DAKOTA TAWAXITKU KIN, OR THE DAKOTA FRIEND [caption title]

by [Dakota Language]: Pond, Gideon H. [ed]:

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Book Description

St. Paul: Published by the Dakota Mission, November 1850 - August 1852.. A total of eighteen issues, 4pp. each. Ten quarto issues from Volume 1, printed in three columns; eight folio issues from Volume 2, printed in four columns. Illus. The issues from Volume 1 interleaved and string-tied, issues from Volume 2 also interleaved. Edge wear and some tanning on exterior leaves. A couple faint old stains in each of the gatherings. On the whole, quite clean and in very good condition. In a cloth clamshell case, leather label. A nearly complete run of this very rare Dakota Mission periodical. Only twenty total issues of this monthly newspaper printed in the Dakota and English languages were published, and this collection of eighteen issues contains all but issues three and four (January and February 1851) from the first volume. The primary purposes of the paper were to educate the Dakota themselves, and to pass along information on the tribe to the American people. It ceased publication when the Dakota were removed from Minnesota under a treaty of 1851, which ceded all Sioux lands in Minnesota to the United States, and provided for the removal of the tribe further westward. The editor, Gideon H. Pond, was a prominent missionary to the Dakota Indians, arriving in Minnesota in 1834 and taking up the study of the Dakota language. With his brother Samuel, Gideon Pond helped develop the first Dakota alphabet (no dictionaries or grammars being available up to that time), and they went on to publish readers, grammars, and translations in Dakota, and taught the language to Stephen Return Riggs. The mission statement of the newspaper is printed in the first issue and reads (in part): "to diminish and remove the existing prejudice to education among them [the Sioux], by exciting in them a taste for reading and bringing into use that knowledge of letters which is already expressed by a few...It will be the object of the paper to bring before the Indian mind such items of news as will interest them, and any such matter as it is believed will be calculated to improve their physical, mental, and moral condition." The paper contains a great variety of news, information, and reports, including news from local villages and settlements - including obituaries, weddings, and baptisms - reports by missionaries, accounts of Dakota customs and myths, religious works, the text of treaties, language lessons, and engraved illustrations. One article describes a ball game played by the Dakota closely resembling lacrosse, and another gives a description of the origins and form of their medicine dance, while another brief notice relates the Winnebago's love of whiskey. Most of the articles are printed in both Dakota and English, though occasionally only in one or the other. Beginning with the seventh issue of the first volume, an illustration was incorporated into the masthead depicting Dakota children reading THE DAKOTA FRIEND, as a missionary and two Dakota adults look on. "There is much of interest to the philologist in this paper: lessons for learners, grammatic forms, vocabularies, &c." - Pilling. After a few months of publication, the newspaper experienced financial difficulty, and several changes were made, including enlarging the size of the paper from quarto to folio sheets, and raising the subscription rate from twenty-five to fifty cents. The paper was printed at the Chronicle and Register Office in St. Paul for its entire run, and the English language portion was edited by the Rev. Edward Neill. Publication ceased in August 1852 with Vol. II, No. 8, and a note in the final issue reads: "the Dakota Mission deems it unadvisable, while the Indians are so unsettled, to continue the FRIEND. If the prospect is more encouraging it will be resumed hereafter." Printing in Minnesota began in the summer of 1849, so this is a very early imprint indeed, and only the fifth periodical in an Indian language published in the trans- Mississippi West (following a Shawnee language paper printed in Kansas beginning in 1835, and two Cherokee and two Choctaw language papers printed in present-day Oklahoma in the 1840s). Pilling locates runs of THE DAKOTA FRIEND at the Library of Congress and Harvard, and OCLC adds runs (some incomplete) at The New York Public Library, Yale, Newberry Library (from the Ayer and Graff collections), Huntington Library, Chicago Historical Society, Minneapolis Public Library, Minnesota Historical Society, and University of Minnesota. A very rare and important early Indian language newspaper. PILLING, PROOF-SHEETS 3029. PILLING, SIOUAN, p.23. AYER, INDIAN LINGUISTICS (DAKOTA) 65. LITTLEFIELD & PARINS, pp.128- 31. GRAFF 988. SABIN 18286. OCLC 1644692.

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