Remember the Wind: An Unusual Memoir About Standing Rock

Cover art from a library copy of the 1965 publication. Copyright J.B Lippincott Company

Remember the Wind: A Prairie Memoir is a book by writer William McK. Chapman about his time running St Elizabeth's School in Wakpala, South Dakota for three years in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He arrived on the heels of famed Standing Rock linguist Ella Deloria who handed over the running of the school to him. It provides a snapshot of the Standing Rock of that time, albeit through the lens and the temporary tenure of a non-native former correspondent for Time-Life. It is interesting because books like it are so rare. I found it a bit strange, and like other memoirs, it said about as much about the author as about Standing Rock. Still, it offers some interesting vignettes of the Standing Rock of the period as well as the early effects of the Oahe Dam.

The book is relatively rare, but hundreds of copies are available through libraries around the world and a handful are available for sale online. It is one of those books that sits in a sort of publishing limbo, a place relegated to books either not popular enough to republish or that will probably never be digitized due to the complexities of whatever copyright may continue to hold it in publishing purgatory. Libraries need to remain vigilant that

books like this, however marginal, are not lost in the mad dash to the future, because not everything is or will be digital. It could of course...but it won't.