With My Own Eyes: A Lakota Woman Tells Her People's History.

Carson, James Taylor

With My Own Eyes: A Lakota Woman Tells Her People's History, by Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun and Josephine Waggoner, edited and introduced by Emily Levine. Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 1998. xi, 187 pp. $35.00.

Between 1934 and 1936 Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun, a resident of the Old Soldiers' Home in Hot Springs, South Dakota, told her life's story to Josephine Waggoner. The two Lakota Sioux women were dissatisfied with histories of their people written by Anglo-Americans, and they hoped to publish the manuscript that resulted from their partnership. For a variety of reasons the project was delayed, and they both died frustrated in their inability to find an outlet for their work. The copy-edited manuscript lay in the Nebraska state archives for years where students of Sioux history came to appreciate it as a valuable and insightful source into life on the Great Plains, but it failed to reach a larger audience. Over sixty years after its completion, Bettelyoun's history has finally appeared in published form.

With My Own Eyes is an autobiography and contains both the strengths and the weaknesses inherent to the genre. Susan Bettelyoun spent her younger years living at military posts where her father worked as an agent of the American Fur Company as well as in several capacities for the United States government. Her observations of marriages not just between her parents but between other traders and Sioux women reflect both the workings of fur trade society and the deep quality of personal relationships that trading ties created.

If Bettelyoun's father gave her entry into the life of the fort, her mother enabled her to circulate among the Sioux. Three motifs -- warfare, food, and kinship -- ground the narrative in Sioux culture. What the U.S. Army considered mindless raids by Native savages emerge through Bettelyoun's eyes as calculated responses to specific grievances held by the Sioux. Nowhere is the logic of Sioux warfare better explained than in the killing of a cow that escalated into the "Grattan Massacre" of 1854.

Just as warfare was a constant theme in Sioux life so too was finding food. The narrative explains not only how Natives prepared food but also how they hid stores and how they used the environment to feed themselves. Bettelyoun lived against the backdrop of the great bison hunts, and she argues convincingly that the shortage of buffalo pushed the Sioux to war. She captures well the Sioux hunters' growing anger at seeing the Plains littered with bloated carcasses left by big game hunters.

If war and food were the staffs of Sioux life, kinship gave it structure. Indeed, Bettelyoun foregrounds the narrative in terms of kinship. She lists her relatives on both her father's and her mother's side, and she explains how she derived her social status from them. One of her most important contributions to ethnohistory is her challenge to the tribal labels ethnohistorians use today. Instead of describing people as Sioux, Arapaho, or Cree, Bettelyoun suggests that band identity was far more important in terms of social relationships and conflict.

Disease upset indigenous patterns of culture and life, and With My Own Eyes conveys in harrowing detail the disaster of depopulation. Cholera scourged the land, and the author remarks on not just the deaths from disease but the collateral suffering caused by famine. Plains peoples reacted as best they could by shooting travellers who seemed sick, by abandoning ill adults and infants, and by isolating themselves from contact with outsiders. Unfortunately Bettelyoun does not have much to say about how the Sioux coped with such catastrophic losses.

Whether or not With My Own Eyes stands as an interpretive history or as a primary source is ultimately up to the reader. Historians will find the book useful for its colourful depictions of life in the West and for its unique perspective on Sioux history, but the book should reach a broader audience. Autobiographies are wonderful tools for teaching First Nations history, and With My Own Eyes will make for lively classroom reading and discussion.

Susan Bettelyoun was inspired to tell her story because she believed that Anglo-American historians were incapable of writing Sioux history. Having lived through many of the important events in Sioux history, she felt she knew the troth. Few scholars today debate history as truth. We tend to value perspectives more so than orthodoxies, and Bettelyoun's perspective is one that has remained hidden in the archives for far too long.

James Taylor Carson

Queen's University