Wínyan
Photo essay on Oceti Sakowin winyan rooted in collaboration and consent.
Our Oceti Sakowin winyan have done everything to hang onto what our ancestors created for us through our own dystopia, our attempted genocide. Our winyan have hung onto so much of the way we were, despite everything we had to go through and are still going through. We need projects like this to remind ourselves that there is still good in the world, no matter how many times we have been told the world is ending, we are still here.
The series is a contemporary representation of Oceti Sakowin winyan, more colonial known as Sioux Nation. The series was born out of misrepresentation in modern media of our people and as an answer to providing context on the reclamation of contemporary identities of indigenous winyan.
This is a series representing our kinship and ties to what it means to be Oceti Sakowin. This is a series encompassing all the ways it means to be a winyan.
Mikayla Patton
“These past few months, I got obsessed with using the shape of elk teeth. Traditionally, in a lot of plains or northern tribes, the women adorned their dresses with elk teeth. It was an interesting design, but the meaning behind it has a lot to do with wealth. Obviously, you have a really strong family because you’re able to completely adorn your dress with elk teeth; do you know how many animals you’d have to kill that get that many teeth? It was really interesting thinking about all of that wealth, and I used it, but I was thinking of it like personal wealth, like me being wealthy within myself—it’s not having money, it’s being OK, if that makes sense. It’s something I kind of got obsessed with, and I repeated that pattern over and over. It also translates to women in general: We relied on men to provide for us, but a lot of that doesn’t happen anymore. We’re providing for ourselves, there’s strength within that, so I really liked using that.
Adrienne Zimiga
“My stories, probably about my grandmother and her mother, my great grandma, Elizabeth. There are times I catch myself just,… I have a picture of her at my desk and, I end up just finding myself just looking at it. I think about what life would have been like for her. Because I think as we all get to a certain age, you know, and you're in your 20s, you think nothing of it. In your 30s, there might be a flicker of it there but by the time you hit 40 or mid 40s, you start thinking about, you know, your footprint, and what is your legacy? And what are you leaving behind? And I, I think about my great grandmother, and her daughter, my grandmother, and the lives that they had.
I think about, you know what we have going on today, as far as you know, politics and whatnot, and you've got all these old white men making decisions on what women are supposed to do with their bodies. I can't even begin to fathom what that must have been like for someone like her. Like what was it like to have to survive?”
Isabella LaBlanc
“I think about them a lot. And I've grown up
hearing stories again, about my ancestors from hundreds of years ago and time before that, And then my immediate ancestors to my grandma's and aunties. I think in my family, we've always talked a lot about the stories that we hold in us and that our stories are passed down through generations. And so the stories of the people that have come before us, they live in us and we carry them with us every day. And so I tried to acknowledge them and do my best to acknowledge them in the way that I live my life and go about my life.”
HolyElk and Bernie Lafferty
“When I was real little, my mom and aunties said that I talked Lakota. But as we grew older, I went to boarding school too so there we talked English. My mom and aunties said that they understood our language but they never talked it. They all went to boarding school also. My grandma, she never really, she would talk in Lakota but she didn’t try to teach them because when she went to boarding school they were really dealt with harshly when they spoke the language. They used to hide together and sneak away and that's when they’d talk the language. If they were caught talking the language they got punished severely and stuff so she didn’t want her children to go through that because they went to boarding school too. So, I see where at that time it kind of passed down, I could see how it started to fade away because of our grandparents and what they had to go through they didn’t want their children to go through that either. Now, everyone wants to learn their language and a lot of people are trying to bring their language back and that’s a good thing.”
Anangookwe Wolf
“…If it wasn't for them, I wouldn't be here. If it wasn't for the resilience, like, none of us would be here, none of us would be healthy, because they made an effort to, like, you know,… you can't fix everything in your lifetime. But they always worked hard to ensure that the next generation would have something more than what they had. And so I'm just so incredibly grateful for the family I have. And I'm always excited to hear stories and go visit the places where they were.”
Nancy Bordeaux
“And actually asked my grandma I had, Unci, that was my grandmother's mother. She was alive and she was in the household too. She only spoke Lakota, So she remembers a time, I asked her Unci, I said what was there a long time ago, what is it like a long time ago when you were a little girl?
She said “Back then..”, she said “...there was no fences”.
So to her it must have really been a big thing or something to see all the, you know, boundaries and demarcation and fences and everything going up
But what I remember most about her, Unci, she is that she was always making tobacco ties
for ceremonies. So she had them strung up in her room and she would be making me string them up until she had all of them. And so it's like,
to me it was like a whole different world to go into her room because you just knew that she was an old one.”
Collins Provost
“We also had another grandma who had lived within the camp. My grandma was saying that ...men who were trying to court her. And there were two men in particular, during that process that were trying to win her over, and one of them was the fur trapper and another one was part of the band. And one day, she was walking back from the river from gathering her water in the buffalo bladder and she felt a thud in her back. When she walked back to camp, another lady walked by her, she started screaming,…someone had shot an arrow into my grandma's back. They realized that it was one of the men.
It was kind of like, “If I can't have you nobody will”, she survived. She ended up marrying the man, well, of course, who didn't shoot her in the back. But it shows that like, when choosing a partner, you know, have them be respectful for you, you know, that's not gonna hurt. Those are some of the
stories that we have of our grandmas from long ago, to carry our own strength and resilience, our own perseverance, that you can actually really overcome anything.
You just have to be willing to move forward.”