Thread:User talk:WaitingforGodot/Lakota woo/reply (3)

1. Average life expectancy was in the 40s. you qualified to be an elder at 35, after you had your first grandchild, roughly - this before the smallpox. Just the reality of life in the Dakotas. Some people did live into their 60's of course.... but not many.

2. That has never been a Lakota belief. I've heard of it, but don't know who it is (the phillipines maybe?). Lakota drew images of themselves all the time. Crazy Horse did not, and it was a noteworth thing - something that added to his mystique.

3. Riiiggghhhttttttt........... Winters were harsh, really harsh. These were effectively stone age people. they ate everything they could find, including carrion if you were desperate enough. To suggest that primitive people would forgo meat, the single most important dietary feature we have, especially when they don't have agriculture to supplement the diet, and if you've been on the black hills and badlands, you won't find an abundance of nuts and seeds..

linguistically speaking, their word for "meat" was the exact same word as that for deer. "ta", like "tatanka" "big meat/big deer/ buffalo".

4. Oh for fuck's sake. Women were effectively slaves - though not in the sense of being owned, but in the sense of being the workers. granted, they were pretty happy as such, since they didn't in general get beaten, raped, etc., but they did all the work, truly back breaking work; were generally not allowed to hunt or fight; were generally not allowed to own, much less ride, horses; generally had no real status as this was a patriarchal people, not matriarchal. women had little to no access to the spiritual world - though they were often the medical/herbal healers in the tribe (the spritual healiers, wichasa wakan were men) setting the bones, cleaning wounds, and maintaining the herbal memory of the tribe.

women who menstruated were isolated from the tribe (though new ages say that's cause it was a vacation) ; and unlike many eastern and southwestern tribes, there was no governmental structure for women.

maybe that's what equality means.