Peter Clenott

LAKOTA TALES AND TEXTS IN TRANSLATION has a remarkable history of its own. The original Lakota manuscript was rescued from destruction during the violent occupation of the village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, during the late winter of 1973. In 1970, Paul Manhart, a Catholic priest of the Society of Jesus and at the time a pastor in that village, had published Eugene Buechel, S.J.'s monumental Lakota-English Dictionary, with the late Louis and Daisy Whirlwind Horse assisting. Louis had been a tribal interpreter and Daisy was a highly perceptive translator. Father Manhart had an office in the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church overlooking the mass grave of Lakota visitor victims of the 1890 massacre. At the time of occupation, he had borrowed the original manuscript of Buechel's "Lakota Tales and Texts" from the Holy Rosary Mission archives. He was planning soon to publish it. So he kept it on a lower shelf in the far corner of his small library. Early during the occupation, he and two local men, Benjamin White Butterfly and Ruben Mesteth, took a box and went to the office, only to find it in shambles and the room and library shelves stripped of books - all except the Tales and Texts manuscript in the corner, a dingy home-made book in Lakota long-hand, untouched. All else was gone. In June of 1978 then, "Lakota Tales and Texts" was published in St. Louis. Father Manhart prepared this translation to answer many requests from teachers of history, social sciences, and language; and to lay a groundwork for preparing a series of Lakota language texts for systematically teaching the language in a two or four-year high school course. In Louis and Daisy Whirlwind Horse's words: "Our children will lose some real and conscious contact with their roots unless we continue to record and study Lakota."