Visiting Scholar to present lecture on Lakota Indian concept of time

Morgantown, WV, March 7, 2006: An Indiana University professor will be on campus next week to serve as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar and to lecture on the Lakota Indians’ unique perspective on time.

Dr. Raymond J. DeMallie will present “Lakota Winter Counts and the Cultural Interpretation of Time” on Monday, March 12 at 8 p.m. in the Mountainlair’s Gold Ballroom on WVU’s Downtown Campus. The event is free and open to the public.

DeMallie will introduce winter counts, the pictorial records kept by the Lakota that designated each passing winter with a mnemonic, or memory aid, illustrating a memorable event from the previous year. These records served as calendars to name the years and also formed the basis for a native history. DeMallie will also discuss the nature of the events they commemorate and offer some interpretation of what they reveal about native Lakota concepts of time and history.

While on campus, DeMallie will also visit several English and History classes that touch on aspects of Native American culture.

DeMallie is Chancellor’s Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind. He serves as director of the University’s American Indian Studies Research Institute. His research focuses on the Plains Indians of North America, and he has done fieldwork on reservations in the Dakotas, Montana, and Saskatchewan. DeMallie writes and teaches about kinship and social organization, ritual and belief systems, oral traditions and material culture. He has written and edited a number of books on the Plains Indians and is past president of the American Society for Ethnohistory.

The event is sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society in conjunction with the Native American Studies Program and the Departments of History and English in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.

For more information, please contact Dr. Alan Stolzenberg, Phi Beta Kappa advisor, at 304-293-3435, ext. 6437, or at astolzen@wvu.edu.

W-V-U