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Welcome to the Lakota Winter Counts, online exhibit

About the Winter Counts Exhibit

This online exhibit was created in response to requests from Lakota educators and community members to make primary source materials in Smithsonian collections available online for Lakota researching their cultural heritage. It is based on consultations that Candace Greene and Christina Burke held in a series of Lakota communities in 2002 as they were preparing a book called The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian (Greene and Thornton, eds., forthcoming University of Nebraska Press).

The winter counts are from the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives and National Museum of the American Indian. The commentary that accompanies the individual winter count years was provided by Lakota winter count keepers or, in the case of the Rosebud Winter Count, by Russell Thornton. For the most part, these comments and explanations have come to the Smithsonian through a series of interpreters and intermediaries whose words are faithfully presented here as primary sources. Their usage, grammar, and spelling reflect the knowledge and attitudes of the period when they were written.

Interviews with Lakota people provide another rich body of primary source material, offering contemporary perspectives on winter counts and Lakota history. The video interviews that appear in the section called Who Are the Lakota are accompanied by photographs which were often chosen or provided by the speakers themselves. These extensive interviews represent only a few of the Lakota people consulted in the course of the project. They illustrate the range of knowledge still held about winter counts and the diversity of perspectives about their meaning. In addition to these historic and contemporary primary materials, the exhibit provides general information on Lakota culture and history throughout the exhibit, as well as in the Teachers' Guide in the Learning Resources section.