Author: Battiste Good (1821 - 1908) Location: Dakota, USA

Battiste Good was a Brulé Dakota who lived at the Rosebud Agency in South Dakota. His winter count is speculated as being created around the turn of the twentieth century.

This is a Visual-Verbal Epic.

Epic (n.) - A long poem based on an oral tradition that narrates heroic deeds and adventures, as well as histories of nations.

Popular examples include: Beowulf, The Iliad and the Odyssey, Paradise Lost, and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Epics are important to a culture because they are a way to pass down traditions of said culture to the next generation. Before writing systems, these were passed down orally.

The Waniyety Wowampi, also known as the winter count, is a pictorial calendar and history that is usually drawn on a hide that depicts a memorable event(s) of a given year. They are linked closely with oral traditions and storytelling as a way to keep historical records. Usually, a tribal elder would be responsible for making the winter count, being named the Keeper of the Count.

The winter count was a form of historical storytelling used by many Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies. Tribes like the Blackfeet, Mandan, Kiowa, Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota relied upon these pictographs as a medium for remembering cultural moments, making them mnemonic devices that act as forms of recordkeeping. They were also arranged in chronological order.

A standard winter count depicts the most memorable event of a year rather than the most important. This decision is made by tribal elders and the keeper who will then proceed to create an image to memorialize the event. While in some tribes, like the Kiowas, more than one pictograph was recorded every year, most Plain tribes illustrated only one memorable event yearly. The years depicted in the winter count usually were recorded between the first snowfall to the first snowfall. The time that elapsed between these two events was considered a full year, and the events occurring between were therefore subject for the pictograph.

Similarities also occur between winter counts across the Great Plain region, which implies possible interband relations existing between indigenous people. Some winter counts like those produced by Long Dog, The Flame, The Swan, and Major Bush are described as being so alike due to their close proximity to one another. So rather than just communicate individual tribal memories, these winter counts demonstrated a communal indigenous history. Because of this, winter counts can account for the movement of settlers into the Great Plains as well as the political and social relationships between various tribes.

The keeper was known as the person who painted a new pictograph every year. They were responsible for both the commemoration of the memorable event and also its communication. Acting as a cultural historian, the keeper’s told the story of winter count to their people.

Being a keeper was a role traditionally associated with a patrilineal line. So as one keeper died, a living son would come to replace him. Keepers were often buried with their winter counts after their death, but their winter counts were usually copied beforehand by their apprentice.

Winter counts were usually named after the keeper who created them.

Winter counts are normally inscribed on buffalo hides, but they have also been known to appear on rocks (paintings found on cave walls, canyons, mountains, etc), on deer and cow hides, and when animal populations were scare, on paper and muslin.

The dyes used to create the pictographs varied upon resources available, ranging from berries, clay, plants, roots, liver bile, blood, and stomach.

1. Bullock Texas State History Museum
2. U.S. National Park Service
3. Winter Count Wikipedia

This was prefaced with the following personal account:

“In the year 1856, I went to the Black Hills and cried, and cried, and cried, for a vision, and suddenly I saw a bird above me, which said: ‘Story crying; I am a woman, but I will tell you something: My GreatFather, Father-God, who made this place, gave it to me for a home and told me to watch over it. He put a blue sky over my head and gave me a blue flag to have with this beautiful green country. My GreatFather grew, and his flesh was part earth and part stone and part metal and part wood and part water; he took from the theme all and placed them here for me and told me to watch over them. I am the Eagle-Woman who tell you this. The whites know that there are four black flags of God; that is, four divisions of the earth. He first made the earth soft by wetting it, then cut it into four parts, one of which, containing the Black Hills, he gave to the Dakotas, and, because I am a woman, I shall not consent to the pouring of blood on this chief house that is the Black Hills. The time will come that you will remember my words, for after many years you shall grow up one with the white people.’ She then circled round and round and gradually passed out of my sight, I also saw prints of a man’s hands and horse’s hoofs on the rocks, and two thousand years, and one hundred millions of dollars. I came away crying, as I had gone. I have told this to many Dakotas, and all agree that it meant that we were to seek and keep peace with the whites” __ (Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888)__

In Battiste Good's winter count, he accounts for various illnesses that took his people such as smallpox, deaths from childbearing as well as contact with white men and women. Winter counts are not traditionally considered poems or visual-verbal epics, but Good's winter count, according to Rothenberg, includes a “cyclical & mythic section covering the years 901 to 1700, after which the counting by year-names begins” (487). It therefore appears that the first part of Good's winter count is where the visual-epic occurs, but the latter half seems to take on a more traditional form. From the pictures found on Battiste Good's winter count (found in the figure above), there doesn't appear to be any written language compared to what is featured in SAF. It is therefore difficult to classify this particular visual work as poetry.

Good, Battiste. “Winter Count.” The Serpent and the Fire, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada, University of California Press, 2024.