With the passage of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act in 1990, museums and other cultural institutions received a timely reminder that the human remains and material objects they had collected over the years belonged to still vital American Indian communities and that returning these objects constituted not only a legal commitment but an ethical imperative. Similarly, the knowledge embedded in these objects also rightfully belonged to these communities, and it was incumbent on collecting institutions to make every effort to return or at least to share these less tangible cultural artifacts, these repositories of meaning, with Indian people. Guided by this vision, Candace S. Greene and Russell Thornton, in collaboration with many individuals and Lakota communities, have produced The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian, an ambitious work of scholarship that opens the winter count collections of the Smithsonian’s Department of Anthropology to their Lakota communities of origin and to a wider general and academic audience, including such specialized disciplines as anthropology, history, and folklore.
Winter counts are pictographic calendars, first produced by Lakota peoples probably in the mid-1800s, which employ specific images or symbols to depict one significant or remarkable event in each year. The winter count keeper added to the calendar regularly, after consultation with a council of elder men to determine what event would be depicted for that year. Pictographic representations acted as mnemonic devices, allowing the community and particularly the winter count keeper to recall the events of past years by “reading” the images, usually arranged sequentially in spirals or rows. An apprentice usually worked in tandem with a winter count keeper, learning the stories behind particular images and adding to the calendar or a copy when necessary. As a result of this developmental process, winter counts can be quite specific, recording yearly events only of interest to a particular band, or more general, as when a specific event by its very novelty and magnitude inspired widespread acceptance of its significance among count keepers from different bands. Such was the Leonid meteor shower of the winter of 1833–34 that gives this book its title.
As is evident, winter counts were dynamic documents, added to and copied over the years, even commissioned by non-native collectors. Those in the Smithsonian collections depict events from the early eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. In addition, winter counts reflected historical changes in Lakota society in other ways, from the choice of calendar material—hide, cloth, or paper as well as paints or ink—to the addition of written captions as Lakota literacy spread through the efforts of Protestant missionaries. By the 1870s, winter counts captured the attention of researchers, particularly Garrick Mallery, who collected materials relevant to nine of the thirteen winter counts in the National Anthropological Archives (the other major repository of Smithsonian winter counts is the National Museum of the American Indian). Such interest itself complicated the documentary record of particular winter counts. Probably the most famous, or at least most reproduced winter count, that of Lone Dog, for instance, only exists in the NAA archives as a series of photographs, based on a muslin copy obtained by a soldier in the fall of 1876. This cloth copy itself was copied from another copy reproduced on hide. Mallery himself published a photographic re-creation of the Lone Dog winter count produced by superimposing a photograph of the cloth copy onto a drawing of buffalo hide. This photographic re-creation has been reproduced numerous times over the years. To their credit, the editors of this volume decided to be as inclusive as possible, publishing Native-produced counts and replications by others.
The majority of the volume is devoted to these winter counts. Individual entries are organized by date (correlating Lakota year names to the modern Western calendar) and contain the particular pictographs used to designate that year. Collectors’ notes and other commentary round out each entry. An extraordinary feat of documentation in and of itself, the juxtaposition of the various counts cannot but produce a “synergy,” as Candace Greene puts it, “each object having the potential to shed new light on the next, providing insights and possibly challenging conclusions that might seem evident from any one item examined in isolation” (70). These new insights may come from Lakota users themselves, as the data has been made web-accessible at the request of Lakota educators (www.wintercounts.si.edu). It is fitting, then, that the volume ends with a reproduction of the “Her Many Horses” winter count of Emil Her Many Horses, a young Lakota women living in Washington, D. C., who decided to record the history of her extended family, inspired by the legacy of winter count keepers before her.
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[Review length: 777 words • Review posted on May 4, 2009]