As the dark clouds gather in the west, the hot humid air seems to coat everything, clothes, homes, even the leaves of the prairie’s few trees with foreboding. The wind barely stirs the grasses around the village, and hardly stirs the buffalo tails of the lodges.

Much has been written in the Dakota Literary Tradition by authors such as Ella C. Deloria and Luther Standing Bear, survivors of assimilation policy and boarding schools, who wrote about the domestic lives and strength of the women of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate. Waterlilly is a piece of fiction but based on decades of ethnographic study by Deloria, who spoke both Dakota and Lakota. Learn more about #NativeReads and the Oak Lake Writers’ Society.

Women work quietly but swiftly to pull drying meat off of the drying racks, to bank the coals of fires, as older children go off by foot and on horseback to round up younger kids playing in the treeline. One group of women, including several older women with their trained pack dogs, had gone to gather kindling for the village. There was no mindless rushing around, indeed such a thing might invite unpleasantness, but the people were quietly looking out for one another. A hunting party could be seen returning in the distance and a village watcher had greeted them in sign used at long distances. They were not going to come straight back to camp, even loaded down with meat, but were planning on taking shelter as best they could where they were at. Almost imperceptible at first, the air let out a very long, quiet sigh, and the damp clinging became cooler, first feeling like relief, sweat that pooled and stayed in place before, not drying, now dried. Then as a gust of wind rushed through the Cottonwood trees near the lake, looking up from their work, people realized rain was coming. Looking around them, the long band of clouds piling and a slight green tint to the air, shifted. The final extra stakes were added and the children rushed into the village and accounted for, while each lodge’s woman double checked the center rope.

The sky turned black and to fortify the people, wasna was taken down from its place up high and everyone was given a handful of the potent mix. Women patted their belts to reassure themselves they hadn’t misplaced anything, though of course they hadn’t. Some added a bit of extra kindling to the small rectangular pocket holding fire making tools on the back of the belt at the small of their backs. As the driving rain and hail began, no matter what happened next, straight line winds nor hail, so long as even one woman was there, they could rebuild the village and once again shelter, feed, clothe and warm all the people.

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Later, when Americans stripped our people of their clothing through a multifaceted assault on the Oceti Sakowin Oyate, they didn’t just take our cultural fashion, they took the literal function by which we built our villages.

To be frank, I highly doubt they realized the importance of our women’s clothing as the very tools by which we built our homes, produced more clothing and shoes, and otherwise formed the foundation for our entire domestic and urban reality. However, whether they knew it or not, the effect was the same.

In our culture, these tools would not be worn unless the person wearing them had shown mastery of the skills they entailed. Part of a woman’s coming of age had as much to do with this education as did her physical changes, and this was the same for men, as well, though far too much is usually focused on men and eagle feathers as the symbols of their achievements. While women do receive eagle plumes now and then, that was not how women were identified as an adult, indeed, instead, it was literally what she wore, the belt and a special bag that also provided function over fashion’s forms.

As we work to decolonize, domestic decolonization is as crucial to achieve as any decolonizing work of law, education, economics and trade, etc. As more and more of our women purchase homes and build up their self-sovereignty, alongside Two Spirit and other spiritual and artistic culture keepers and creators, we will reclaim our dexterity as wielders of literal home making and community building unconceived by Western Civilization and uniquely indigenous and Dakota, Nakota and Lakota.