Most people likely guessed that when Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun and Josephine Waggoner got together, they were, once again, going over old times, just two residents of a Hot Springs retirement home bringing back a little nostalgia. They were both mixed-bloods who'd seen more than their share of living through the years.
It was Waggoner who had the bright idea to write it all down, to make a record of what the two of them and many others of their era could remember, could say, could explain. They'd seen it all, from the nomadic life on the Plains, through the whole reservation era. They'd been there, eye-witnesses. Mrs. Waggoner used to read Sitting Bull's mail for him--and there were lots of letters and notes because Sitting Bull was the most well-known Indian of them all. She'd been there when he died, when he was shot and killed.
So it must have happened a lot, the two of them sitting together in the Home, Josephine with her pen and ink and tablet, Susan wholly willing to go on and on about the old days. Together, the two of them created their own history of the Plains Indians, bringing in others of the old ones to testify as to what they saw and did and remembered.
Witness, Josephine Waggoner named it, and a subtitle, A Hunkpapa Historian's Strong-Hearts Song of the Lakotas, and it didn't get published until long after Josephine Waggoner had passed away, as her friend Susan Bettelyoun had passed before her. Why so long? Because there were no footnotes. All Mrs. Waggoner had was what people told her, and some people told her different accounts of the same stories others told. Witness, was a witness all right, but who could believe it, who could really rely on what was there on paper, if there was no proof.
So what they created was what one might call "Indian history," the story of a time on the plains when everything was in flux, that history told--remembered--by the Native people themselves, with no verification because, simply there was none.
Years after the two of them were gone, the manuscript was published by the University of Nebraska Press, its fine narrative history available for anyone to read.
Here's a good sample, from With My Own Eyes: a Lakota Woman Tells Her People's History (1998), a kind of companion volume.
Is it true? Is it factual? It's quite fair to say that no one will ever know.
What's perfectly clear, however, is that,here as elsewhere, who tells the story makes a difference. It's helpful to remember that the Oregon Trail, in some places, was a mile wide. Here, Susan Bordeaux Bettlyoun is doing the remembering.
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My uncle Swift Bear and many others tried their best to clear the country of the invaders. They allied with the Cheyennes and Arapahos for this cause. They watched the traveled ways to make attacks to intimidate the travelers but there seemed to be no end to the emigrants. Down in Kansas, below the Republican River, my uncle Swift Bear and some of the foremost braves were sent down to make raids and cripple as many of the emigrants as possible. They spent the whole summer up and down along the Republican River and its tributaries to head off the oncoming emigrants. They made attacks and raids, they ran off stock such as oxen, mules, and horses. At one place, my uncle said they surrounded an immigrant train and besieged them till they used up all their ammunition and as they drew in closer on them, these white people all fell on their knees within the circle of wagons with their heads bowed without any resistance. Everyone was killed and the wagons were all burned. This was the days before they knew or heard of religion. The Indians wondered why they went down on their knees with bowed heads. They did not understand because their form of prayer was different.
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