Representing the Lakota Past: Document, Text, Narrative

With My Own Eyes: A Lakota Woman Tells Her People's Story. By Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun and Josephine Waggoner. Edited by Emily Levine. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. xl + 187 pp., introduction, maps, illustrations, appendixes, notes, index. $50.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.)

Wakinyan: Lakota Religion in the Twentieth Century. By Stephen E. Feraca. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. xvi + 104 pp., preface, illustrations, notes, suggestions for further reading. $35.00 cloth, $12.00 paper.)

The Lakota Ritual of the Sweat Lodge: History and Contemporary Practice. By Raymond A. Bucko. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. vii + 336 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.)

Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun, born in 1857, was a mixed-blood Lakota, the daughter of a French-American trader and a Brulé (Sicangu) woman. Her collaborator, Josephine Waggoner, born in 1872, also was a mixed-blood Lakota; her father was an Irish-American trader, and her mother was Hunkpapa. Both were bilingual and educated women. In 1933, at Waggoner's impetus, they began to work together on a manuscript based on Bettelyoun's memories of mid–nineteenth-century Lakota people and events.

The introduction by editor Emily Levine describes the difficulties the women encountered in trying to get the Nebraska State Historical Society to publish the manuscript. Several editors worked on it over the course of the next twenty-five years, but both authors died without seeing it published. The central issue was that the manuscript was transcribed oral history and therefore did not meet the standards of historical scholarship. Thus, even though the Nebraska State Historical Society had published works based on oral historical research, such as that of Mari Sandoz, the lack of a chronological structure and a cohesive narrative was problematic. The Bettelyoun-Waggoner work did not fit any accepted genre of historical text. So it stayed in the archives, heavily utilized by researchers, until Native American texts were looked upon more favorably by editors.

Waggoner, according to Levine, "wrote the words just as they were spoken" by Bettelyoun (xxii). But the stories were clearly told to be written down, to become authoritative historical texts that would provide a perspective missing in scholarly histories. Although intended for a non-Indian audience, Bettelyoun's accounts of events and actors are related from the point of view of those who experienced it, whether her father, her brother, a contemporary Lakota, or herself. These accounts are almost cinematic in the richness of detail about places, people, and events.

Bettelyoun eschews the use of collective nouns, reifications, analytical terms, and abstractions used by scholars in their attempts to reconstruct or interpret the past. She tells the story of the past from the perspective scholars most avidly yearn for, that of someone who actually was there. Unlike Levine, however, I did not hear Bettelyoun's voice as clearly "identifying with the Lakota as opposed to white culture" (xxxv) or as a distinctly female voice. She does not speak, in fact, on behalf of all Lakotas, or all Lakota females, or even all mixed bloods. She speaks from the unique, particularized position she held within a complex society, and she does not label, categorize, or generalize about any other individual participants in that society. Yet this may in fact be what is most Lakota about her storytelling. The role that her father, brothers, and mixed-blood relatives played as brokers and interpreters is clearly revealed in her accounts, and she no doubt saw herself in a similar role when she decided to tell and record these stories. Any culturalized or genderized interpretations must be made by others, however; they are not provided by Bettelyoun.

Bettelyoun enlightens us about the complexities of society on the Plains through relating events involving Lakotas of different bands, Indians of different tribes, mixed-blood traders and interpreters, Mormons and European settlers, missionaries, and of course soldiers. She gives us invaluable glimpses of the complexities of the interactions...