INTRODUCTION In American history and myth, Plains Indian society tends to be portrayed by the primary (and often solitary) figure of the male warrior. Images of the lives of Indian women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as earlier, come largely from western texts: the writings of travelers, missionaries, military officers, ethnographers and historians. For many reasons, however, these characterizations are likely to be unrevealing. Specifically, early male writers tended to focus on male activities, eliciting detailed information from male informants. When women do appear at all in descriptions of pre-reservation life, they often blend with the setting in a backdrop of endless menial chores. A characterization of women in “texts” produced by Plains Indians themselves might present a different picture. Such records do exist. In the nineteenth century and earlier, Plains Indian men kept pictographic biographies, as well as yearly records known as winter counts; oral narratives are thought to have complemented these pictographic documents. Although women did not produce the records, they do appear in them. What distinguishes picture writing from just a group of pictures is that the pictographs convey elements of a narrative that can then be expressed verbally. The term picture writing refers specifically to historical and religious documents. In the nineteenth century, Garrick Mallery reported that pictography was put to “practical use by historic Indians for important purposes, as important to them as the act of writing.” In context and use, the interplay of the pictographic record and the associated oral narratives would echo each other, creating an increasingly richer body of knowledge, uniting the people in a common past identity.

INTRODUCTION History, in any culture, may be conceived of as the narrative organization and interpretation of events completed in a recent or remote past. The kinds of events represented in a historical text as well as the pattern of narrative organization would naturally reflect and reinforce cultural beliefs, including notions of temporal order. The Lakota, or Sioux, of the nineteenth century and earlier preserved both tribal and band histories; there were many such records reported among different Lakota groups. Other tribes known to have kept yearly historical records include the Mandan, Blackfeet, Ponca, and Kiowa. The first reported European contact with the Teton Sioux on the Plains was by the French in the mid-1600s. Among the numerous reasons for the tribe’s westward migration from the Great Lakes region were war and economic pressures, for the Chippewa, the Teton’s longstanding enemy, had obtained guns early from French traders. Today, the political divisions and designations of the Sioux people correspond to their geographical location after progressive migrations: the Santee remain the farthest east, the Yankton ventured a bit west, and the Teton migrated still farther in the westerly direction. The dialects of the language also roughly correspond to these geographic divisions: Dakota is spoken to the east, Nakota in the center, and Lakota to the west. Traditionally, calendrical records of the year were textualized in a series of pictographs called winter counts or counting buck, which were kept by members of the tribe known as winter counters, a responsibility and honor generally passed from father to son. The use of the word winter instead of year stems from the fact that the Lakota calendar reckoned time differently than the Roman calendar, and so had no equivalent for the English word year.