The Winter Count — Remembering What Matters
The Lakota Winter Count (Waniyetu Wowapi) is a pictographic history recorded on buffalo hide, with each year represented by the single most significant event the community experienced — a radical act of collective memory and value.
The Winter Count is both a historical record and a philosophical statement: each year, the community must decide which single event is most worthy of permanent memory. Not military victories necessarily, nor even leaders' deaths — in many Winter Counts, the defining event of a year is a remarkable weather event, a significant spiritual occurrence, a great healing, or a migration. The counting begins in winter — the time of reflection, storytelling, and wisdom — because the Lakota understand that the proper time to assess what a year meant is from the perspective of its ending, in stillness and darkness, when the essential can be seen clearly. Known keepers of Winter Counts include American Horse (Oglala Lakota), Lone Dog (Yanktonai), and Cloud Shield — their counts spanning from the 1700s to the reservation era are preserved in major museums and provide an invaluable Indigenous perspective on historical events.
Remember. Remember who you are. Remember where you come from. Remember what matters.
Historian James Howard's comprehensive study of Lakota Winter Counts documents that these pictographic histories provide historically verifiable records of astronomical events, epidemic patterns, and climatic conditions that are independently confirmed by Euro-American and scientific records.
Winter Count oral tradition
Written about in
- What Native American traditions say about elders
Each year the community agrees on the one event worth painting on the hide. Deciding what deserves to be remembered is itself the discipline.
- What Native American traditions say about grief
Each year of a Lakota Winter Count is one picture — the single event the community judged worth permanent memory, and often that is a weather event or a healing rather than a battle or a chief's death. The counting starts in winter, because a year is assessed from its ending. Applied to a year of loss, this is a hard and useful question: what one image is this year?