The Long Soldier Winter Count. Courtesy Smithsonian Institution.
Dakota Goodhouse is a historian, Standing Rock tribal member and an authority on winter counts. He continues to research these important primary source documents, publishing his findings on his blog The First Scout. The blog is a wealth of information regarding Lakota/Dakota and Standing Rock history. His most recent post includes a new look at the Long Soldier Winter Count with translations in Lakota using the Lakota Language Consortium orthography. It is a great companion when visiting the full sized print of the winter count at Sitting Bull College or just interpreting the winter count. It can be found here in PDF format.
In the early 2000s, researchers for the landmark book The Year the Star Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian visited Standing Rock to gather information about the Long Soldier Winter Count. The book is another essential companion to the Long Soldier Winter Count. As part of their visit, they gifted a full sized print of the winter count, which has been displayed at Sitting Bull College Library every since. Since the winter count itself measures 69x34.5 inches, the framed copy is so large it requires a pickup bed to move from place to place.
The print continues to be the gift that keeps on giving as a historical and teaching resource on Standing Rock. Unless one looks very closely, it is difficult to tell that it is a print and not the real thing. In addition to Long Soldier, the library also houses a full-size copy of the High Dog Winter Count (on display at the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismarck) donated by Dakota Goodhouse. His translations into LLC Lakota orthography for that winter count can be found here.
Both of these prints are part of an ever-growing "library on the walls" displayed within buildings across the college campus. The displays feature copies of historic photographs, maps, documents and other items from Standing Rock's storied history. Hopefully, we can one day have more full-sized prints of winter counts to add that can continue to inform and teach for generations to come.
The book above was paralleled by a companion interactive website that featured audio by former Sitting Bull College Native American Studies Department head Wilbur Flying By and interviews with Standing Rock tribal members associated with the winter count. The site went online in 2005 and won many awards including a Webby and a World Summit Award. Check the link to see a few screenshots of what the site looked like. Portions of the site can also be found on the Internet Archive, though it lacks any of the interactive features. The website was the best thing next to having the actual winter counts. The interactive nature of the website and the ability to cross-reference winter counts made it useful for both reference and teaching a new tech-savvy generation. There is hope and news that it will be brought back at some point in the future in a new form.
The website was taken down a few years ago due to its age and problems in interacting with ever changing technology and devices. There is bitter irony in the fact that the lifespan of the digital surrogates of antique historical documents was a little over a decade, while the originals soldier on in some of the best preservation conditions on earth at the Smithsonian. Obsolescence is a problematic issue in our digital present and we discard the physical too quickly for the digital at our peril. Techno-utopians need to solve the problem of continual obsolescence in hardware and software before we can truly say that the all digital library is really here.