Sources
Storytellers from the Rosebud Reservation—Sicangu Lakota
Horse Creek Community
This district or community was named for the creek that drains into the Little White, or Smoking Earth, River.
My maternal grandparents were Albert and Annie. Lucy and Maggie were my grandfather’s sisters. Lucy married Moses Rattling Leaf. In the 1950s when many Lakota were still using horses and wagons (and buggies), Grandpa Moses had a very good-looking pair of matched draft horses for his wagon. Maggie married Paul Little Dog, who was also known as No Two Horns.
My parents are Joseph and Hazel. My mother has patiently answered questions in the past three years, especially concerning the names in this Sources section. I was not surprised to hear various bits of family, cultural, and historical information from my father in the years before he died; which I always suspected he knew, and am exceedingly glad he finally saw fit to divulge.
Sam Brings (aka Brings Three White Horses) George Brave
Sam told me of a place along Horse Creek where he had found arrowheads and flint chips when he was a young man or boy. My grandfather and I later found stone flakes there, too, but no arrowheads. The site was bulldozed when Highway 83 was widened in the 1960s. George was an avid hunter and later in his life drove a bus route for the local school district that hauled only Indian students.
Harris and Millie lived west of us on his land that bordered the Little White River, adjacent to my grandmother Annie’s land. We walked to their log house often, especially in the summers. I remember trying desperately to stay awake as he and my grandfather would talk far into the night about the old days.
Swift Bear Community
The Swift Bear district or community is located on the northern edge of the Rosebud Reservation. Its northern border is the Big White or White Earth River. It is named for one of the Sicangu Lakota headmen, Swift Bear, also known as Quick Bear. All of the following were in some way related to my maternal grandfather, Albert.
Ring Thunder and Soldier Creek Communities
Katie (Katherine) Roubideaux Blue Thunder and M. Blanche Roubideaux Marshall were sisters. Blanche was my father’s mother. Their mother (one of my great-grandmothers) was Adelia Blunt Arrow, a Sicangu Lakota, and their father was Louis Roubideaux, a mixed-blood of French descent and a district agent and interpreter for the Indian Bureau at the Rosebud Agency. My grandmother Katie lived to be nearly 101 years old.
Sam and James Provincial were brothers. Sam was a very distinguished-looking man with a strong baritone voice. By contrast, James was very soft-spoken. Sam’s wife was Mercy and Jim’s wife was Ollie Lodgeskin Provincial. My maternal grandmother Annie and Ollie were first cousins, and had known each other since childhood. Ollie’s mother, Lulu Lodgeskin, was a small woman who also lived to be a hundred years old. I never heard her speak English.
My father’s older brother was Narcisse Brave. Both of them were involved in tribal politics with the Rosebud Sioux Tribe at one time or another. My father was a council representative from the Horse Creek Community and Uncle Narcisse was tribal vice president.
Laban was my uncle by marriage. He was married to my father’s sister Adelia. He, like my grandfather, the Reverend Charles Marshall, was an avid fisherman. Uncle Laban liked to tell stories as he fished.
Storytellers from the Pine Ridge Reservation—Oglala Lakota
Wilson and Alice lived along a creek bottom not far from my grandparents, Charles and Blanche Marshall, near the town of Kyle on the Pine Ridge, in the Potato Creek District. They walked a lot because Wilson was blind and Alice, as I recall, didn’t drive. Alice had extensive knowledge of midwives in the old days, and Wilson just knew a lot. Adolph was my uncle by marriage, married to one of my father’s sisters. He was not an old man when I first met him, when I was eight, but I suspect that much or all of what he knew historically and culturally he learned from his father, Guy Bull Bear, who lived through some interesting times. Bull Bear, is, of course, an old and distinguished name among the Oglala Lakota.
My grandfather Charles was tall and very distinguished. He and my maternal grandfather, Albert, had a deep mutual respect. Grandpa Charles, in his life, was a rancher, a gold miner (having worked in the Homestake Gold Mine in the Black Hills), and an ordained Episcopalian deacon. I remember watching him play baseball when he was fifty-five years old. He was the son of a Frenchman, Joseph Marshall (probably originally Marichale). (Joseph and his brother, Francis [François] had an interesting journey that eventually led them to the Pine Ridge Reservation, via Fort Yankton and Fort Laramie, among other places. They both married Lakota women and raised large families.)
Many of these people from Rosebud and Pine Ridge were related to me, or took me as a relative. Each of them gave me a piece of themselves because of a story or stories they told me, or because they taught me something. My grandfather Albert taught me to make bows and arrows, for example. Grandpa Isaac Knife taught his son, Israel (my cousin), and me to weave fish traps out of sandbar willows. I can’t remember who it was that taught me how to play the Snow Snake game first, sliding willow rods on the river ice. All my grandmothers showed me about beading and quilling, and hide tanning. The list goes on and on. Most of all they all taught me to be aware of who and what I am, and always to be proud of it.
