heyoka mistranslation

[Erik D Gooding]

As I've already email Mr. Mashtay, I believe that this sentence, taken
from Father B's definition of aheyoka, contains a typo, that second s'ni
should be the conintuative s'na, 'he's always having a fire'. that
expresses the contrary nature of the heyoka. Perhaps Ray DeMallie can run
into the other room there at AISRI and check to see which way Father B
wrote it on his slips. But my gut says its either an expression of the
period and/or a typo.


Erik

P.S. JEK, I'll get to our conversation about stress/pitch/accent here
shortly, if I ever get my dissertation done, I can think of other things!



On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, SHEA KATHLEEN DORETTE wrote:

> 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.
> >
> >
> >
>