Blue Thunder's Winter Count: An Exploration of Dakota History

Dakota Winter Count The Years 1795-1806

Subject Index

Index of Readings and Narrations

Index of Discussion Questions

Overview

Bibliography

Dakota Wapa -- Culture

Maize -- Survival

Wound -- Warfare

Colonial flag -- Euro-Americans

Wakan means sacred

All of the above image above is clickable.

Winter Counts from different tribal groups frequently follow roughly similar narratives many of which re-count similar incidents with similar pictographs.  The count emphasized here -- Blue Thunder III [Yellow Lodge] -- includes interpretations from various Dakota historians: Blue Thunder, No Two Horns, High Dog, and occasional others.

This winter count is part of a group of nine closely related counts from the Standing Rock Reservation in the Dakotas. The one here above is the Yellow Lodge Blue Thunder Variant Count III .

In addition, this winter count often echoes the content of other counts -- Swift Dog, Jaw, and Ben Kindle. When this is the case, the editors of this website often reveal this in links to "more" material.

You can find the essay on which this exploration is founded in

Howard, James. H.""Dakota Winter Counts as a Source of Plains History." Anthropological Papers. 61.173 (1960): 335-416.

Sound: Dakota man plays flute on a Sunday afternoon, 1987. The Library of Congress Sound Archives <http://www.loc.gov>