This ledger compiled by George Sword (Miwakan Yuhala) is a site of Lakota memory, a rich collection of autobiographical reminiscence, traditional stories, and ethnographic observations written in alphabetic Dakota by a man who lived through what were perhaps the hardest years for the Oglala Lakota people during the 19^th century.

In September of 1896, Sword narrated part of his life story to Bruce Means, who translated it into English. In this interview, Sword describes his many social responsibilities before the reservation system was imposed on his community. “I was wičaša wakan (Holy Man),” he told Means, having “conducted the Sun Dance.” He also bore “scars on his body” showing he had been a dancer. But Sword became disillusioned with some the old ways when the Lakota began losing battles to the Americans. That was why he adopted the surname Sword,“because the leaders of the white people wore swords.” He then took on a new role—Captain of the Pine Ridge police force.

Though he did not speak English, he learned “to write Lakota . . . [like] the old Lakota talked in the formal manner.” Just as Black Elk understood his collaboration with John Neihardt as a way to “publish” the fulfillment of his Thunder Beings vision, Sword may have believed that his voluminous writings in Lakota proffered a return of power to the Lakota Oyate [Nation]. He focused on traditional speech patterns as his model of written composition: “I write the Lakota words as I speak them.” In Sword’s view, the printed word had fostered an unhealthy debasement of the younger generation’s vernacular: “The printing and the writing of the white man has changed the language . . . When the old men of the Lakota die the right Lakota language will be forgotten.” Sword made his ledger so that would not happen.

This beaded hair ornament was obtained by an amateur white anthropologist visiting the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation in northeast Kansas during the mid-1930s, a period of economic hardship. The ornament, along with other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Prairie Band items including a necklace, pouches, and a headband, is currently housed fifty miles away from the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation in the collections of the University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art. This striking object prompts any number of questions concerning the category centering this discussion: Native American sites of memory.

What are the various meanings that accrue to the word “site” in light of the long history of Potawatomi movement and relocation and the Prairie Band’s particular history in northeast Kansas? (See Prairie Band Potawatomi Tribal History) And what are the additional meanings that accrue to the word “site” in light of the long history of the vampiric collection of Native American possessions by amateurs and academic types alike? How does the function of the university museum as particular a site of collection, if not recollection, shape contemporary understanding of the memory held within and through such an item? And further: For whom and how does such an item—worn yet vibrant, archived in academic settings both physical and electronic—serve as a site for remembrance?

This site of memory is walking distance from the MLA Conference, in Stanley Park, founded in 1886. City officials evicted those who lived there to fulfill the fantasy that it was pristine wilderness. Then markers of “proper” Indigeneity were imported, such as totem poles from Northern nations. The memorial to E. Pauline Johnson / Tekahionwake (1861-1914), the “Iroquois poet-reciter,” served the same purpose of colonial appropriation. However, many colonial memorials have been reappropriated as sites of cultural and political renewal. Some were contested from the start. For example, Johnson’s poems written for the reinterment of Red Jacket in 1884 and the unveiling of the Joseph Brant memorial in 1886 complicate the dispossession the ceremonies were intended to enact.

Below I have assembled a collection of trees that act as sites of Native memory and settler (mis)interpretation in the American West.  I hope they will provide a framework to discuss how memory is rooted in the land for Native peoples and enhance land-centered reading practices for scholars of memory.  I have also included counterpoint examples, misreadings and appropriations of the sacred site of the tree, that serve settler ideologies of property and the project of manifest destiny.