American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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.