Dakota Dialects

[Marino]

At 11:00 PM 1/25/2005, you wrote:
>On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Mary Marino wrote:
> > Parks and DeMallie don't actually say anything directly about Yanktonai
> > self-identification, but since 'dakhota' was one of the words they
> > elicited and which they offer among 20-odd sets showing the differences
> > among the 5 dialects, their Yanktonai respondents were clearly not
> > self-identifying as 'nakhota'.  Maybe 'self-identification' in a
> > socio-cultural context is a different sort of mental operation from
> > responding to a dialect survey. This is by no means impossible, and is
> > part of what prompted my question.
>
>That's part of what I was wondering, too, along with the other issue Mary
>mentioned to Cory - that perhaps identification was influenced by the
>literature.  I know that folks working with Dhegiha speakers on linguistic
>issues - which leads readily to culteral discussions - are widely referred
>to various standards with comments like "But of course if you're
>interested in that sort of thing why don't you just read (some relevant
>published source)."  The impression I had was that Omaha elders like
>Wilson Wolfe (deceased) were much better read in the Omaha ethnographic
>literature than I was or may ever be.  So I suspect Yanktonais are quite
>familiar with the report that Yanktonai(s) is an N-dialect, even though,
>ironically, very little investigation of the Yanktonais language has
>actually been done.  (But I may be underestimating this through ignorance
>of less well known Dakotan materials.)
>
> > They don't actually discuss the origins of the 3-way analysis.  Riggs
> > identified 4 forms of Sioux and reported the h-k-g correspondence and
> > seemed to assign as much importance to it, as to d-n-l.
>
>Which would indicate that the canonicalization of the d-n-l division was
>subsequent to Riggs.  I wonder what the history of it was?

I think a part of the "history" might simply be its fatal attraction as a
linguistic/cultural cliche.  Sound correspondence reflected in the *actual*
tribal names - one fact to remember instead of two, and easily memorable at
that.  First-year textbook stuff.


> > You're right about the Council Fires.  That tradition must predate the
> > westward expansion and socio-political elaboration of the Teton.
>
>I may be misunderstanding you, but I suspect that the socio-political
>elaboration of the Teton is less a consequence of their westward expansion
>than a post-Riggsian discovery of a pre-existing but previously unreported
>situation.  There may well have been some elaboration during the
>expansion.  In the same way the number of Santee divisions has probably
>decreased or at least changed under the impact of American and Ojibwe
>incursions.  But I think there were already several Teton divisions
>comparable in nature to the Santee divisions by the time of contact.  I
>think that the depiction of the seven Dakota Council Fires as we know it,
>with the Teton lumped into one Fire, arises from the logic of the
>presentation and from the circumstance that the presentation was of Santee
>origin.
>
>I don't know that there's any evidence at all for a formal Seven Council
>Fires alliance or entity, but there was clearly some prevailing notion of
>coherence arising from linguistic factors as well as others, and there
>could also easily have been inter-band meetings - the colonial powers and
>Americans arranged several themselves - in which the ideal of a Dakota
>unity was expressed.  There is also a cultural tendency to organize things
>in fours and sevens.
>
>Given this milieu, if you asked a Santee-Sisseton speaker what the various
>Dakota groups were you might well get an elaboration in terms of seven
>groups.  The bulk of these would be local Santee-speaking entities - the
>four Santee groups.  This nice appropriate number of local entities could
>then be raised to the next appropriate number, seven, by adding to it
>three more distant clumps without differentiating within them groups
>comparable in size to the four Santee groups.  It would be in some sense
>necessary to separate the Yankton from the Yanktonais, and to suppress the
>divisions of the Teton, no matter how much information was available about
>Yankton and Teton internal divisions, because only this approach would
>yield the necessary number three of additional groups.  Of course, it
>would also be likely that less would be known about more distant groups.
>
>If an account of historical Dakota organization included the
>Yankton-Yanktonais and Teton at the same level of detail that the Seven
>Council Fires account uses for the Santee there would be more than seven
>Dakota groups.  Alternatively, if the account presented the Santee at the
>same level that the Seven Council Fires accounts uses for the Yankton,
>Yanktonais and Teton, there would be fewer than seven groups.  Either way
>it would probably do violence to the rhetorical and logical sense of the
>Seven Council Fires account's presenter.  Furthermore, providing less
>detail about more distant and less well known groups, and more detail
>about well known local groups would probably also be in line with the
>presenter's sense of duty to the subject.  It presents what can honestly
>be presented and elaborates where possible.
>
>So I think that distinguishment of seven bodies of Dakota speakers is a
>consequence not of there being seven inherent and comparable bodies, but
>of seven being a conventional number of elements in a catalog.  If the
>first sources on Dakota subdivisions had been Teton or Yankton the catalog
>canonized in the literature would still probably have included seven
>groups, but the details would probably have been quite different -
>presumably four groups of Tetons or Yanktons and three of more distant
>others.

Well, this is way more than I had in mind, at any rate.  To unpack the
essentials:  1) there is the number 7 (of whatever-it-is that we are
discussing: a culturally approved and valued number); 2) there is the
"oceti" (council fire) concept:   elastic as a socio-political term (It
could be a territorial unit, or a band, or some other division of the
people), 3) there is the information possessed by a knowledgeable leader or
elder of the group's traditions and the existing divisions of the people in
a known region.  These elements could configure in various ways to produce
all sorts of "oceti sakowin"  sets of council-fire groups.  Does this in
fact happen?  I have only ever heard of one "oceti sakowin"  list.   Is the
oceti sakowin an important concept among Teton groups?   I can only recall
reading about it in reference to Dakota groups.

My idea is simply this:  if "oceti sakowin"  were a single, invariant
tradition, it might go back to a time when the Teton, Yankton and Yanktonai
were  three *single units* - on a par- at least in cultural understanding,
with the Santee, Wahpeton, Sisseton and Mdewakanton.