We Are The Stars

We are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition
by Sarah Hernandez
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$39.95 ISBN 9780889779181

In We are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition, American academic Sarah Hernandez (Sicangu Lakota) examines the colonial dismantling of Dakota, Nakota and Lakota intellectual traditions, including “star knowledge through oral storytelling.” She writes that when missionaries arrived in the early nineteenth century, the “linguistic [colonization]” began.

Hernandez teaches Native American literature and is the director for the Institute for American Indian Research at the University of New Mexico. She states that “missionary translations of the Dakota language set a dangerous precedent that denigrated Oceti Sakowin star knowledge and supplanted [their] tribal land narratives with new settler-colonial land narratives that ensured that many of our people converted to Christianity and assimilated to the American nation.” Missionaries learned the Dakota language and printed bilingual Dakota-English newspapers which contained “misinterpretation[s] of Dakota origin narratives” and essentially “delegitimize[d] the Oceti Sakowin’s intellectual traditions”—and Christians replaced them with their own. These settler-colonials subsequently “stripped the Dakota nation of 35 million acres of land” and forced them onto a “ten-mile-wide reservation” in Minnesota.

Hernandez frequently makes a connection between land and ideology. Countless injustices followed the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, including the confinement of “Dakota women, children, and elders” into a “concentration camp” known then as the Crow Creek Agency, where 300 people died within a year. Survivors were subjected to hard labour and sexual assault. The women—revered as the tribes’ “culture keepers and culture bearers”—still kept their traditional stories alive, despite hardships that ranged from imprisonment to exile to boarding schools.

Traditional stories were passed down through the generations, resulting in almost 200 books authored by Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota women who used “English-language literacy and the printing press to perpetuate the knowledge handed down by oral storytellers and historians.”

In the book’s second section, Hernandez demonstrates how these oral traditions have been preserved via “re-imagining” by print storytellers, including Charles Alexander Eastman (b. 1858), whose eleven novels feature his grandmother; Ella Cara Deloria (author of Waterlily, a novel concerning Lakota women “bound together by kinship, storytelling, and tradition”); and writers involved in the Oak Lake Writers’ Society, a longstanding “tribal group … dedicated to protecting and defending the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota literary traditions” via publications, presentations and a podcast series, #NativeReads.

Hernandez is a longtime member of the Oceti Sakowin-led Oak Lake Writers’ Society, and she contends that this combination of “old and new land narratives, old and new literary genres” is an “extension of the Oceti Sakowin oral tradition,” and that the books produced will “guide and empower future generations by reminding [them] of ]their] connection to the stars, the land, and each other.”

This scholarly text is an homage to the women who were the early story and culture keepers, and it’s a celebration of those Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota women who continue the Oceti Sakowin literary tradition—and healing—today. The book cover’s significant “ledger art” (art superimposed over a financial or legal document) was created by Ruben Hernandez, the writer’s brother.

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