Post by brock on Jan 17, 2010 14:22:45 GMT -5
Got done transcribing an interesting story pertaining to the ability of the Lakota and Lewis and Clark to translate their words to each other. This story comes from Doug War Eagle who is one of the Clown family members that I am translating their oral history, this time to paper.
There are certain things that defined the Lakota history with the Americans in large ways. One of them was the near battle that Lewis and Clark reported with the Lakota along the Bad River in 1804. One can argue that Lewis & Clark's journal description of the Lakota as being a hostile people certainly colored how future Americans approached the Lakota during the first half of the 1800s. One thing that particularly caught my eye was the reference to the head man Partisan. Other writings tell us his real name was Tortonger or Tokahonger (loosely means the First One There or First At the Site) but Lewis and Clark consistently referred to him as Partisan. My question to Doug was why.
Doug is a direct line descendant of Black Buffalo and has spent much of his life researching his oral history and the history of the Lakota beginning in the days when he was the delivery boy of meals to the homes of elders who could not prepare their own meals. A sort of meals on wheels. Many of these elders were lonely and had oral histories that nobody was interested to hear so they told them to the delivery boy which was Doug.
In any event I asked him why any Lakota in 1804 would allow himself to be named Partisan. It wasn't a Lakota name at all. He told me that Tokaonger had spent some time trading with the French and was quite an aggressive trader, hence 'The Partisan'. So how did that get into Lewis and Clark's lexicon as they weren't French. I already knew that Lewis and Clarks' Lakota/Nakota/Dakota interpreter, Pierre Dorian, had been left behind to try to make a group of Yankton become peaceful with a rival tribe so by the time Lewis and Clark came in contact with the Lakota they had no reliable interpreter so they used another Frenchman named Pierre Cruzatte. Doug told me Lewis & Clark's interpreter knew very little Lakota but Tokahonger knew French so for the most part they communicated in French which Lewis and Clark never gave the Lakota credit for as the better translators in their talks...Lewis & Clark only complain about their own. So because Tokahonger had to win them over into speaking French since their Lakota was so bad he gave his French nickname to make them feel more comfortable in the translation.
It's kind of a little story but I always get curious about names and events that never made sense and this was one of them. The way the story has been told in the past just seemed to allow another culture to define the Lakota in a foreign way.
There are certain things that defined the Lakota history with the Americans in large ways. One of them was the near battle that Lewis and Clark reported with the Lakota along the Bad River in 1804. One can argue that Lewis & Clark's journal description of the Lakota as being a hostile people certainly colored how future Americans approached the Lakota during the first half of the 1800s. One thing that particularly caught my eye was the reference to the head man Partisan. Other writings tell us his real name was Tortonger or Tokahonger (loosely means the First One There or First At the Site) but Lewis and Clark consistently referred to him as Partisan. My question to Doug was why.
Doug is a direct line descendant of Black Buffalo and has spent much of his life researching his oral history and the history of the Lakota beginning in the days when he was the delivery boy of meals to the homes of elders who could not prepare their own meals. A sort of meals on wheels. Many of these elders were lonely and had oral histories that nobody was interested to hear so they told them to the delivery boy which was Doug.
In any event I asked him why any Lakota in 1804 would allow himself to be named Partisan. It wasn't a Lakota name at all. He told me that Tokaonger had spent some time trading with the French and was quite an aggressive trader, hence 'The Partisan'. So how did that get into Lewis and Clark's lexicon as they weren't French. I already knew that Lewis and Clarks' Lakota/Nakota/Dakota interpreter, Pierre Dorian, had been left behind to try to make a group of Yankton become peaceful with a rival tribe so by the time Lewis and Clark came in contact with the Lakota they had no reliable interpreter so they used another Frenchman named Pierre Cruzatte. Doug told me Lewis & Clark's interpreter knew very little Lakota but Tokahonger knew French so for the most part they communicated in French which Lewis and Clark never gave the Lakota credit for as the better translators in their talks...Lewis & Clark only complain about their own. So because Tokahonger had to win them over into speaking French since their Lakota was so bad he gave his French nickname to make them feel more comfortable in the translation.
It's kind of a little story but I always get curious about names and events that never made sense and this was one of them. The way the story has been told in the past just seemed to allow another culture to define the Lakota in a foreign way.
