Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1997
Document Type
Article
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3/4, Summer/Fall 1997, pp. 163-64.
Abstract
This special double issue of Great Plains Quarterly has been a long time in the making. Unlike the yearly special issues that showcase papers from our annual symposia, this number of the Quarterly contains four articles submitted at various times, revised and expanded, and collected together. All deal with EuroNorth Americans' misperceptions of indigenous peoples and the consequences of those misperceptions for all peoples of the Great Plains.
In "The Sacred Black Hills," Linea Sundstrom painstakingly contradicts the view many researchers have proposed that Cheyenne and Lakota beliefs and oral traditions about the sacredness of the Black Hills had been conveniently developed by contemporary people seeking to buttress contemporary claims to the area. Because history, as a scholarly discipline, has always privileged written texts over oral ones and because of the common folk belief among literate peoples that oral texts are less reliable than written ones, ethnohistorians have had to learn from indigenous peoples and from other disciplines, such as archaeology, how to deal with oral and pictographic texts. Sundstrom's methodology here, however, is to compile written texts more than fifty years old that support the oral and pictographic claims for the sacredness of the Black Hills. Her research makes clear that the oral histories were right all along. Not only have the Black Hills been sacred to the Cheyennes and Lakotas, but also to the Arapahos, Kiowas and Kiowa-Apaches, Arikaras, and Mandans, who had all known the area. Although Sundstrom cannot answer questions about the more distant past-such as whether the Lakotas had known the sacred Black Hills thousands of years earlier and then returned more recentlyshe does make it clear that the area was sacred to the Lakotas and Cheyennes when the United States seized the land and even that its sacred status was known-and disregarded- by Euro-American reporters at the time.
In "Mapping the Marias," Barbara Belyea looks at one decision made by Lewis and Clark on their long trek from St. Louis to the Pacific. For nine days they paused where two rivers converged, exploring and checking their maps to discover which should be considered the Missouri-and followed to its source to reach what they supposed would be a portage that led to the headwaters of the Columbia and hence to the Pacific-and which they should declare a tributary and leave unexplored. The stream coming from the northwest they eventually named the Marias, and continued along what is still called the Missouri, flowing in from the southwest. Subsequent historians have praised their choice as a victory for scientific methods of observation. Yet had they chosen to follow the river Clark named for his cousin Maria, they would have found a shorter and easier passage to the Pacific. Belyea points out that both the captains' Native informants and the Native mapmakers whose information had been incorporated into their most recent European map depicted rivers less in terms of European conventions of watersheds and tributaries and more, at least in these cases, as passageways through the mountains. The captains hesitated at the Marias not because Native understanding of the relationships between rivers was sketchy or unreliable, as historians have implied, but because Lewis's and Clark's own preconceptions about rivers, tributaries, and watersheds prevented them from understanding the full import of the information available to them.
Comments
Copyright 1997 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln