Emil Afraid-Of-Hawk's style (A Personal Impression)

[Tom Leonard]

I am not familiar with the text to which you are referring but I'd like to
suggest that "the cultural context & background of a Lakhota native speaker
of the 1940's, and (their) 'mental world' " might be a whole lot different
than we might think. By the 1940's many Indian people, many of whom were
fluent speakers of their own languages, had exposure to European texts and
were voracious readers.

I once attended an Otoe wake service where an old man (I believe it was
Truman Dailey, if  I remember correctly) arose to give a speech. During his
speech the old man repeated John Donne's famous Meditation XVII ("No man is
an island, entire of itself......and therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls. It tolls for thee") nearly word-for-word, the entire verse
from memory. The only difference was he didn't say "Europe is the less"; he
said "our land" instead of  "Europe". Even more remarkable, he then repeated
it in Otoe (!), all without a script or prompt.

I asked a few Ponca elders that I was sitting with about their reaction to
his speech. Their reaction was something like "Oh! Did that come out of a
book? You know that guy spends a lot of time reading. He went to the
university. It sure was pretty though." I asked about the Otoe translation
and they said "He just repeated himself - said the same thing - sure was
pretty." It was, without question, one of the more remarkable and moving
speeches I've ever heard.