Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 1998, pp. 83-84.
Abstract
Julian Rice organizes, critiques, and analyzes one of Ella Cara Deloria's lifetime achievements, the writing of a Lakota epic. His volume provides a brief history of Lakota linguistics as well as recognition of Deloria's contributions to maintaining oral traditions. Six critical essays follow the Lakota and English texts and are characteristic of Rice's ability to research and criticize Deloria's work from a linguistic perspective. What he has produced is a useful reference text for researching and teaching Lakota linguistics through the epic story of Iron Hawk.
This, Rice's second of three books on Lakota oral traditions since 1992, is an exceptional example of literary critique as well as linguistic analysis. In offering his edition of Iron Hawk, one of "four unusually long stories" from Deloria's previously unpublished manuscript, "Dakota Tales in Colloquial Style" (1937), Rice continues Deloria's Lakota scholarship.
Ella Deloria recorded Iron Hawk after memorizing the story as told to her by various elder Lakota consultants, Makula primary among them. Considerably longer than most traditional narrative representations of the Lakota culture hero, Iron Hawk makes possible- through Deloria's preservation-the linguistic and literary analyses of scholars such as Rice.
"Iron Hawk: Oglala Culture Hero" is represented by four hundred and nineteen lines of Lakota text comprising the heart of the volume. It is a story teaching kinship among all things. Rice follows it with a discussion of "Iron Hawk as Literature: An Interpretation," an exemplary critique. In "The Verbal Texture: Tanin and lea a" he sets the narrative context. These terms in the Lakota cultural worldview "suggest that cultural consciousness must be spoken, sung, and acted into being, if the people are to live," which is what Deloria professed throughout her life. "The Lakota Context: Meadowlarks" suggests the centrality of meadowlarks in Lakota culture and oral traditions, while "The Lakota Context: Sun, Fire, the Color Red" describes the predominance of these features in the Lakota cultural worldview. In "The Lakota Context: East and West" Rice focuses on the relevance of the Western Powers (direction, not ideology) in Nicholas Black Elk's visions and the Eastern Powers in Deloria's Iron Hawk. Appendix I offers a version of the "Iron Hawk" story as told to Martha Warren Beckwith by Makula in 1926. A free translation showing the problems the translation process itself entails, this version also permits students of Lakota oral traditions to compare it with Deloria's Lakota text and its English translation. Appendix II, "Dakota Play on Words," offers a Lakota and English free translation of twenty-nine lines each. Rice's short introduction is followed by a brief introductory note by Deloria characterizing "these small bits which are related as incidents, intended to amuse." The volume concludes with a useful orthographic note section.
Rice makes a genuine contribution to Lakota studies through his in-depth analysis of the content of Iron Hawk. Every Lakota studies reference library should own this work.
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln