American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION History, in any culture, may be conceived of as the narrative organization and interpretation of events completed in a recent or remote past. The kinds of events represented in a historical text as well as the pattern of narrative organization would naturally reflect and reinforce cultural beliefs, including notions of temporal order. The Lakota, or Sioux, of the nineteenth century and earlier preserved both tribal and band histories; there were many such records reported among different Lakota groups. Other tribes known to have kept yearly historical records include the Mandan, Blackfeet, Ponca, and Kiowa. The first reported European contact with the Teton Sioux on the Plains was by the French in the mid-1600s. Among the numerous reasons for the tribe’s westward migration from the Great Lakes region were war and economic pressures, for the Chippewa, the Teton’s longstanding enemy, had obtained guns early from French traders. Today, the political divisions and designations of the Sioux people correspond to their geographical location after progressive migrations: the Santee remain the farthest east, the Yankton ventured a bit west, and the Teton migrated still farther in the westerly direction. The dialects of the language also roughly correspond to these geographic divisions: Dakota is spoken to the east, Nakota in the center, and Lakota to the west. Traditionally, calendrical records of the year were textualized in a series of pictographs called winter counts or counting buck, which were kept by members of the tribe known as winter counters, a responsibility and honor generally passed from father to son. The use of the word winter instead of year stems from the fact that the Lakota calendar reckoned time differently than the Roman calendar, and so had no equivalent for the English word year.