Lakota Place Names in Southwestern Saskatchewan
Cover Photo: John Lecaine (far left), Christina Lecaine (nee Laswisse, far right) and family (needs naming). Wood Mountain, May 1950. Everett Baker Slide Collection.
The importance of place names has long been acknowledged in the processes to narrate history, encode meaning, and inscribe landscape. For Lakota people in southwestern Saskatchewan, it was no different.
Lakota people came more numerously and more permanently to present-day Saskatchewan after the Battle of the Little Bighorn/Okíčhize Pȟežísla Wakpá in 1876 and 1877. This led many government officials, later historians, and popular opinion of several generations to believe that Lakota people were merely refugees in Canada. There had been Lakota people in what is now Saskatchewan before 1876, but after 1876 as many as five thousand Lakota people fled north of the 49th parallel, escaping from the American cavalry. Eventually, in 1910 a temporary reserve was set aside for Lakota people at Wood Mountain, later made permanent (at half the original size) in 1930.
The reserve was never the start nor the end of Lakota connections to certain places (this is true for all Indigenous people and their lands/waters, of course).
'Eagle Plume, age close to 90’ (Wood Mountain Lakota). Eagle Plume was less than ten years old when her camp was attacked by American cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn/Okíčhize Pȟežísla Wakpá. After the defeat of Custer, she traveled with Sitting Bull's band to what is now Saskatchewan. Like many others, she stayed after Sitting Bull returned to the United States. Photographed by Everett Baker at Wood Mountain, 1954. Everett Baker Slide Collection.
The areas discussed here became part of the wider Lakȟóta Tȟamákȟočhe/Lakota Country, most of which is now part of the United States, through processes that were part of the Northern Great Plains for many generations. Lakota borders and boundaries were fluid and flexible, shifting as connections with other people and non-human relatives moved, cycled, and changed. Southern Saskatchewan was, and still is, part of these ongoing relationships and connections within Lakota worldviews and to the larger Lakȟóta Tȟamákȟočhe. Place names are just one small reflection of these connections for Lakota people.
John Lecaine was a Wood Mountain Lakota man who recorded many Lakota place names in the Wood Mountain area (he sometimes also went by the last name Okute-Sica/Okȟúte-Šiča/Hard to Shoot At). Place names were becoming more of an interest to hobbyists, anthropologists, and historians in Saskatchewan in the 1950s and 1960s. John Lecaine corresponded with many of these early Saskatchewan researchers, such as S.T. Wood, Everett Baker, and George Shepherd.
John Lecaine, photographed by Everett Baker at Wood Mountain, May 1950. Everett Baker Slide Collection.
John attended the Regina Industrial School until 1906. After his return, he spent many hours with his father visiting different important places and listening to his elders tell their life stories and experiences.
He created several maps of the Wood Mountain area showing Lakota ceremonial areas, winter camps, and other significant features.
John Lecaine’s maps are a wonderful visual source of Lakota inscriptions of the land. In one of the best examples, he circled the places on a topographical map, inscribed notes in the margins, and included a written key to all the places he identified.[1]
These maps, annotations, and stories that were collected, remembered, and retold by John Lecaine and other Wood Mountain Lakota people are the basis for this short examination of place names.
John Lecaine wrote that: “The Sioux never saw the Wood Mtn. country till for the first time in the fall of '76. and probably all the creeks and land marks were already named by the Red Coats and other tribes of Indians and metis [sic] inhabiting the country.”[2]
As mentioned previously, Lakota people had been in the southern Saskatchewan area before 1876. However, Lecaine’s statement is still important because it echoes how many place names that the Lakota used were from other peoples. Some were Lakota translations of other Indigenous names, such as Čháŋȟe which came from the older Métis word for the area, Montange des Bois. Both the Michif and Lakota names are translated literally to mean Wood Mountain.
The White Mud River (also known as the Frenchman River) near present-day Val Marie in southern Saskatchewan similarly had dual names in Lakota. The first was a literal translation of White Mud River, Wísaŋye Wakpá (White Paint River). The second is Míčha Wakpá or Coyote River[3] which may have come from Lakota people’s own experiences or memories from that place.
Wísaŋye Wakpá or Míčha Wakpá (also known as the White Mud or Frenchman River) photographed by Everett Baker near Climax, SK, 1963. Everett Baker Slide Collection.
Straight-translation place names are essential for illustrating the ties Lakota people had to other Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the Wood Mountain Uplands. These place names illustrate the acknowledgement of other peoples who occupy, claim, and utilize the same spaces as Lakota people, which is important in caretaking and sharing these places among many.
Furthermore, surviving on the prairies necessitated common and close shared resources and ways of communicating about specific places between diverse peoples. Shared place names helped with this. Conveying the idea of shared places through shared place names could have possibly helped in diplomatic relations between peoples. Moreover, shared place names could help to quickly identify specific landscapes and landmarks in discussions of trade, hunting, travelling, and natural events like weather and fire when communicating among many diverse people and languages.
Lakota place names that came from significant events or people that were part of their own oral traditions and histories also grew in number with each passing generation in the Wood Mountain Uplands. These kinds of place names are particularly important for inscribing the meaning and specific significance of the landscape to one’s own community. They are much more personal and often have specific cultural contexts.
Some examples of these are Tȟa Čheyáka Pahá, Peppermint’s Hill or Three Mile Butte. It is named so in Lakota because of a man named Peppermint who went to the top of that butte to haŋbléčheya (fast/ “vision quest”).[4] It is called Three Mile Butte in English because it is three miles east from the old North West Mounted Police (NWMP) post at Wood Mountain. Other names like this include Stolen Black Horse Creek (McEachern Creek),[5] Arm Creek (Moose Jaw), and Čháŋȟe Čík’ala/Little Wood Mountain. Čháŋȟe Čík’ala/Little Wood Mountain is where the town of Rockglen, Saskatchewan is today. It looks similar in landscape to the hills and trees of the old post area of Wood Mountain. It was also the site of the sixth winter camp in 1881.[6]
Tȟa Čheyáka Pahá/Peppermint’s Hill, or Three Mile Butte in the background on left and Harebells growing in the foreground. Photo courtesy of author.
All these names come from Lakota people’s own stories and perspectives of landscapes as they experienced these places. Oíyoȟpeya Waŋkátuya (High Descend) was the best crossing place on the Frenchman River, but named for the steep descend down about a half a mile north of the ford.[7] Names like these are utilitarian and come from people’s uses and experiences with those places. They serve as good reminders for returning to those areas when people depended on memory for maps. Even if the specific stories of certain names are not known anymore, we can imagine what those places may have represented through the names which served as mnemonic devices in Lakota everyday lived knowledge and now history.
Similarly, other Lakota place names have become firmly entrenched in historic events. For example, the winter camp locations that Lakota people made in the years immediately after the Battle of the Little Bighorn have been entrenched as significant places of Lakota history and memory in the Wood Mountain Uplands.
The first winter camp site in 1876, which Lecaine identified on his map near where the Frenchman River meets the Canada-United States border, is called Očhéthi Óta (Many Hearths). It is “named so because the fire-places the Metis people remaining there where a short time before the Metis had a winter camp.”[8] This place, according to Lecaine, was actually south of the border but the Lakota camped on the north side of this place and therefore the north side of the border in Canada.
Lecaine goes on to write that “General Miles (U.S.) ordered the Metis [sic] to move back into Canada and had all the adobe houses burned”[9] and just the many hearths/fireplaces were left standing.[10] This place description has a striking resemblance to Chimney Coulee near Eastend, but it could be that there was more than one old Metis wintering camp that had only chimneys or hearths left standing.
Chimney bases photographed by Everett Baker at Chimney Coulee, Eastend, 1962. Everett Baker Slide Collection.
The third winter camp place in 1878 was called Cȟaŋ Kasótapi (Cleared Timber)[11] because all the trees had been used up and cleared in that area in that winter.[12] These winter camp places and others are particularly important to understand in the context of the late 1870s, when so many Lakota people were in present-day Saskatchewan and camps were large.
John Lecaine outlined that these winter camps had to have five important components that were essential to Lakota people’s (and their horses’) survival. These give insight into understandings of place we might overlook or take for granted now. These five things are: enough fuel (wood) for approximately five months and three or four hundred lodges of people, a good unfailing water supply, the camp circle must be located down in a low land surrounded by hills with good look out points nearby, winter range for thousands of horses for many months, and the site must be situated to have the lodges/tipis in sight of each other (and when possible in a circle or near circle).[13] If one is familiar with the places of these historic winter camps, these components can readily be seen even today.
Ceremonial sites have important cultural, spiritual, and historical significance on the landscape to Wood Mountain Lakota people. Wiwáŋyaŋg Wačhípi Wakpála (Sundance Creek), today known as Medicine Lodge Creek after the Lakota name no doubt, was the place the first and second wiwáŋyaŋg wačhípi/sundances were held after 1877 by Wíŋyaŋ Iglúš’aka (Pregnant Woman) and Waúŋžiŋča (Bob Tail). [14] This is not the only sundance and ceremonial place important to Lakota people historically and today, but this one may be the most publicly known, especially since the present name for the creek is named after the Lakota connection to it. Therefore, this is the ceremonial place and name that I felt comfortable sharing here. Other ceremonial sites are private places, which only need to be known to the families and community members who have direct connections and relationships to those places and the people they wish to share them with on their own terms.
These are just a few examples of Lakota names and places with historical, cultural, and familial importance to Lakota people in the past and today. Collectively they show a wide area that had many diverse uses, meanings, and relations for Lakota people.
The landscape was inscribed, traveled, and understood as Lakȟóta Tȟamákȟočhe within diverse experiences of hardship, healing, sustenance, and ceremony. These relationships are ongoing with old stories and names being remembered and new ones being made in Lakȟóta Tȟamákȟočhe because the land itself serves as the basis for lived culture and remembered history.
Wísaŋye Wakpá or Míčha Wakpá (also known as the White Mud or Frenchman River) in the middle ground, near Val Marie, SK. This is also the site of a Bison jump (foreground). Photo courtesy of James R. Page.
Claire Thomson is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Alberta. She completed her MA at the University of Saskatchewan and she currently works part time for Agriculture and Agri-Foods Canada (AAFC).
Claire also ranches with her parents and has her own small, but growing herd of horses and cattle. Her family has been ranching in the Wood Mountain Uplands of southwestern Saskatchewan since the 1880s and she uses the livestock brand that her great-great grandparents originally used.
Claire is writing her dissertation, studying Wood Mountain Lakota connections within Lakȟóta Tȟamákȟočhe/Lakota Country from 1881 to 1930, land which overlays the U.S.-Canada border. She works to centre Lakota experiences and understandings of place, good relations, and community to challenge colonial narratives and boundaries.
In her spare time, Claire enjoys riding her horses, sewing, and volunteering as the secretary for the Wood Mountain Historical Society.
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Endnotes
[1] Glenbow Archives, Wood Family Fonds, Series 3, M-9460-147, “Annotated Map by John Lecaine, Correspondence w John Okutesica re Sitting Bull & his winter camps, 1960-1962.”
[2] Saskatchewan Provincial Archives, G.F. Shepherd collection, A289, File 24, John Lecaine, “Wood Mtn. April 29. I943,” John Lecaine Letters to Shepherd.
[3] Glenbow Archives, Wood Family Fonds, Series 3, M-9460-147, “Annotated Map by John Lecaine, Correspondence w John Okutesica re Sitting Bull & his winter camps, 1960-1962.”
[4] Thelma Poirier personal collection, John Lecaine to Wood Mountain Homemakers Club, “Peppermints Hill,” n.d.
[5] Glenbow Archives, Wood Family Fonds, Series 3, M-9460-147, “Annotated Map by John Lecaine, Correspondence w John Okutesica re Sitting Bull & his winter camps, 1960-1962.”
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid, Letter from John Okute-sica (Lecaine) to S.T. Wood, September 15, 1960.
[8] Glenbow Archives, Wood Family Fonds, Series 3, M-9460-147, Letter from John Okutesica to S.T. Wood, September 28, 1962.
[9] Saskatchewan Provincial Archives, Everett Baker collection, R561.30.n, Okute, John, Historical Notes, 1957-1962, “Sioux Historical Sites In Wood Mountain Country By John Okute (Lecaine).”
[10] Glenbow Archives, Wood Family Fonds, Series 3, M-9460-147, “Annotated Map by John Lecaine, Correspondence w John Okutesica re Sitting Bull & his winter camps, 1960-1962,” Letter from John Lecaine to S.T. Wood, September 28, 1962.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Thelma Poirier personal collection, John Lecaine original letters, “News,” nd.
[13] Saskatchewan Provincial Archives, J.D. Herbert collection, 190.2, 44-1D, Letter from John Okute (Lecaine) to J.D. Herbert, February 25, 1955.
[14] Saskatchewan Provincial Archives, Everett Baker collection, R561.30.n, Okute, John, Historical Notes, 1957-1962, “Sioux Historical Sites In Wood Mountain Country By John Okute (Lecaine).”