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  • The Spirit and the Sky: Lakota Visions of the Cosmos by Mark Hollabaugh
  • Sarah Whitt (bio)
The Spirit and the Sky: Lakota Visions of the Cosmos by Mark Hollabaugh University of Nebraska Press, 2017

MARK HOLLABAUGH'S ETHNOASTRONOMY TEXT The Spirit and the Sky: Lakota Visions of the Cosmos addresses the ways in which nineteenth-century Lakota people, guided by their cultural beliefs and practices, incorporated celestial phenomena into their sophisticated understanding of the universe. In so doing, he seeks to synthesize an intricate body of Lakota cosmological knowledge into the methodological parameters dictated by the Western field of astronomy. Though Hollabaugh's desire to preserve nineteenth- century Lakota perspectives about their celestial world is clear, this task is perhaps better left to Lakota people themselves.

As a well-organized text in its ten chapters ranging from "The Lakota People" to "The Spirit and the Sky," the trajectory of the book is relatively straightforward. Hollabaugh—an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at Normandale Community College in Minnesota—does a fine job of imparting a basic understanding of astronomical processes and concepts to his readers. As he suggests, the place-based nature of Indigenous cosmologies and the wealth of nineteenth-century materials, such as winter counts and pictographs that depict celestial events, afford real insight into the importance of these phenomena to the Native peoples living in the Great Plains region in this era. However, Hollabaugh's connections to Lakota people and their culture are tenuous, which raises questions about the implications and impact of this work for Native and non-Native communities alike.

In chapter 3, "Lakota Culture," Hollabaugh speculates about the reasons for which the Lakota people hold the numbers 4, 7, and 28 to be sacred and suggests that a correspondence between these numbers and their recurrence in nature and observed astronomical events is a likely cause. He explains, "Twenty-eight occurs frequently in Native American lunar cycles due to the number of days in the lunar synodic month when the moon in visible" (45) but contends that definitive reasons for the recurrence of the number 7 are murkier. He concludes his investigation into Lakota "legends" by saying, "It is possible that late nineteenth-century Lakota saw sacredness in the number seven after learning from Catholic missionaries about the seven sacraments, seven gifts of the Spirit, seven virtues, and seven deadly sins" (46), which, far from demonstrating sustained involvement with and [End Page 233] knowledge of the Lakota community, instead propagates the kind of intellectual Eurocentrism that encourages the ongoing colonization of Indigenous bodies, lands, and spiritualities within the academy. Throughout the text, Hollabaugh's secondary source materials are predominantly outdated and not reflective of new developments in anthropology or Native American studies. Ultimately, Hollabaugh's persistent reliance upon non-Native scholars to account for the intricacies of Lakota thought silences the voices of Native people, whose contributions to the field he largely ignores.

Elsewhere, Hollabaugh's findings stray even farther afield of the more recent work of Native American historians and scholars. One such instance occurs in chapter 7, "Eclipses and the Aurora Borealis." After a brief but detailed discussion of partial and total eclipse cycles, Hollabaugh turns to an overview of winter counts in "Lakota territory." While he notes that references to solar and lunar eclipses do not appear across all winter counts in this region, the counts that do make reference to these events provide compelling evidence for their central importance within some plains cosmologies. Hollabaugh then shifts to a discussion of the connection between two eclipses and their cosmological influence. As he relates, the late Montana author Roberta Carkeek Cheney disclosed that "Lakota medicine man Kills Two connected the 1869 eclipse and the 1888 eclipse to Wovoka's establishment of the Ghost Dance that ultimately led to the Wounded Knee massacre" (114), an assertion of causation that both seminal and cutting-edge scholarship in Native American studies has assiduously labored to debunk as the product of an erroneous and damaging master historical narrative.

Importantly, chapter 7 is also the chapter in which Hollabaugh makes his central contribution to Lakota ethnoastronomy. Here, he provides more expansive information about the "brilliant, spectacular aurora...

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