George Sword’s Warrior Narratives: Compositional Processes in Lakota Oral Tradition by Delphine Red Shirt (review)

Delphine Red Shirt (Oglala Sioux) has been exploring the depths of her Lakota heritage since her first book, Bead on an Anthill: A Lakota Childhood, appeared in 1999. In turn, her fascination with the Lakota writings of George Sword, James R. Walker’s noteworthy collaborator, has persisted since her last book, Turtle Lung Woman’s Granddaughter (2002). However, unlike her previous works, Red Shirt has switched from evoking the Lakota experience in the form of the novel to a work that combines the Indigenous perspective of American Indian studies with the analysis of literary criticism. As Red Shirt states, “The purpose of this study is to use the written work of George Sword to demonstrate the way in which oral narrative is composed by the Lakota people, to show how their practice produced a form distinct from narratives composed in the period after contact with Europeans, when writing was introduced” (xi).

What the reader encounters in the book’s seven chapters and four appendices is an analytical portrait of the mind of an original Lakota writer who was, at the same time, an original oral historian. What makes Sword “original” in both respects is the fact that his rendition of Lakota narratives in the Lakota language, using alphabetic writing, straddles the boundary between two otherwise distinct forms, writing and oral history, thereby creating a hybridized genre. Using theories developed by Milman Parry, who did groundbreaking studies of the oral traditions embedded in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, in addition to analyses of the Serbo-Croatian preliterate language tradition, Red Shirt seeks to comprehend the themes and formulas of Sword’s writings, which are derived from the distinctly nonliterate Lakota oral tradition.

Like many unexpected contributors to the American Indian literary tradition, Sword did not intend to become a writer but rather turned to writing as a means for preserving what he regarded as an endangered Lakota tradition, namely, its oral history. According to Red Shirt, Sword worked on his narratives at the behest of James R. Walker, the Pine Ridge Agency physician (1896–1914) who had taken up a request from Clark Wissler during his 1902 visit to the South Dakota reservation on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History. Wissler convinced Walker of the value of collecting Lakota stories and to use his position as agency physician to recruit informants, which, in addition to Sword, included Little Wound, American Horse, and Gray Goose. As for the narratives that Red Shirt examines, they consist of four narratives about going to war and one long narrative about the Sun Dance. Indeed, one of the more significant contributions of this book is that it provides readers fresh translations of Lakota narratives that were previously available only in older editions of Walker’s work edited by Ella Deloria, Elaine A. Jahner, and Raymond J. DeMallie. With respect to what Sword thought he achieved in his Lakota writings, he is quoted as saying to Walker: “The young Oglalas do not understand a formal talk by an old Lakota because the white people have changed the Lakota language, and the young people speak it as the white people have written it. I will write of the old customs and ceremonies for you. I will write that which all the people knew” (77).

As for Red Shirt’s analysis, she summarizes her methodology in three steps: “first, an analysis of the content of the original text of the narratives in the Lakota language; second, word-for-word and literary translations of the text into English; and third, an application of oral theory to analyze the Lakota text in order to determine the process of composition of these narratives” (6–7). Red Shirt then proceeds to examine 2,240 lines of Sword’s Lakota narratives, in which the objective is to develop “an appreciation and understanding of the characteristics of Lakota oral tradition that have...