C.A.R.T.S.

Mary Louise Defender Wilson: Audio Story

Listen to "The Woman Who Turned Herself to Stone"©
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This story is provided courtesy of the North Dakota Council on the Arts and Makoche Recording Company for educational purposes only.
If you want a copy of this recording, it is featured on "The Elders Speak,"© available through Makoche [http://makoche.com].

Two Stone Women with Mary Louise
Photo Courtesy of Mary Louise Defender Wilson

The Dark Stone Woman (left) sits on a small knoll north of Fort Ransom, east of the Missouri River. The Light Stone Woman, found west of the Missouri River near Half Timber Butte, lives with Mary Louise in Sheilds, ND. Many Dakotah believe that there are opposites of everything in the natural world, for example, the stone in the story is light and her counterpart is dark.

About this story:

"The Woman Who Turned Herself to Stone" is about a Dakotah woman's love of nature. It is also about an important feature in the Standing Rock Reservation/Dakotah landscape. Dakotah stories, like many Native American stories, contain "why" tales that explain the origin of the people, their religious beliefs, and certain natural things in the landscape like boulders or lakes. Mary Louise's story, "The Woman Who Turned Herself to Stone," is an example of a story that is specific to a landscape. It is also an example of a story that teaches respect for nature and environmentalism.

One of the stones in Mary Louise's story can be found near the area of Pyramid Hill where, according to Dakotah belief, their people began. The region is located in southeastern North Dakota near Fort Ransom. Mary Louise often visits this stone to make offerings.

Mary Louise says, according to tradition, there were four women who turned themselves to stone, two east of the Missouri River and two west of the Missouri River. Only three have been seen.

About Native American stories:

Oral Tradition: Native Americans value the ability to speak well before audiences. Native people value leaders as much for their speech making as for their work ethic, military and economic accomplishments. A leader's ability to speak clearly helps to establish laws, negotiate differences, and maintain peace. Native people also value telling folktales and sacred myths, which contain and preserve a nation's values, worldview, history, and way of life.

Language: Many people have said that to know a people is to speak their language. Language captures the little (and big) ideas, feelings, and ways cultures see the world. In short, culture and beliefs are transmitted through language. When Europeans came into contact with Native Americans, more than 100 million Native Americans spoke more than 850 languages and had a large body of spoken literature*. Stories were part of this body of literature and were told both to children and adults to entertain and to teach Native ways of life.

When the U.S. government pulled many Native children out of their homes and placed them into English-only boarding schools, the natural transfer of cultural information from adults to children was interrupted. As a result, children lost the ability to express many essential ideas in their native language. In addition, they had difficulty expressing themselves in English, which was a second language. And when they could express themselves in English, they were often censored. [ask Mary Louise about this].

After years away in boarding school, speaking English, many young people could no longer express or fully understand Native stories or Native culture. Plus, they no longer lived near places mentioned in the stories. So it became hard for them to relate to stories that drew on parts of the landscape, like "The Woman Who Turned Herself to Stone."

Mary Louise challenges these language obstacles when she tells bi-lingual stories to young people. "I tell stories as a way to teach the language," she says. "Even if they don't literally understand what I am saying in Dakotah, they are emotionally able to understand it."

*Leeming, David A. 1997. Storytelling Encyclopedia: Historical, Cultural, and Multiethnic Approaches to Oral Traditions Around the World. Arizona: Oryx.