Culture
Watchlist: “Lakota Winter Count”
By Kamiah Koch
Social media/digital journalist
Just a few years into YouTube’s existence on the internet, the Smithsonian Education channel published a video about Lakota winter counts.
According to the 2008 video, winter counts are a form of historical records created by the Lakota and Sioux people used to document events from every year’s winter.
“Every winter was given a distinctive name, which was a way of referring to a time when something happened,” National Museum of Natural History Anthropologist Candace Greene said.
Greene attributes these Lakota winter counts to their developed and formalized sense of history.
“These winter counts encapsulated that and are very strongly connected to people’s sense of identity, both in the past and in the present” Greene said.
The video shows a Lakota winter count displayed flat on the table. It looks vaguely similar to a Mayan calendar. Drawn on an animal hide, characters are organized in a spiraling circle with each character representing a winter event.
Some of the characters are of animals, people, flowers, teepees or unidentified shapes drawn similarly like the well-known Native American petroglyphs found all across the Americas.
Lakota Nation member and Associate Curator for the National Museum of American Indian Emil Her Many Horses said there was a single person responsible for making the winter counts in their community or family unit and they were called the “winter count keeper.”
“It was from that family unit that they came together to decide what event to document for that year,” Her Many Horses said. “I think by looking at the winter count you can see what was happening within that community. Their depiction of that particular year would probably spark all these other memories and things that happened throughout that time.
The winter count keeper was also responsible for remembering the years’ histories and meanings behind the figures.
Even though this video is nearing 16 years old, it still shows the recovery of Tribal histories is ongoing.
Greene says they can interpret a certain amount from the pictures based on clothing or hairstyles drawn on the people to represent different Tribes or groups of people.
“Without a text you can’t go further than that,” Greene says. “Fortunately, a number of texts were recorded directly from the winter count keepers.”
For winter counts that don’t have written texts as a companion document, historians can look at a particular event that was recorded across in all Lakota winter counts to corroborate what years are recorded.
You can watch the entire video yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNaYrAKiZmw or find it linked in the Smoke Signals “Watchlist” Playlist on our YouTube channel.