Winter Counts / Battiste Good

[gregor]

In pursuit of the discussions over the past weeks and months, I felt that it would be useful to go deeper into the topic of Winter Counts and Ledger Art. I believe that first of all the origin, the supposed author and the circumstances of the development of winter counts and ledger books have to be reviewed very accurately. Only then it can be decided what credibility can be attributed to the depicted events.

First we have to see what we have: a Winter Count or a Ledger Book. Both types of documents provide knowledge (either a general event to denote a year or personal events in the life of an individual).
Some scholars believe that the majority of preserved Winter Counts are copies of copies, since the originals are either perished or were buried with the creators. We may have to deal with copies that have been copied by family members of the original creator. With the death of the original author the importance of single pictograms and individual years may be lost.
As long as the original author has recorded events, which he has seen himself or that have taken place during his lifetime, we can probably expect a high level of reliability. The situation is different with copied events - in my opinion. We have to look (and do so) for other sources or records in other winter counts.

Winter counts are mnemonic devices that only make sense in the context of an oral tradition. But this oral tradition must be plausible and reliable. Furthermore, it should be noted that from the reservation times Winter Counts (and also Ledger Books) were sold as souvenirs or craftsmanship. And I suppose some of these works are as accurate and reliable as todays “Original Egyptian Papyri”.

Ledger Books differ from winter counts. They usually show biographical events of a single person. They often show events in loose sequence but not in chronological order. Here we have also to examine whether they are copies. Or whether some pictures were even falsified (such as the Ledger of the Cheyenne Black Horse) to reinterpret events.

I would like to discuss some key Winter Counts and scrutinize them a little bit deeper.

Maybe we can start with Brown Hat / Battiste Good and his son High Hawk and discuss the following questions and answer some:

- Who was Battiste Good? What was his family?

- Were there other winter count keepers in his family before him?

- Which tiyospaye - under which leaders – did he belong to?

- What position did he have among the Brulé? How was his reputation?

- Since when did he live on a reservation?

- Did he join a Christian religion? Did he learn to write?

Thanks to all who participate in the discussion!
Toksha ake
Gregor

[grahamew]

Here's a fairly basic start: www.caeno.org/pdf/Battiste%20Good_Winter%20calendar.pdf

I'm sure I'be seen a photo of him

[gregor]

grahamew, thank you, that's a good start. Maybe we get more biografical facts. Do we know who actually wrote the year dates in the Winter Count?
Was it Battiste Good or another Person? I ask because we have e.g. Ledger Books which were manipulated by 1 - 2 other persons.

[kingsleybray]

Battiste Good, also known as Brown Hat (Wapostan-gi), was born in c. 1821. He died in 1894. He was a Sichangu (Brule) Lakota. According to one statement he was closely related on his father's side to Old Man Afraid of His Horse, the Oglala chief. He seems also to be related to the Little Thunder family, a prominent Brule tiwahe. He became the headman of a small Brule band, the Tiglabu, considered an offshoot or sister band of the Brule Kiyuksa band. He addressed the Indian Peace Commission when it arrived at Ft Laramie in April 1868 for treaty councils. He was a minor headman at the Upper Brule agencies (i.e. New Whetstone, Spotted Tail agencies) in the 1870s. When the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies were moved to new locations on the Missouri in fall 1877 he is listed among Brules who transferred to the Oglala agency - but he returned to the Brules and settled with them at Rosebud Agency in 1878. By 1885 his Tiglabu tiyospaye was located on Cut Meat Creek.

By the 1870s he had developed a keen interest in tracing the Lakota past. At some point - possibly in 1856, according to internal evidence - he started keeping a winter count. It is important to understand that while he would have kept the original skin record, painting on the yearly pictograph, the incidents chosen to commemorate each passing 'winter' would have been agreed by an informal grouping of band elders. Battiste did learn to write, presumably at the small Episcopal Church-run school that was established at Spotted Tail Agency. He made a copy of his count for army surgeon William Corbusier in a drawing book in 1880, adding Arabic numbers and occasional English words to amplify some of his pictographs.

His count is said by editor Garrick Mallery to have originally begun recording events from late in the 18th century - like most of the other counts with which Mallery was familiar. "Several Indians and half-breeds said that this count formerly embraced about the same number of years as the others, but that Battiste Good gathered the names of many years from the old people and placed them in chronological order as far back as he was able to learn them." Battiste systematically interviewed knowledgeable elders to construct a yearly record that reached back to the winter 1700-01. Elders undoubtedly existed who carried long sequences of events in their memories. It would be naive to assume from that that the resulting record can be treated as a 20:20 vision view of the past. Lakota storytellers had different preoccupations than 20th c. historians. The count admits to uncertainty about the identity of enemies in certain years. And one thing I've learned is that the mnemonic year entries preserved by editors like Mallery, with minimal amplification, would have been the tip of the iceberg. Trained keepers memorised a string of events and anecdotes for each winter. These have not been preserved in published form.

These caveats aside, the Battiste Good winter count remains an essential native overview of Brule history, which we have to try to use with appropriate criticism and respect. Like I say about a lot of these sources -- I don't take it literally, but I do take it seriously.

[Dietmar]

This is the family of Battiste Good aka Brown Hat:




Battiste Good is standing 4th from left, beside him (2nd from left) possibly his wife Goes In The Midst.
Standing far right is his son High Hawk.

[grahamew]

Thanks. That's the one I remember.

[gregor]

Kingsley, thanks for your detailed notes on Battiste Good. Are there other written dokuments by BG? I ask, because writing was an exceptional ability for a Lakota of this generation. I only know George Sword, who left a lot of texts. Are there other Lakotas of this 1st Reservation Generation who left written Dokuments? Thanx!