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Woman's Dress

Oglala Lakota

 

 

It's time to lay to rest the frequent assumption that Woman Dress was a winkte: this hoary old factoid has no relation to truth. Pine Ridge showman and interpreter Eddie Herman told my friend Joseph Balmer sixty years ago that Woman Dress's mother was a wife of Oglala chief Smoke, and a famous craftswoman in quill and beadwork. So fancy was the boy's outfit that he was dubbed Woman Dress . . . well, maybe, but he wasn't a winkte, being an enlisted scout for a number of years, photographed several times in 'normal' male attire, fathering a large family. Ambrose, I think, was the first author to make the unmerited assumption of WD's winkte status, since when it seems to have accepted as self-evident. — Kingsley Bray

Woman's Dress was called Pretty Boy as a child. So, he may have had feminine features, or if we take the name figuratively, it may have meant in our word "gay." According to Marie Sandoz's biography of Crazy Horse, Woman's Dress always stayed behind when the young warriors went on raids, mostly because of his unwillingness to fight. He was not looked down upon as other cultures do because he was "un-manly" male.

Woman's Dress was part of Red Cloud's clan and was involved in the conspiracy to spread false rumors about Crazy Horse once on the reservation. The jealousies and threat of loss of power by reservation chiefs resulted in Crazy's Horse's death. — “Crzhrs”

 

 

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