The Lakota winter count. Photo from National Museum of Natural History via The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
A historic Lakota winter count now being housed by the National Museum of Natural History went unnoticed in a California family's trunk for decades. The winter count depicts a series of annual events from about 1752 to about 1888. It was most likely created by someone on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, where it ended up in the collection of a non-Indian couple that used to operate a general store there. From there, the folded sheet of muslin with 136 years of pictographs somehow landed in a relative's trunk. Dr. Timothy Tackett, a history professor whose aunt had owned the store, discovered the artifact in his mother's home in California in 1998. "We had never noticed before that there was something covered up on the bottom of this trunk,” Tackett told The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. The winter count includes a depiction of the Leonid meteor shower of November 1833. The last image was added about a year before the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. "What interests me most about the winter counts is their relation to language, to expression verbal and visual—language in the abstract," Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday writes in the January 2015 issue of Smithsonian Magazine. "It is a crucial link between the oral and written traditions, not unlike the Rosetta stone, the Dead Sea scrolls, the walls of Lascaux. It is reflection and enigma, history and myth. Get the Story:
Priceless Indian history artifact once sat unnoticed (The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin 1/20) Also Today:
N. Scott Momaday: There Are 120 Years of Lakota History on This Calendar (Smithsonian Magazine January 2015)
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