North America & Arctic · Lakota, Great Plains · Love
Lakota courting flute (siyotanka)
A Lakota suitor could court with music. Carnegie Magazine wrote in 1998 that a young man’s love song on the flute copied a bull elk bugling for a mate, and that flutes were decorated with drawings of elk. In 1918 John R. Colhoff of Pine Ridge carved and painted one in the shape of a crane.Flutes at night1902 and 1918The oldest account we could open was written by a Santee Dakota, one of the Sioux peoples alongside the Lakota. In Indian Boyhood (1902), Charles A. Eastman recalled his first years among the Sioux: young men played the carved flute late into the night for young women to hear, their robes pulled over their heads. The oldest Lakota flute we could check is a courting flute of 1918 by John R. Colhoff, born on the Pine Ridge Reservation to a Lakota mother. The Museum of Nebraska Art says he carved and painted it in the shape of a crane, a bird found in Sioux lore, and lists it as cedar with brass beads, cotton cord, hide and paint.Source: Charles A. Eastman, Indian Boyhood (Project Gutenberg eBook 337) ↗
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