Sioux

(Sioux is now the commonest general name for peoples often identified by other tribal names such as Lakota or Dakota. Also Nakota.)

Many Indian stories focus on complex interpersonal dynamics of common relationships. These stories often begin with a situation of socio-psychological instability: here a family unit of one man with two wives, his brother with none. The imbalance opens the initiating actions to a variety of interpretations. The story does not aim at a singular meaning, but instead generates a diversity of possible meanings. This encourages retelling, which is the "same" narrative only in regard to some elements of content - features of social situation, event, character, etc. This is why a modern reader needs to remember that normally a story was familiar to Indian listeners. The heard a narrative with an awareness (unavailable to us) of its history, of different meanings developed from it by previous tellers. That awareness was fostered by a narrative structure built upon schematic patterns of parallelism and contrast, an artifice not controlled by natural time sequences.

Hazardous conditions of physical survival made Sioux listeners aware that even small issues of interpersonal relations might be of life or death significance in a small community. To them, the account of the brother's refusal of his sister-in-law's request for the owl would have suggested multiple explanations. There are the obvious alternatives of interpreting the request whither as a command or a sexual invitation, but beyond these are other questions, for example, might the hunter's refusal originate in selfishness or jealousy? Deciding among such alternatives requires the listener to evaluate how this first episode will relate to subsequent one, regardless of their sequential order. For Indian listeners who knew the story, "suspense" consisted primarily in how a teller, through manipulations of parallelism and contrast between various events, would create a particular moral-psychological meaningfulness to the narrative. The reduction of the importance of temporal sequence and escape from direct cause-effect relations free an auditor's imagination to engage in an exploration of new perspectives and diverse and complex possibilities of the meaning of the story's actions. We who read silently to ourselves must remember an Indian heard the story in company with others. She heard it retold by someone with whom she had listened to it before. Later, she would hear other retellings; perhaps retell it herself. For her, the story was not a detached, fixed text, but a set of specific social experiences involving a variety of people exchanging ideas, opinions, convictions, and experiences. "The" story for her is a long-term series of social negotiations, which over time refine and subtilize its form and complicate its significance so that, despite its brevity, it is packed with meaning inseparable from actual interpersonal relationships.

We can't recover the processes of this communal activity of storytelling, but we can recognize that it bears some resemblance to our pleasure in stories we value the most, what we call classics, which are narratives that we enjoy rereading. That may encourage us to seek reward in grappling imaginatively with problems posed by such an Indian story as this, finding for ourselves possible ethical and psychological connections between episodes apparently unrelated by progress of the plot. for instance, we may find it worth assessing the significance of the story's final event, in which the tribal group is destroyed through an over-killing of buffalo by the man who refused his sister-in-law a single owl.

Another difficulty for us, however, is that most of the actions are grotesquely exaggerated and fantastically violent - especially in representing women as threats to men. It may help in understanding this characteristic narrative extremism to recognize its connections with the formulaic "If he had not done so-and-so," conditions would be different from what they are now. The tale evokes imagining of actions and impulses which accepted cultural practice suppresses or condemns. The storytelling frees listeners to imagine communally emotions and impulses subjected to the strongest social controls. This story, for example, magnifies to sensational imaginative visibility Sioux men's unspoken fears of women's sexual potencies. Unrealistic exaggeration allows depiction of common psychic attitudes that one doesn't offer openly for either private or communal evaluation. What seems at first glance to be extreme, excessive, and bizarre represents the terrific and terrifying power of our hidden emotions and the strain we feel in accommodating them to our social ideals. Sioux men were brave hunters - consider carefully if you would have what it takes to kill a buffalo with a bow and arrow (so you control your horse only with your knees) as you ride bareback in the middle of a stampeding herd of two hundred huge animals. Sioux were also extraordinarily courageous warriors: they paid highest tribute to those who "counted coup" - in the midst of a battle, touched an enemy without killing or wounding him (which, of course, puts your own life at the highest risk.) Most of them also were loyal husbands and responsible members of the tribe. These impressive qualities were achieved by self-application of cultural ideals to the instincts, anxieties, and fears that all human beings experience. It is not difficult to guess the kind of relief such men might feel in hearing a story that articulates feelings they have had so persistently to control. It seems likely that, in different ways for all Sioux listeners, the extreme fantasies of this story were sustaining to them both as individuals and as members of their community. To Sioux women, who both told and listened to such stories, the bringing into imaginative openness of the psychic pressures felt by their men must surely have been helpful. We must not forget that these people, in the harsh and unforgiving conditions of the high plains, had built a special way of life of which they were intensely proud. And justifiably proud, for it has been admired by virtually every Westerner not bent on genocide who has encountered it, in actuality or in historical reports. It was a culture founded upon and continually renewed by this kind of "exaggerated" storytelling that is perhaps the only way of telling both the private and public truth about any people's profoundest feelings and ideals.

From Clark Wissler, "Some Dakota Myths II," Journal of American Folklore 20 (1907), 195-206, 197-9.

A man lived with his two wives and a brother. One day the brother went out to hunt, and as he was coming back he shot an owl, which he brought home with him.