Dan's Outside

Tracking the 'year of the falling stars

A fascinating look at how the Lakota Sioux used ‘winter counts’ as their calendar for generations. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories]

If you had to chronicle your family or personal history without the benefit of a calendar, chances are that you’d link important events to each other – ‘that was the same year we bought the new house,’ or ‘that happened just after I graduated.’

The Lakota Sioux used just such a system to preserve their own past, using a specific incident to anchor each year in their oral histories, and the time between first winter snowfalls to determine the year’s length. The resulting Lakota Winter Counts form the basis of a new online exhibit by the Smithsonian Institution, and you’d be surprised at just how much history can lie behind a single, simple image.

Lakota Winter Counts: An Online Exhibit can be found at http://www.wintercounts.si.edu.
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May 17, 2005 - Posted by gdanmitchell | News