing to his students than just trying to play the songs on a recorder, a western European instrument.

The music teacher searched the internet looking for flute makers, and experimenting with various flute kits, discarding those that didn’t seem to have a true sound to his sharp ears. Eventually, Dubé crossed paths with Kevin Locke. Kevin sent Dubé the schematics of one of his great-grandfather’s flutes. Dubé seized the opportunity to reconstruct not just a traditional flute, but a traditional flute with the original sound.

One of Dubé's flutes.

Dubé created a cast using the original traditional flute from Kevin’s schematics. Dubé wanted to create a flute that was easily constructed and mass produced yet true to the original sound. In the end, his experiments found success in a custom size ABS plastic flute matching the exact sound of the original one-hundred twenty-year-old flute.

...small town pride in the class B team that represented the best hopes of the community...

I entered the high school and remembered my days when my team played the Solen Sioux. There was the typical small town pride in the class B team that represented the best hopes of the community, and like any small town, the team was fiercely held high in respect. Putting the games of yesteryear firmly in the back of my head I made my way down the hall towards the gym where Dubé was preparing his workshop.

Dubé’s luggage was opened up on the bleachers and inside it was as though he had brought an entire workshop. Someone had set up some tables and Dubé was quick to set drills, tools and all his accoutrements out for the workshop. In the span of twenty minutes he trained staff and volunteers in preparation for students to drill the holes of their flutes.

Kevin arrived about fifteen minutes after we got to the school. Students were quietly milling about in the halls in eager anticipation of the morning’s project. A few had poked their heads into the gym to watch Dubé set up and train the school staff. A teacher, possibly the principle, cheerfully made some announcements about lunch and stuff before she gently reminded students to be on their best behavior for Dubé’s flute workshop.

Locke offered a heart-felt greeting to the youth who assembled at the school.

About fifty-five high school students filed into the gym, arranged by year, and immediately staked out spots on the basketball court. The gym quickly filled with echoes of growing chatter which became a loud buzz with the arrival of fifth and sixth graders from the nearby community of Cannonball, who took the floor closest to where Dubé was set up.

The principle made a few announcements reiterating students to be on their best behavior and extended a welcome on behalf of the schools and introduced Kevin. Kevin introduced Dubé who shared some technical things about the flute and what to be expected in the workshop, and the students listened as best as students could while they itched to get to the construction.

Dubé divided the large group into three and subdivided each of those into three at each table. From the time of Dubé’s beginning instructions to the last student drilling the last hole in the last flute and the last student assembling the various pieces into a replica of the Lakota Grandfather flute, about forty minutes had passed. At one point in the assembly Kevin remarked, “Rich is really organized,” a sentiment which was repeated by high school staff.

Dubé (orange shirt) plays a quick tune between instructing students.

When the last flute was put together, Dubé called for the students to gather together once again on the basketball court where he offered some basic flute instruction. It was this instruction that Dubé’s experience as music teacher came out. When the students were quieted with their flutes and ready to play, Dubé played a few simple songs with the students who echoed his rendition of the old English tune “Hot Cross Buns.” The fifth and sixth grade students were quite familiar with playing the song on their recorders and followed Dubé’s instruction swiftly.

There, Kevin shared the story of the first flute.

After Dubé’s crash course in flute basics, Kevin stepped in and shared a few flute songs, one of which was the Flag song which the students recognized right away. The students had grown tired of the floor towards the end of the workshop and took to the bleachers on the other side of the gym after the song. There, Kevin shared the story of the first flute. He played the first flute song as part the story, and sang the song at the end.

One of the things that Kevin shared, a traditional belief, was that the Dakota and Lakota people are people of the wind. On the tips of ones fingers are what we call fingerprints. We all have fingerprints. For the Dakota and Lakota people however, fingerprints are more than something that identifies and/or incriminates a person, they say that the patterns tell one which direction the winds were blowing on the day of one’s birth.

In the days of warriors and legend, the flute was played by young men in traditional courtship, to win the heart of a particular young woman. A young man might sit outside the lodge of a young woman and serenade her. If he was successful, she might contrive an excuse to fetch water or gather additional firewood to spend a few moments with a suitor.

"Indian Courting" by Captain Seth Eastman, 1852.

The flute was a part of daily life.

The flute was a part of daily life. Early American Western artists like Seth Eastman and George Catlin painted scenes of young men playing the flute. When the post reservation era began, traditional courtship faded and was nearly forgotten.

In the 1970s, Kevin Locke took up the flute and learned about the tradition from men like Richard Fool Bull, William Horn Cloud, Joseph Rockboy, Asa Primeaux, Henry Crow Dog, Bill Black Lance, Charles Wise Spirit and Pete Looking Horse among many others. At a wacipi, Locke saw Richard Fool Bull’s display of flutes and remarked, “Someone should learn this tradition,” to which Fool Bull said, “Maybe you should.” And Kevin did.

Locke hopes to pass on the flute tradition to the today’s generation. Dubé’s flute workshop fits snugly into the world of the young native student. An individual can construct a flute with traditional specs and a faithful sound and be finished in five minutes using Dubé’s kit. In a world where studies come first, where extracurricular activities play a large role in a student’s life and where popular media influences style and dress, there’s still time and place for dancers and singers to hit the pow-wow circuit.

In the Land of Sky and Wind the wind is a constant presence. The people of Standing Rock are people of the stars. They are people of the wind. Maybe the flute tradition will work itself back into the daily lives of the people as it once did. 

Visit Kevin Locke online at Kevin Locke.

Visit Rich Dubé at Northern Spirit Flutes.

Winter Counts: The Art of History

The book "Moonstick: The Seasons of the Sioux" by Eve Bunting and John Sandford provides wonderful concise explanations of the months, and beautiful illustrations of the seasons. Its a children's book, but worth looking through for information. 

Winter Counts: The Art of History

Pictographic Lakota History

By Dakota Wind
GREAT PLAINS - In the age before the railroad, before horses and guns, the Dakota and Lakota Sioux regarded the full passing of a year in thirteen months. Thirteen twenty-eight or twenty-nine day months.

The year ended and began with the arrival of the spring, when the birds flocked north, when the ice broke on the Missouri, when the trees began to bud, and when bison calves were born. The sources for the Smithsonian however, state that the year is measured from first snowfall to first snowfall. One of those sources was an anthropologist in the 1880s names Garrick Mallory, who heard it first-hand from the people he was recording the winter counts.

The Dakota/Lakota kept track of time two ways. The first method was by using counting sticks. There were thirteen sticks, about the size of tipi pins, to represent the lunar months, and a long stave upon which were carved notches representing each passing day, and in the case of the winter count keeper Brown Hat, years. 

Above is a colored example of Baptiste Good 's (Brown Hat's) winter count. The complete winter count can be viewed in the text "Picture Writing of the American Indians, Vols. 1 & 2" by Garrick Mallory. 

The second method for tracking time was the winter count. The Dakota/Lakota call it Waniyėtu Wowapi [lit. Winter They-Picture], freely translated as “Winter Count.” A winter count is a mnemonic device with a picture representing a year. The year is named rather than numbered. 

In the “dog days” (the days before horses) as the traditional elders say, the tribe would come together in the spring, as one year ended and a new one began, to decide what to name the year, then the winter count keeper would draw the year accordingly. 

Some anthropologists say that the winter count tradition began after first contact. The John K. Bear winter count begins with Wicokicize tanka [lit. Battle Big], and according to anthropologist James Howard, there are three tribes whom the Dakota/Lakota were at war with: the Assiniboine, the Cree, and the Chippewa. In one of the biggest battles fought between the Sioux and Chippewa was one which took place at Mille Lac in 1682. 1682, is also the year that the John K. Bear winter count has been determined to begin in. 

The John J. Bear winter count also starts two years before first contact, at least with this particular band of Sioux, the Ihanktowana (or Yanktonai). This winter count records 1684 as Wasicun tokahcin ahi kin [lit. takes-the-fat first came the], or “The very first white man they had ever seen among them,” or “the first white men came to them.” James Howard reasoned that the eastern Sioux, the Dakota, had made contact about 1640, with Jean Nicolet, and that the western branches of Sioux very probably didn’t have their first contact until the arrival of Nicholas Perrot in 1682. 

The Brown Hat winter count, also known as the Baptiste Good winter count, is a wonderful anomaly, for it begins in A.D. 901 with the coming of the White Buffalo Calf Woman bringing the gift of the sacred pipe and continues with various mythological histories and the arrival of the horse (which wasn’t reintroduced to North American until the arrival of the Spanish in Mexico in the early 16th century). 

Above is Blue Thunder's winter count, currently in the collections of the State Historical Society of North Dakota. It measures about 3' x 15' and was originally a tipi liner. The material is cotton, the pigments are a combination of ink, pencil, and paint.

Winter counts are an interesting subject to search for in libraries, archives, and museums. They defy being categorized. Is it philosophy? Is it psychology? Is it religious studies? Is it history or social science? Is it language? Is it art? Is it geography? Winter counts have been designated as a multi-discipline study, and are simply Dakota/Lakota.

The John K. Bear winter count has entries that fit philosophy, even an entry related to psychology case studies conducted by the North Dakota State Hospital back in the 1970s. It is definitely history. It is language. It is art. Winter counts even contain geographical data relating to movements over the plains and movements (due to warfare) of other tribes. They also contain meteorological data with references to deathly cold winters, blistering summers, devastating floods, and earthquakes. They even mention astronomical events such as unusually luminescent northern lights turning night to day, the passing of asteroids, comets, and falling stars.

The winter count is an art, and not just art, but the ability to relate the history to the listener. The winter count keeper was selected by the people made up of a council of elders, traditional tribal leaders, and spiritual leaders or advisors, for his artistic ability and his for his charisma or public speaking. The winter count keeper was referred to as Ehanna wicohan oyakapi [lit. Long-ago knowledge relating-to-the-people], relating the history to the people, or simply “historian.”

Above is the "British Museum" winter count, named that only because its part of the collection there. It is actually a variant of Blue Thunder's winter count.

Women have kept the tradition of the winter count too, in two cases at least. The Blue Thunder winter count was kept by a female relative, Yellow Lodge Woman, and was added to for a few years, until it was sold to the State Historical Society of North Dakota (it was the 1930s and the money was desperately needed).

The winter count tradition is still practiced. Cataloging and interpreting winter counts is on-going across the country as museums and other institutions realize they are more than an art piece.

The Brule winter count above is also a home. Winter counts were painted on hides, tipi liners, cloth, in ledger books, and also on the tipi.

The Smithsonian Institute has a wonderful online interactive exhibit of ten Lakota winter counts, including the Bapiste Good winter count (but only entries from 1700-01 and on). Visit: http://wintercounts.si.edu.