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Visiting scholar to present lecture on Lakota Indian concept of time
An anthropologist nationally known for his work to preserve Native American culture will visit West Virginia University on Monday (March 12) to discuss the Lakota Indians’ unique perspective on time.
Dr. Raymond J. DeMallie will present “Lakota Winter Counts and the Cultural Interpretation of Time” at 8 p.m. in the Mountainlair’s Gold Ballroom on the Downtown Campus. The event is free and open to the public. He’s here as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar.
“Winter counts” were pictorial records kept by the Lakota that designated each passing winter with a mnemonic – a memory aid, like a poem or visual icon – illustrating a vivid, remarkable event from the previous year. The counts did double duty as calendars and narratives for the particular history of that Lakota branch.
DeMallie will also talk about the kinds of events that were commemorated and what they reveal about Lakota concepts of time and history. He’ll visit several English and history classes that touch on aspects of Native American culture.
He is a Chancellor’s Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he serves as director of the American Indian Studies Research Institute.
DeMallie has lived on reservations in the Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan tribes for his research on kinship, social organization, ritual and belief systems, oral traditions and material culture among indigenous people.
He has also authored and edited several books on the Plains Indians and is a past president of the American Society for Ethnohistory.
DeMallie’s visit is sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society, the Native American Studies Program and departments of History and English in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.
For more information, contact Dr. Alan Stolzenberg, Phi Beta Kappa advisor, at astolzen@wvu.edu or 304-293-3435, ext. 6437.