The Lakota Way: Stories and Lessons in Living

Story Summary: “The Story of the Man who Spoke Softly”

There is a headman who is known for his quiet wisdom. After he has been the headman for some time, younger men in the village want a new leader. They decide to hold birds in their hand and ask the headman if they are dead or alive. If he says alive, they will crush the bird. If they say dead, they will let the bird go. When a young man stands before the headman with a bird in his hand and asks if the bird is alive or dead, the leader wisely says, “the answer is in your hands” (198).

Story Summary: “The Story of the Woman Who Gossiped”

In the village lives a woman who loved to gossip. She hears a young couple arguing, and when the man leaves for a month to go hunting, the woman tells everyone the young woman will not welcome her husband under her sleeping robes so they can’t have children. The young woman is so mortified she runs away from home until her brother finds her and brings her home.

From that point on, the village ostracizes the woman, and she goes to the wise woman of the village. She tells the gossipy woman to go to every house where someone she had gossiped about lives and place a white down feather on each door. The woman does so, and she tells the wise woman that they have floated away. The wise woman tells her that these feathers are like gossip, as once harmful words are spoken, they cannot be taken back. The gossip learns her lesson and makes friends with people by giving away everything she owned. She is then called One Dress because that is all she owns. She lives quietly after that time.

Story Summary: “A Lesson from the Gully”

A grandfather and his 11-year-old grandson cross the Plains in the deep snow of winter with four large jackrabbits. The grandson wants to be home sooner and tells his grandfather they should take a shortcut across a gully. The grandfather says that the snow is too deep for this, but the grandson insists and hurries on ahead. The grandfather patiently pulls out a rope from his burlap sack and threads it through a hole in a stone. He tosses this stone and rope down into the gulley, where his grandson is buried under the snow.

The grandson, after being rescued, asks his grandfather how he knew he was under the snow. The grandfather responds that he has had time to observe trails in the snow. The grandfather also learned his lesson the hard way because his grandfather had to pull him out of the snow when he was little. He tells his grandson that he will have to rescue his grandson in the same way.

Story Summary: “Life’s Gift”

Older people are wise because wisdom is life’s gift. For example, a grandmother does not tell her grandchild at first not to poke a fire in the finger, but after the child does so, the grandmother tells the child, knowing the lesson will be forever branded in the child’s mind.

The author recalls building a log house with his grandfather in which the grandfather did not criticize him for getting in the way but gave him a task that made the author feel good about himself. He recalls his grandmother distracting him in a windstorm by asking him to stack wood in a crisscross pattern and asking for his help while she beaded. He writes that it’s better to be known for one’s wisdom than for any great accomplishments in life.

Story Summary: “The People”

The author grew up hearing Lakota spoken by his parents and grandparents. The names “Lakota,” “Dakota,” and “Nakota” all mean “an alliance of friends.” Differences in the dialects they speak suggest that the Nakota and Dakota spoke one language while the Lakota once spoke another.

The three groups lived in the Great Lakes area until the late 1600s. The Ojibway acquired firearms from the French, shortened their name from “naddewasioux” to Sioux, which was also the term used for the Lakota, including the Rosebud Sioux and other Sioux groups. The Lakota had seven sub-groups, including the Oglala and others.

The Dakota settled in southwestern Minnesota, and parts of South and North Dakota, while the Lakota pushed west across the Missouri River to the open plains. While they had lived a woodlands life in the Great Lakes, they reclaimed the nomadic life they had likely had earlier when they were on the plains. The arrival of the horse in 1680 did not start their nomadic lifestyle but enhanced it.

On his mother’s side, the author is Sicangu, the word for “burnt thigh” (208). They got their name when they could not outrun a prairie fire and decided to run back through the fire. On his father’s side, he is Oglala. The horse helped the Lakota have bigger houses and larger territory, and there were about 15,000 Lakota on the Plains, the largest group, by about 1800. The horse was essential for buffalo hunting and for war mounts as part of their skilled cavalry. Horses were essential to the Lakota lifestyle.

The Lakota valued family and kinship, which the Lakota feel with everything on earth. An important phrase in Lakota rituals is “mitayuke oyasin,” which means “all my relatives” (227). Their sense of kinship with all living things reminded them of their place in the great circle of life. As they only used what was needed, the bison on the plains seemed endless.

In 1837, the first white traders appeared via steamboat, and that summer, about 2,000 Lakota and a similar number of Mandan died from smallpox brought by the whites. The development of the Oregon Trail in the 1840s brought an onslaught of whites, as well as their diseases. A conference at Fort Laramie, which the Lakota call Horse Creek, resulted in the whites’ assurance that the pioneers were just passing through. The first white attack came in 1854, when a Mormon lost a cow along the trail. The Sicangu Lakota leader, Conquering Bear, offered the man a horse, but he refused, and the US Army under Grattan opened fire. Crazy Horse, known as “Curly or Lighthaired Boy” (214) as a boy, witnessed this exchange, which was deadly on both sides and resulted in Conquering Bear’s death. After that, hostilities became constant, and many of the great Lakota leaders emerged, including Crazy Horse.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 declared the entire western half of what is now South Dakota as the Great Sioux Reservation and gave the Native Americans hunting rights elsewhere. Then, gold was found in the Black Hills in 1874, and white prospectors crossed into Indian land, in violation of the treaty. Native American leaders realized resistance was necessary. The best known of these battles was Crazy Horse’s improbable victory over US Army’s Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.

This battle, in Marshall’s words, “awakened a sleeping giant” (216). Out of necessity, the Lakota could no longer pursue honor in war but had to resist the whites any way they could. The US Army pursued the Lakota relentlessly, and the Lakota also suffered from the loss of the bison as result of white overhunting. The loss of the bison sapped the Lakota’s strength, figuratively and literally. Crazy Horse surrendered to US forces in 1877 and, the victim of rumors by some of his own people that he was going to kill a US army general, he was killed resisting arrest.

In the years that followed, the Lakota endured additional traumas, as their reservation was carved up, and the Dawes Act of 1887 that attempted to turn tribal land holdings into individual plots. A Paiute Indian developed the Ghost Dance, which the Lakota believed would rid the earth of whites. This dance unnerved whites, who thought it was the sign of an uprising, and they sent Indian agents against the leader Sitting Bull in 1890.

Red Cloud invited Big Foot’s Mniconju Lakota to Pine Ridge. Thirty miles from Pine Ridge, they were apprehended by the Seventh Cavalry, Custer’s old unit, and the Ninth Cavalry, an African American unit known as Buffalo Soldiers. They were forced to camp near Wounded Knee Creek, and there, soldiers fired on them, killing 200 out of 350 Mniconju and Big Foot and ending the Ghost Dance.

The years after that were marked by the attempt to eradicate Lakota ways and destroy their language, which they retained. Lakota soldiers, including the author’s grandfather, Charles J. Marshall, fought in World War I, although they were not granted US citizenship until 1924. Many Lakota were forced to attend missionary schools off the reservation, where they were taught their culture and language were wrong. It was not until the early 1970s that two Lakota colleges were established that had the mission of preserving Lakota language and culture. Still, the Lakota struggle with the loss of reservation land, fights over US government jurisdiction over their lands and government, alcoholism, and racial prejudice. They are tenacious about holding on.

Story Summary: “Walking the Circle”

“Kaohomni,” or “the circle” (223), is central to Lakota life and represents their view that everything in life is connected. They also believe that life itself is a cycle, and the sweat lodge, or “Inikagapi,” is a circular structure. Lakota dwellings, both when they lived in the forests and later on the plains, were circular and were reminders of the cyclical nature of life. The conical dwellings on the plains were also arranged in circles.

The medicine wheel, or “cangleska,” or “spotted wood” (225), is a common symbol in Lakota art. It has two intersecting roads—one red and one black. The Red Road is the more difficult but more moral path through life, while the Black Road is the easier but bad path. The other sacred colors on the wheel include yellow and white, and the number four, representing the directions and the seasons, is also sacred. To the author, the medicine wheel represents the equality of all forms of life. In the Circle of Life, no one form is greater than the others, as they all depend on each other.

Although the Lakota no longer live in circular dwellings, they continue to form circles when they get together, and they continue to participate in the sweat lodge ceremony, symbolizing the continuing cycle of life. The ceremony begins with the fire pit outside, and then the participants enter the lodge, where the leader offers a prayer to the Creator and the powers in all Four Dimensions. The leader pours water on the hot stones, and the participants experience cleansing and rebirth through sweating. As they emerge from the lodge, symbolizing the womb, they are ready for a new beginning, just as each day can offer this new beginning to each of us.