(In)dependent body parts in Dakotan?

[regina pustet]

While compiling a Lakota text collection over the past couple of years, I
noticed usages of the possessive markers that struck me as extremely
inappropriate from the classical Boas/Deloria perspective. My overall
impression is that the system is changing under the influence of English
syntax. As for the discourse occurrence of the inalienable nominal
possessor prefixes (the ma-/mi- series), we have to keep in mind that they
were already relatively marginal when Boas and Deloria were working on the
language. Usually, in the Deloria texts as well as today, possession is
expressed by means of semantically complex verbal person affixes, which do
not differentiate between control and non-control, or whatever the
semantic denominator of the Lakota ma-/mi- contrast may be, if there is
any. In other words, in statistical terms, the hypothetical contrast is
not very salient. In my texts I observed an overwhelming tendency to
replace the original possessor affixes with the paradigm of free
possessive pronouns (mithawa mine, nithawa your etc.), to the effect that
I had just a handful occurrences of affixes of the ma-/mi- type in the
texts -- which is not much, given that I have about 350 pages of text. I
remember an interesting sentence in which my speaker said something like
the doctor examined me, and my heart, my liver, and my blood are all okay.
She used a different construction type for each possessed body part she
mentions: the mi-affix, verbal affixes, and the free pronoun mithawa mine.
All in all, body parts tend to be used with the free pronouns today, or
with the verbal possessor affixes, rather than with the ma-/mi- series of
affixes. I also explicitly checked the compatibility of various body part
lexemes with these affixes, and my speakers were usually reluctant to
accept the forms. They prefer the free pronouns in this case -- they
probably imitate English syntax (subconsciously, of course).

What Im trying to say is that the contrast between ma- and mi- did not
play a very dominant role in actual language use in the past, and is about
to get entirely obsolete today.