#1: Question Advantages: One of the advantages of the documents presented as resources in this book is the full culture that is presented to the ethno historians, anthropologists and tribal historians through the tribal, community and family memories that are passed from generations of Plain Indians. With the help of various documents such as winter counts and ledgers, historians are able to collect and record important oral histories to try to maintain the oral memory of the Plain Indians in the 21st century. Oral renditions were held in higher esteem than written documents for as stated by the Crow Warrior Two leggings, Our words are our breath and are sacred. However, written documentation was also important to many historians in depicting a fuller picture of the Plain Indians culture, such great examples were winter counts. A fantastic winter count was the Lone Dog Winter, which depicted different scenes and images through the lofty hand of the great Lone Dog, a Yanktonai Sioux from North Dakota, who drew the illustrations himself. He distinguished different events that had passed each year and marked the illustrations on a buffalo robe. These different oral and written documents help historians and audiences around to evaluate the history of the Plain Indians that goes beyond the Indians being seen only as war exploits but also as culturally enriched people. Disadvantages: As powerful as the documents are, there are also many disadvantages that go along with the documentations of the Plain Indians such as suffered translation and manipulated documentation. Often times speeches or statements made by the Indians were lost in translation to the interpreters. As in the example of the Treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867, several different languages such as Cherokee and Comanche were spoken through the Indians, then the interpreters would feed back what they were saying, however, due to the white supremacy ideology, the reporters focused more on what the interpreters said than the Indians themselves. the Often interpreters would manipulate what the Indians would say because they wanted to frame it more on the white audience than speaking the truth. The interpreters couldnt even pronounce the names right in translation, such as the Sioux Warrior Takakokipapi whose name was meant as Young Man Whose Horses They are Afraid, and his name was translated in English as Young Man afraid of Horses. Another example would be the speech given by Chief Seattle of Squamish and Duwamish Indians, who boldly stated the criticism of the white society, but his words were appropriated to fit a white audience and were embellished by a Texas Professor who modernized the language from the historic account. Raymond DeMallie explained that even different Indian treaty councils were a dramatic conflict between two mutually exclusive ways of life. However valuable they are, the Plain Indians didnt receive the respect of their own voices but rather their voices were lost in the vision of white supremacy and were filtered and flawed.
Question #3: Other such autobiographers as Charles Eastman and Luther Standing Bear made autobiographies with a non-Indian audience in mind, where the structure and subject matter were manipulated. The white audience wanted to hear about the colorful culture of the Indians, not the grim present tribulations they were faced with; ignorance. Such as the Peter Navokavs edition of the Crow Warrior Two leggings life, who was distorted to fit the 19th century audience. This was known as bicultural composite composition as referred to by Arnold Krupat. Although some of the documentation could be trusted it was slim to none. David Brumble said Indian Narrators and white interviewers and editors left a valuable legacy that helped afford us some sense of the culture and life of the Plain Indians
and other influential tribes that helped us to get inside the habit of mind of the Indians but that the legacy is a puzzling matter that needs understanding of both the teller and the writer.