Dakota Dialects

[Koontz John E]

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?

> 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.

There was probably no one absolutely correct, logically coherent,
completely satisfying account of Dakota subgrouping.  A question could
always have been raised as to whether this group or that was structurally
comparable to another group, and it would always have been unclear how
many divisions and levels of divisions to use to organize the
progressively changing continuum of bands.  So, given the difficulties of
achieving a perfect but debatable analysis, a division into seven somewhat
arbitrary but convenient groups for presentational purposes can be seen as
a rhetorical strategy rather than a falsifiable assertion about Dakota
enthnology.

Returning to the issue of the ennumeration, a reasonable consideration
would be on what basis the Assiniboine-Stoney are not included, since they
are explicitly mentioned.  This is rationalized in the Seven Council Fires
account in terms of alliance (orabsence of enmity), as I recall, while in
addition an attempt is made to connect these groups with the Yanktonais,
thus placing them within the scheme.  I think, however, that these
rationalizations is just that - a rhetorical dismissal of a apparent
deviation from the presenter's thesis.  If the Assiniboine-Stoney were
recognized as a group they would be an eighth group and the logic of the
presentation would be lost, so they are not an eighth group by one logic
or another.

This assumes that the presenter had some particular logic not known to us
for distinguishing the Yankton and Yanktonais, and so was not willing to
supress that distinction to accomodate the Assiniboine-Stoney.  The logic
may simply have been that a particular seven had already been ennumerated
and it was too late to revise it when the issue of accomodating the
Assiniboine-Stoney arose.

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.

Incidentally I think at one point in the BAE's Synonymy Dorsey suggests
somewhat guardedly that it looks to him like it might make more sense to
divide the Santee into five groups.  But his logic was based on comparable
entities and produced in a presentational framework that more easily
accomodated revisions.

(I have to credit this general line of thinking and some of the details to
David Rood who gave a succinct version of it in class at one point in
response to a question.  He might well want to disavow all kinds of things
in this long-winded recapitulation and elaboration.)