Winter count

Similar to other traditions among the Indigenous nations of North America, winter counts were used as mnemonic records in order to help structure fuller accounts of history that would be passed on orally.

Located in the Northern Great Plains, Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota people physically recorded yearly events on various materials before and continuing past the point of contact with settlers.

Scholars have noted that the Lone Dog, The Flame, The Swan, and Major Bush winter counts are so similar for this reason; because these bands lived close by and often interacted with each other.

[2] Lakota winter counts particularly reveal deeply rooted historical ties with European traders during a period that predates the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the subsequent extreme marginalization and oppression of Indigenous peoples in North America.

By the end of the 1870s to the early 1880s, copies of winter counts (including the American Horse, Cloud Shield, and Battiste Good) were being commissioned by European collectors as Indigenous ethnographic objects.

By studying written accounts from fur traders, missionaries, and military personnel from a winter count's time and place of origin, scholars gain a broader understanding of the effects of epidemics.

Because many Indigenous groups were not literate in a European sense, their story was largely omitted from an American history that was predominantly dependent on written source material.