Falling Stars, Ghost Dances, Dead Treaties: Lakota Winter Counts as Counter-Archives
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Among the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Seven Council Fires), Lakota people have long marked the passage of years not with numbered dates but with images and stories. The term waníyetu wówapi or waníyetu iyáwapi is commonly glossed as “winter count,” combining waníyetu (“winter,” standing for the snow-to-snow year) with wówapi/iyáwapi (“that which is marked, written, or counted”). These pictorial calendars record tribal history in sequences of glyphs, each representing a single winter’s most memorable event and anchoring longer oral narratives that are activated in performance rather than fully written out. They are not merely “artworks” in a narrow sense, nor are they simple raw data for Euro-American historians. Instead, they constitute a Lakota visual theory of history, grounded in oral tradition, spirituality, and community deliberation.
In Lakota practice, a winter count is a pictorial calendar in which each year, understood as the cycle from first snow to first snow, is represented by a single glyph chosen through communal deliberation. Elders meet with the winter count keeper to review the significant events of the year such as battles, unusual weather, epidemics, religious visions, treaties, or other happenings and collectively agree which event best characterizes that winter. The keeper then renders a small, stylized scene that can serve as a mnemonic key for the longer narrative he will recite during winter storytelling season.
Lakota winter counts are part of a broader Plains tradition that includes Kiowa, Mandan, and Blackfeet pictorial calendars, but they are among the best documented. Historians estimate that roughly a hundred winter counts are known today, with at least fourteen Lakota examples in the Smithsonian collection alone. The Lakota counts typically mark one event per year, whereas Kiowa counts often distinguish between winter and summer with two marks, reflecting different ceremonial cycles. The Lakota phrase waníyetu wówapi encapsulates a conception of history that is both cumulative and cyclical: each year is unique, yet every glyph is literally framed by winter, a season that calls people indoors to tell stories and reflect on the passage of time.
Visually, winter counts vary in layout. Some, like the Lone Dog Winter Count, arrange years in a counterclockwise spiral beginning near the center of a buffalo hide or muslin sheet, with the most recent winters at the outer rim. Others, such as Battiste Good’s book-format winter count, display rows of small images accompanied by Lakota and English glosses and, in later copies, Gregorian dates. The spiral emphasizes the cyclical aspect of winter and the continuity of community memory; the rowed format more readily lends itself to cross-referencing with Western chronology. In all cases, however, the structural principle is the same, one event per winter, chosen not by an external state but by the community itself.
Traditionally, each tióšpaye (local kin-based community) chose a single winter count keeper, who was generally a respected elder known for his memory, judgment, and speaking ability. Until the twentieth century, these keepers were men, although women’s voices profoundly shaped the stories that the counts encoded, as will be discussed below. The keeper’s responsibilities were extensive. He consulted elders to decide which event named the year; he painted or drew the new glyph on the count; he memorized the longer narrative associated with each image; and he performed the count in public, often during long winter nights, reciting the sequence of years and elaborating their significance.
Historical photographs and ethnographic accounts show winter count keepers displaying their work to visitors and to their own people. A widely reproduced late nineteenth-century photograph, for instance, depicts Sam Kills Two holding a hide-based winter count, with his hand tracing one of the pictographs as he explains that the horse symbol for 1801–02 marks the first winter his band had horses. Greene and Thornton emphasize that this interpretive labor is inseparable from the visual record itself: a winter count without a keeper is not a complete history but a script awaiting a knowledgeable reader.
Keepers were also archivists. When a hide wore out or was buried with its owner, an apprentice or successor might copy the entire sequence onto a new support, sometimes adding earlier years reconstructed from elders’ memories. Battiste Good’s winter count, now held by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board and the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives, is exemplary in this respect. Mallery noted that Good “gathered the names of many years from the old people and placed them in chronological order,” extending his count back into the pre-horse era and making it one of the longest known Lakota sequences. In such cases, the keeper becomes a historian in a recognizably scholarly sense, synthesizing multiple testimonies into a coherent long-term record while remaining rooted in communal consensus rather than individual authorship.
DeMallie’s broader work on Lakota ethnohistory underscores that Lakota and non-Lakota documents rest on different premises and should be read together rather than hierarchically. In his essay “These Have No Ears,” he argues that winter counts, oral narratives, and ritual texts constitute an Indigenous archive that both complements and challenges written colonial sources. The winter count keeper, then, is not simply a “native informant” but a historian whose epistemology deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms.
The earliest known Lakota winter counts were painted on buffalo hides, usually tanned robes with the hair removed on the painting surface. Pigments included charcoal and soot for black, red and yellow ochres, and plant-derived blues and greens mixed with animal fat or plant binders. These materials were not neutral supports but part of a world in which buffalo were central to subsistence, ceremony, and identity. To paint history on buffalo hide was to inscribe communal memory on the very body of a relative species whose life and death were entwined with Lakota survival.
By the mid- to late nineteenth century, however, military campaigns and market hunting devastated bison populations, and reservation confinement restricted access to hides and traditional pigments. In this context, winter count keepers began to adapt to available materials such as trade cloth, muslin, and paper, including pages torn from account books, which also became a substrate for what scholars call ledger art. The Lone Dog Winter Count now in the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West survives as a painted muslin approximately 96 by 78 centimeters, its seventy pictographs arranged in a spiral that documents Yanktonais Nakota history from 1800 to 1871.
Technical analysis of the Rosebud Winter Count, a late nineteenth-century Brulé (Sičháŋǧu) Lakota count on muslin in the Indian Arts and Crafts Board collection, reveals how such works incorporate both traditional and imported materials. Pearlstein, Brostoff, and Trentelman used visual inspection, microscopy, and X-ray fluorescence to identify black carbon-based media, vermilion, Prussian blue, and commercially manufactured watercolors and inks, applied in at least two different artistic hands. Their study emphasizes that the introduction of paper, muslin, pencils, and European pigments through trade and government agencies did not simply erase Lakota aesthetics; rather, it created hybrid surfaces on which Lakota historians continued to assert visual sovereignty.
The National Anthropological Archives’ MS 2001-10 Anonymous Lakota Winter Count on Muslin, a large sheet of muslin, 89 by 176 centimeters, covered with pencil, ink, and watercolor pictographs, exemplifies this hybridity. Even though its specific keeper remains unknown, its scale and medium attest to the ways winter counts were reimagined under reservation conditions, as artists worked with new formats while preserving the one-glyph-per-winter principle that anchors Lakota historical thought.
Each winter count glyph condenses an event, an evaluation, and a memory script into a small, stylized image. Barbara Risch characterizes this as a “grammar of time,” in which pictographs function as verbs and nouns within a larger narrative syntax that structures how Lakota people talk about the past. A single figure covered in dots can stand for “smallpox-used-them-up winter”; a starburst marks “the year the stars fell”; a tipped tipi may encode “the winter the wind knocked down many lodges.” The images are not merely illustrative; they select, evaluate, and argue, embedding Lakota understandings of causality, morality, and significance.
Battiste Good’s winter count is especially rich in such condensed narratives. In the sequence he compiled, the smallpox epidemic of 1779–80 becomes “Smallpox-used-them-up winter,” rendered as a dotted human body that visually evokes both pustules and depletion. Linea Sundstrom’s comparative analysis of northern Plains winter counts identifies at least a dozen epidemic entries across Lakota and Dakota counts, including Good’s double smallpox winters and later references to measles, whooping cough, and influenza; taken together, these glyphs indicate that communities experienced major epidemics roughly every six years between the early eighteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The “Year the Stars Fell,” referring to the spectacular Leonid meteor storm of 1833, is another widely shared anchor. Lone Dog’s count represents it as a dark disk with radiating lines; other Lakota and Dakota counts show stars raining from the sky or falling toward tipis. Because this celestial event is also documented in U.S. and European sources, Mallery and later scholars use it to align Lakota and Western chronologies without subordinating one to the other. Similarly, entries for treaty signings, massacres, and the introduction of horses can be correlated with documentary records, but their pictorial form centers Lakota perspectives, a horse glyph stands not for “Spanish colonialism” in the abstract but for the moment when a particular community first acquired horses and reoriented its hunting and warfare.
Pictographs also capture episodes that would be difficult to reconstruct from U.S. documents alone. Risch and others point to winter count entries that commemorate a Lakota woman wounded counting coup, the capture of a two-spirit Crow person described as “half man and half woman,” and visionary experiences that prompted changes in ritual practice. These images remind us that Lakota history includes not only wars and treaties but also gender variance, women’s military exploits, and the spiritual lives of individuals whose names may not appear in colonial archives.
Because multiple Lakota communities maintained winter counts, scholars can compare distinct but overlapping timelines. Greene and Thornton’s volume The Year the Stars Fell reproduces fourteen winter counts from the Smithsonian collections, including those attributed to American Horse, The Flame, Swan, Long Soldier, and others, alongside the nineteenth-century Lakota glosses recorded by interpreters such as George Bushotter and Thomas Tyon. When these are read together, patterns of convergence and divergence emerge.
Convergence is most striking around large-scale events. The introduction of the horse in the eighteenth century; major smallpox and measles epidemics; the 1833 meteor storm; the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty; the killing of Crazy Horse in 1877; the Ghost Dance years; and the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890. The fact that such events appear, often with similar glyphs and year-names, on Oglala, Brulé, Minneconjou, and Hunkpapa counts suggests a shared Lakota historical consciousness that extends beyond the tióšpaye.
At the same time, divergence reflects local experiences and political relationships. Lone Dog’s winter count, originating among Yanktonais Nakota people, emphasizes conflicts and hunts specific to their Upper Missouri homelands; its seventy pictographs document episodes such as the first steamboat seen on the Missouri and particular raids against neighboring nations. The Swan winter count, associated with Minneconjou Lakota, shares many entries with the Thin Elk/Steamboat winter count because these bands lived near one another and often joined in warfare and ceremony, yet it diverges in years marked by local storms, famine, or internal disputes.
Ron McCoy’s essay “A People Without History Is Like Wind on the Buffalo Grass” argues that this plurality of winter counts should be seen not as a problem of inconsistency but as evidence of a robust Lakota historiographic tradition in which different communities contribute their own perspectives to a shared understanding of the past. From this viewpoint, discrepancies between counts are not “errors” to be corrected by historians but invitations to think about region, alliance, memory, and politics as forces that shape what a community considers most important each year.
Winter counts are crucial sources for reconstructing the Indigenous experience of colonialism on the northern Plains, particularly in relation to epidemic disease, military violence, treaty making, and reservation confinement. Sundstrom’s study of epidemic references in winter counts shows that northern Plains communities recorded at least thirty-six major disease outbreaks between 1714 and 1919, including smallpox, measles, whooping cough, influenza, and unidentified “cramp” illnesses. Many of these are marked by stark imagery and year-names such as “many died of the cramps,” “smallpox used them up,” or “smallpox broke out again,” underscoring the recurrent nature of catastrophic loss.
Battiste Good’s double entry for smallpox in 1779–80 and 1780–81, Lone Dog’s notation of an 1801–02 smallpox winter, and Rosebud’s 1837–38 epidemic glyph all correlate with documentary and archaeological evidence for the devastating “Pox Americana” epidemic that swept across the continent in the late eighteenth century and subsequent waves in the nineteenth century. Winter counts thus foreground Indigenous epidemiological knowledge, recording not only the fact of disease but also its sequencing in relation to famine, warfare, and migration.
Equally important are entries that visualize treaty signings, massacres, and the imposition of the reservation system. American Horse’s winter count, preserved and interpreted in various museum and educational resources, includes an image of a prone, bleeding figure as the glyph for “Crazy Horse was killed,” integrating this event into a Lakota, rather than U.S. military, narrative of resistance and betrayal. Multiple counts mark the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty as the year “they made the treaty,” often with a line of figures and papers or gifts exchanged; subsequent glyphs record “the winter they gave us beef” or “the winter they gave us coffee and sugar,” indicating the shift to ration economies.
The Ghost Dance movement and the killings at Wounded Knee in 1890 also appear as entries that encapsulate Lakota readings of colonial violence and religious hope. Raymond DeMallie’s ethnohistorical work on the Lakota Ghost Dance shows how winter count entries for the dance and for Wounded Knee sit alongside oral testimonies that frame the movement as a sincere effort to restore balance and protect the people, not as a “fanatic uprising” as U.S. officials often claimed. In these sequences, catastrophe never exhausts the story. Instead, it alternates with entries for new ceremonies, visions, or acts of intertribal diplomacy, demonstrating that Lakota historiography insists on continuity and adaptation even in the face of dispossession.
For much of the twentieth century, scholarship and museum practice treated winter counts as quintessentially “men’s art,” reflecting a stereotype of Plains societies as organized primarily around male warrior exploits. This flattened both Lakota gender dynamics and the complexity of winter count content. Barbara Risch’s paired studies, “A Grammar of Time” and “Wife, Mother, Provider, Defender, God,” mark a turning point by systematically examining how women appear in winter counts.
Risch shows that, although men are the most frequent protagonists in winter count events, women feature in a wide range of roles as wives and mothers whose deaths are marked as community losses; as providers whose exceptional skill in gardening, berry gathering, or tipimaking is remembered; as defenders who fight in battle or count coup; and as figures associated with spiritual power, such as dreamers, healers, or embodiments of the sacred Woman Who Brought the Pipe. The Rosebud Winter Count’s entry for “Lakota woman warrior wounded counting coup” is particularly important, challenging stereotypes that equate Lakota warfare exclusively with male bodies and reminding us that gender roles have always been more flexible than colonial accounts suggest.
At the same time, the predominance of male keepers inevitably shaped which events were chosen as year-names. War honors, diplomatic councils, and hunting feats are overrepresented compared to everyday forms of reproductive labor, healing, and teaching that women carried out. Yet Lakota oral tradition consistently emphasizes women’s roles as memory keepers, genealogists, and transmitters of stories within families and extended kin groups. When a winter count was recited in a domestic setting, women listening could correct details, add context, or link events to kinship stories, thus co-authoring history even if they did not paint the glyphs themselves.
Reading winter counts through a gendered lens therefore reveals both how patriarchal structures and colonial collecting practices have shaped the archive and how women’s agency persists within and beyond the pictographs. It suggests that any decolonial historiography of winter counts must account for the unseen labor of remembrance carried out by women in homes, lodges, and community gatherings.
Almost every winter count known today has passed through the interpretive hands of missionaries, agents, or ethnographers, whose collecting, translation, and dating practices have profoundly influenced how these works are understood. Garrick Mallery’s monumental late nineteenth-century study Picture-Writing of the American Indians includes transcribed versions of several Lakota winter counts, among them those of American Horse, Cloud Shield, and Battiste Good, each accompanied by English glosses and Gregorian dates. While invaluable as early documentation, his work also exemplifies the power imbalance inherent in such translations.
Mallery and other intermediaries tended to compress complex Lakota year-names into terse English phrases, stripping away metaphor, humor, and embedded evaluations. The Lakota name for an epidemic year that literally likens smallpox scars to “scabs like corn” becomes merely “smallpox winter,” losing its sensory and agricultural resonance. Similarly, glyphs that encode spiritual visions or gender variance are often reduced to neutral descriptions such as “a person with different clothing,” obscuring their significance. In some cases, translators shifted dates slightly to align winter count entries with U.S. military reports or missionary diaries, thereby subordinating Lakota chronology to colonial timelines.
Recent scholarship by Christina Burke and Jane Zhang focuses on these processes of “record making and remaking.” Burke’s study of winter count pictographs and texts in the National Anthropological Archives demonstrates how original glyphs, Lakota glosses, English translations, and later cataloging data form layered palimpsests that must be disentangled to recover Indigenous voices. Zhang, writing from an archival studies perspective, argues that winter counts have been transformed from dynamic mnemonic devices into static “records” through museum cataloging practices that privilege written metadata over ongoing oral interpretation. Both call for closer collaboration with Lakota communities to recontextualize winter counts and to correct misattributions or errors in earlier documentation.
Recognizing these translation histories does not mean discarding ethnographic and missionary sources. Instead, following DeMallie, it suggests reading them as one strand in a braided archive, to be set alongside Lakota oral testimony, contemporary Lakota scholarship, and the visual record itself. Such a layered approach acknowledges that meaning has always been co-produced, sometimes cooperatively, sometimes under duress, and that part of decolonizing historical method involves making those layers visible.
Today, major Lakota winter counts reside in institutions such as the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives and National Museum of the American Indian, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the South Dakota State Historical Society, the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, and regional museums and libraries. Greene and Thornton stress that these collections are the result of widely varying relationships: some winter counts were sold or gifted by keepers who sought to safeguard them; others were acquired by government agents or missionaries during periods of profound coercion and surveillance.
This complex provenance raises ethical questions about ownership, display, and access. McCoy notes that winter counts are best understood as objects of cultural patrimony that belong collectively to bands or nations rather than to individual descendants, making them eligible for consideration under NAGPRA and related repatriation frameworks. Some Lakota communities have requested physical repatriation of winter counts; others prioritize collaborative curation, high-quality digital reproductions, and interpretive programming that reconnects youth with these historical records.
The Smithsonian’s Native Knowledge 360° initiative and its teaching poster “Lone Dog’s Winter Count: Keeping History Alive” represent one model of such collaboration, developed with input from Nakota educators and culture bearers. The Minneapolis Institute of Art’s “Lakota Winter Count” object study likewise situates a photographed hide-based count and Sam Kills Two within a broader narrative that includes Lakota perspectives and references to Lakota language terms, while explicitly directing teachers to readings by Burke and McCoy.
Conservation science, too, has begun to reckon with the need for community involvement. Pearlstein and colleagues’ technical study of the Rosebud Winter Count concludes with a call for ongoing consultation with the Sicáŋǧu Lakota about appropriate treatment, display, and interpretive strategies, recognizing that this object remains a living historical and spiritual resource rather than a mere “artwork” or “document.” In this sense, the movement of winter counts from hide to museum archive is not the end of their story but a new phase in which questions of sovereignty, access, and narrative control are central.
Winter counts encode a conception of time that differs significantly from the homogeneous, linear chronology that undergirds most Euro-American historiography. Risch’s analysis of Lakota temporal grammar emphasizes that winter count year-names are event-based rather than numerical: people say “I was born in the winter the stars fell” or “in the winter when many died of smallpox,” locating themselves within a shared narrative matrix instead of at “1833” or “1779.” This event-based temporality prioritizes what happened and how it affected relations rather than abstract calendrical units.
Vine Deloria Jr., writing more broadly about Indigenous philosophies of time, argues that many Native traditions organize experience around place, relationship, and recurring cycles rather than around an arrow of progress moving from “primitive” to “civilized.” Lakota winter counts exemplify this alternative. They are cumulative, each year has its own glyph and place in the sequence, but they are also cyclical, structured by the annual return of winter and by recurring patterns of ceremony, hunting, and diplomacy. This double logic is made visible in the spiral layout of counts like Lone Dog’s and in the repetition of certain motifs (meteors, epidemics, treaty councils) at irregular but meaningful intervals.
When ethnographers correlated winter counts with Western dates using anchor events like the 1833 meteor shower, they created useful bridges, but they also risked reframing Lakota time within a Western grid that treats the counts as raw data rather than as competing historiographic frameworks. DeMallie suggests, instead, that Lakota and Euro-American documents should be treated as parallel archives, each with its own assumptions about evidence, causality, and authority. In this view, winter counts are not simply waiting to be “converted” into Gregorian years; they invite us to consider how history might look if we organized it around community-chosen events, seasons, and relationships rather than around abstract dates and nation-state milestones.
Far from being confined to the nineteenth century, winter count forms and concepts continue to inspire contemporary Lakota and other Indigenous artists, activists, and educators. Deanna Bickford and Pammla Petrucka describe community-based projects in which Dakota and Lakota youth create their own winter counts, on canvas, paper, or digital media, to record stories of health, family, and land. Elders guide participants in choosing year-defining events, while researchers and artists help translate these into visual motifs, using winter count logic as a tool for community-driven qualitative inquiry and healing.
On the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, the Cheyenne River Youth Project’s Waniyetu Wowapi (Winter Count) Arts & Culture Institute and five-acre Waniyetu Wowapi Art Park explicitly draw on winter count tradition in their name and programming. The art park hosts the RedCan Invitational Graffiti Jam and year-round street-art mentoring, turning walls and skate ramps into surfaces where youth can mark their own “winters” with images addressing food sovereignty, environmental justice, and everyday life. In this context, aerosol murals and stenciled designs become contemporary glyphs, linking ancestral practices of pictorial record-keeping to urban Indigenous aesthetics.
The Winter Count collective, a group of Indigenous artists and filmmakers including Lakota members, extends the winter count concept into moving image. Their 2016 HD video We Are in Crisis, produced in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, uses drone footage over the Standing Rock landscape, intercut with images of oil infrastructure and water protector camps, to frame pipeline resistance as part of a continuous colonial history rather than a discrete “event.” Critics have noted that the work functions like a digital winter count, marking a crucial “winter” in the struggle for land and water while mobilizing contemporary technologies and exhibition circuits.
Lakota artist and HIV/AIDS advocate Sheldon Raymore has created winter count–inspired leather shirts that chronicle the history of HIV/AIDS in Native communities, integrating traditional pictography with red AIDS ribbons and medical symbols. In an essay for the journal On-Curating, curators describe how Raymore’s work uses the winter count form to honor those who have died, record ongoing activism, and assert Indigenous presence in narratives of the epidemic that often erase Native experience. Here, as on the northern Plains two centuries ago, epidemic disease is not merely tabulated but woven into a larger story of survival, care, and collective memory.
These contemporary reactivations demonstrate that winter counts are not static relics but flexible, living strategies for narrating history, asserting sovereignty, and imagining decolonial futures.
Because winter counts sit at the intersection of art, history, language, and Indigenous studies, they offer potent tools for transforming how history is taught. Educational initiatives by museums, tribal organizations, and public agencies use winter counts to challenge persistent myths that Native peoples lacked historical consciousness or documentary practices before contact.
The Smithsonian’s Native Knowledge 360° initiative, for example, has developed a teaching poster and lesson plan titled “Lone Dog’s Winter Count: Keeping History Alive,” which guides students through analyzing reproductions of the Lone Dog count, correlating its events with broader North American history, and creating their own pictograph calendars. PBS LearningMedia’s “The Winter Count: Keeping History Alive in Pictographs,” produced with NMAI, similarly invites students to explore Nakota/Lakota history-keeping traditions and to reflect on the politics of whose histories appear in textbooks. The National Park Service’s “Create Your Own Winter Count” activity, available online, introduces visitors to winter count concepts and encourages them to choose one event per year in their own lives, thereby foregrounding the interpretive labor involved in any historical record.
The Wolakota Project’s lesson plans, which draw on Lone Dog’s winter count and other Lakota sources, integrate winter counts into language arts and social studies curricula, asking students to write “I Remember” poems and translate them into pictographs. Such exercises emphasize that history is not just a list of dates but a narrative shaped by community values and personal experience. The Minneapolis Institute of Art’s “Lakota Winter Count” resource frames the count as both art object and historical document, accompanied by essays and further reading suggestions that direct educators to Greene, Burke, McCoy, and others.
Taken together, these pedagogical efforts invite several methodological shifts. They expand what counts as evidence by treating pictographs, oral narratives, and material supports as primary sources equal in importance to written documents. They foreground Indigenous temporalities by showing how event-based year-names differ from numerical dates, prompting students to question the universality of Western chronology. They center community voices by incorporating Lakota language terms, tribally produced curricula, and contemporary Lakota commentary rather than relying solely on older ethnographic texts. And they encourage students to experiment with winter count–style recording in their own lives, making visible the choices and omissions that shape any archive.
In this sense, teaching with winter counts is not simply about adding “Native content” to existing syllabi. It is about rethinking historical method itself; who defines the timeline, whose categories of significance matter, and how visual and oral ways of knowing can and should reshape academic historiography.
Lakota winter counts may at first appear deceptively simple: a sequence of small, stylized pictures arranged on hide, cloth, or paper but they are in fact densely theorized historical practices that encode Lakota understandings of time, memory, catastrophe, gender, and survival. Each glyph crystallizes a communal decision about what mattered most in a given year; each count as a whole weaves those decisions into a narrative that is at once local and intertribal, cyclical and cumulative.
By looking at winter counts in relation to their keepers, materials, pictorial grammar, comparative timelines, and entries for epidemics, treaties, massacres, and visions, we see how Lakota historians narrated the violent transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through their own categories of meaning. Gender-focused readings reveal women not only as subjects of suffering but also as warriors, providers, and spiritual actors whose presence complicates earlier “men’s art” narratives. Analyses of translation and collection histories expose how missionaries and ethnographers reshaped winter counts through glosses and cataloging practices, while archival and conservation scholarship, especially when conducted collaboratively with Lakota communities, suggests ways to re-center Indigenous authority over these works as cultural patrimony.
When we attend to Lakota theories of time, winter counts challenge the taken-for-granted neutrality of Western chronology. They invite historians to imagine what it would mean to organize narratives around community-chosen events and seasonal cycles rather than around the milestones of nation-states. Contemporary reactivations of winter count forms, from Cheyenne River youth graffiti to digital films like We Are in Crisis and HIV/AIDS shirts by Sheldon Raymore, demonstrate that winter counts remain powerful tools for making sense of new crises and for asserting Indigenous presence in global conversations about environment, health, and justice.
For art history and historiography, the implications are profound. Treating winter counts as visual historiography rather than mere illustrations requires us to retool our methods, to read images as arguments, and to recognize oral and communal archives as theoretically generative. It demands that we include Lakota scholars and community members as co-interpreters, not as sources to be mined. And it suggests that, in an era marked by climate change, pandemics, and ongoing colonial violence, learning from winter counts, how they mark years of loss and resilience alike, how they hold memory on living surfaces, may help us imagine more relational, accountable ways of keeping our own histories.
References:
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Raymore, Sheldon. Notes on Winter Count and HIV/AIDS. On-Curating, issue 42, 2019, pp. 180–187. https://www.on-curating.org/files/oc/dateiverwaltung/issue42/PDF_to_Download/OnCurating_Issue_42_Web.pdf (ONCURATING)
Risch, Barbara. A Grammar of Time: Lakota Winter Counts, 1700–1900. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 24, no. 2, 2000, pp. 23–48. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6pw0c2rp (eScholarship)
Risch, Barbara. Wife, Mother, Provider, Defender, God: Women in Lakota Winter Counts. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 27, no. 3, 2003, pp. 1–30. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7hp7z8f8 (eScholarship)
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Winter Count Collective. We Are in Crisis. HD Video, 2016. Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University; Artists Space; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College. https://icavcu.org/artist/wintercount https://www.artsy.net/artwork/winter-count-we-are-in-crisis https://artistsspace.org/programs/without-us-there-is-no-you https://www.on-curating.org/issue-40-reader/curatorial-archaegeographies-history-of-place-as-political-action.html https://cfileonline.org/exhibition-my-country-tis-of-thy-people-youre-dying (Institute for Contemporary Art)
Cheyenne River Youth Project. Waniyetu Wowapi Art Park and Arts & Culture Institute. Cheyenne River Youth Project and Frankenthaler Climate Initiative. https://lakotayouth.org/arts-center/waniyetu-wowapi-art-park https://lakotayouth.org/arts-center https://www.frankenthalerclimateinitiative.org/2025-implementation/cheyenne https://www.mwejn.org/news/february-partner-highlight-cheyenne-river-youth-project (Cheyenne River Youth Project)
Minneapolis Institute of Art. Lakota Winter Count. Teaching the Arts, Objects in Focus. Minneapolis Institute of Art. https://new.artsmia.org/learning-resources/teaching-the-arts/tta/objects-in-focus/lakota-winter-count (Minneapolis Institute of Art)
U.S. Department of the Interior, Indian Arts and Crafts Board. Treasures of the IACB: Battiste Good, Lakota Winter Counts. U.S. Department of the Interior. https://www.doi.gov/iacb/TreasuresBattiste https://www.doi.gov/iacb/treasures (U.S. Department of the Interior)
Wolakota Project. Full Winter Count Lessons. Wolakota Project, 2013. https://www.wolakotaproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Full_Winter_Count_Lessons.pdf (WoLakota)
Zhang, Jane. Lakota Winter Counts, Pictographic Records, and Record Making and Remaking Histories. Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 45, no. 1, 2017, pp. 3–17. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01576895.2017.1279062 (Taylor & Francis Online)
Wikipedia. Winter Count. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_count (Wikipedia)