The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #132331   Message #3033738
Posted By: Haruo
16-Nov-10 - 02:42 PM
Thread Name: Joseph Renville / Lacquiparle / Dakota
Subject: RE: Joseph Renville / Lacquiparle / Dakota
I had not seen the 1842 hymnal before; it was the first hymnal in the Dakota language. It does not, as you note, contain any music, just texts, and among the texts I do not find "Wakantanka taku nitawa", which is the text usually sung to the tune Lacquiparle. (The usual English translation is a two-stanza paraphrase, by Philip Frazier, from the seven-stanza original, beginning "Many and great, O God, are thy works"; this text was written by Joseph Renville, and the tune was either composed by him or adapted by him from a preexisting anonymous Dakota melody. There is also a seven-stanza translation by Sidney Byrd, beginning "Great Spirit God, the things which are thine". In a footnote to his version of the hymn in the New Century Hymnal, Byrd cites his forebears as recounting that "This hymn was sung by 38 Dakota Indian prisoners of war as they went to the gallows at Mankato, Minnesota, on December 26, 1862, in the largest mass execution in American history."

It appears that the book I found at the Seattle Public Library is the 1868 Dakota Odowan, a predecessor of the classic 1879 hymnal of the same name (where the tune Lacquiparle first appeared in print).

Haruo