History 3010

One Vast Winter Count

Kills Two (Lakota) in a posed photo of a winter count keeper. Photograph by John Anderson. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution NAA INV 03494000

Figure 3The Brule Tipi Cover Winter Count. Courtesy of the Nebraska State Historical Society.

"Winter Count," Lakota, 19th-20th century, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Horses. Tipis. Warriors. Buffalo. Images from Plains Indian life circle around the center of this canvas as if on a march.

This scene does not illustrate one specific moment in time. Instead, each figure stands for a particular year in the history of a Lakota encampment group. Together, these images form a “winter count,” a record of the years (or “winters”) in the tribe’s history. Stories told by the count’s “keeper”—the community’s historian and storyteller—brought that history to life for everyone else.

Reading: One Vast Winter Count

Review from History Net: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=190521084353452

Review from Western Historical Quarterly: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/whq/36.1/br_1.html

Review from The American Historical Review: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/110.1/br_43.html

Paper # 5: Scholars have tended to represent change as something unwelcome in Native communities, as something imposed by Euro-American outsiders over Native resistance or at least reluctance. Put another way, Natives are said to have longed for the maintenance of their people’s traditional ways amid the sweeping changes of the European intrusion. Recent scholarship challenges that characterization of Native American history after European intrusions. Use One Vast Winter Count to demonstrate your understanding of  recent scholarship which argues that Natives were adaptive, creative, and accommodating of European ways. Focus on the incorporation of European ideas, materials, processes by Natives which become are part of  their strategies to hold on to Indian Country.