heyoka mistranslation

[SHEA KATHLEEN DORETTE]

Mr. Masthay,

I'm going to forward your question to the Siouan list so that someone who
reads it may answer it.  Even though I said that I am a Siouanist, I study
Ponca, in the Dhegiha branch of the Siouan language family.  I'm in
Oklahoma right now and don't have my Dakota mateials with me, and, anyway,
someone who studies one of the Dakota dialects could probably give you a
better translation of the material you quote.

Kathy Shea

On Tue, 22 Feb 2000 carl.masthay at harcourt.com wrote:

>
>
> Hi, Kathleen, by golly, I do have a Siouan question for you on my mistranslation
> from
> message #577  on the site Village of First Nations
> ("http://www.firstnations.com/cgi-bin/postit?login=fnai&topic=forum/culture/culture&order=date&article=577"):
>
> OK, so I don't know Lakota, and I should have translated the long sentence in
> #576, but here
> are the words I dragged out of the dictionary as well as I could: 'Winter, and
> within-red... not
> (emphatic) warm, and red... not then with[fire?] this un(?)-clown/trickster
> (men's emphatic final
> particle)'. So maybe that is: 'Winter may look red but it is not really warm,
> and so what looks red
> may not be a fire(?) with this trickster.' Help me, someone! I'm sure that I
> botched it up! Carl
> [Kathleen, can you provide a better translation? Pilamaya, Carl]
>
>   "Osni, yunkan tiyoceyati s'ni nak.e' mas'te, yunkan ceyati s'ni ehan on le
> heyonika yelo," as is
> said to one when he once had a fire while they called it warm weather.
>
>
> (Message #576:) Following up on Gary Senkowski's corrected spelling, I found
> this in my
> Lakota-English Dictionary by Buechel (1970):
> heyo'ka, a clown. According to Riggs this is the name of a Dakota god called by
> some the
> anti-natural god. He is represented as a little old man with a cocked hat on his
>  head, a bow
> and arrows in his hands and a quiver on his back. In winter he goes naked, and
> in the summer
> he wraps his buffalo robe around himself. "Osni, yunkan tiyoceyati s'ni nak.e'
> mas'te, yunkan
> ceyati s'ni ehan on le heyonika yelo," as is said to one when he once had a fire
>  while they
> called it warm weather.
> heyo'ka oti', the house or place where a heyoka does his wakan work.
> In addition, there is this curious name of a plant:
> heyo'ka tapeju'ta, red false mallow, prairie mallow, Malvastrum coccineum. A
> gray moss root.
> Magicians chewed their roots and rubbed their hands with it and so could dip
> them into the
> hottest water without being scalded. (But Sam Terry denied those qualities.) The
>  roots
> chewed and laid on sores have a healing effect.
>   ------------------------------------------------ Gary had earlier e-mailed me
> the following:
> I found that there is a heyoka wheel. It represents all that is not what seems.
> For example,
> when in the southern hemisphere it would appear that the sun rises in the west
> and sets in the
> east. Heyoka means trickster, or jester. The medicine of not what it seems,
> turning things
> upside down.
>
>
>