Family, friends, and the Lakota Nation lost a great elder on Friday with the passing of Joseph Marshall III. A natural born storyteller, Joe learned the Lakota way of sharing history and culture at the feet of his grandfather and other old men.
He became a teacher, a writer, an actor and film consultant. He lived in Casper in the early 1980s when I first met him, and was working for the American Heart Association and the Red Cross.
Joe had his first articles and books published and a film producer found him. Recognizing that Joe had a way with words, and an understanding of Lakota language and culture that would significantly improve films, the producer drew him into a new career.
The Beginning
In the beginning, the boy sat with his grandfather and the other old men under a cottonwood tree in the 1950s, choosing to listen to their stories rather than to join others his age in a game. These old men spoke in their own language, Lakota, but that didn’t matter to the boy, he lived with his grandparents and it was his first language.
A member of the Sicangu Oyate tribe, Joe grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, ten miles southwest of White River, South Dakota, on his grandmother’s land. They lived in a log cabin she had built. His playground was 160 acres and he had a couple of dogs and a horse.
When the boy went to school, at about age eight, he was the oldest in the kindergarten class, and barely spoke any English. But this boy who liked listening to the stories of his elders, did fine in school; many of the other children spoke Lakota and some English, so they learned together.
Telling The Stories
Joe earned his understanding and Lakota knowledge by spending time with the people of his grandparents’ generation “wanting to tell their stories.”
“I loved those stories,” he told me three years ago, explaining how he would ask for the same stories many times over. That repetition of story is the tenant of oral history. “It was the motivation and the mechanism to remember it,” he said.
Stories always entertained Joe and it was perhaps inevitable that one day Joe would write his own, recounting the tales he’d learned as a boy – always drawing from his Lakota culture for inspiration.
His first books were Soldiers Falling into Camp: The Battles at the Rosebud and the Little Big Horn (1992, with Robert Kammen and Frederick Lefthand); Winter of the Holy Iron (1994); and On Behalf of the Wolf and the First Peoples (1995).
Then he wrote a collection of short stories and essays, The Dance House: Stories from Rosebud (1998).
He wrote The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History; Hundred in the Hand, the story of the 1866 Fetterman battle; and The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn that won the PEN/Beyond Margins Arts.
The Long Knives are Crying, a novel about the Battle of the Little Big Horn, was a 2009 Spur Award finalist from Western Writers of America for Best Western Long Novel.
In 2023 he was the Owen Wister Award recipient for Lifetime Contributions to Western Literature and was inducted into the Western Writers Hall of Fame, at the McCracken Research Library in Cody.
From A Humble Childhood
Joe’s humble childhood gave him a foundation that he stood on throughout his life.
Once he earned a college degree, Joe served in the military and taught in South Dakota.
Then he worked in tribal government before he moved to Casper to work for the American Heart Association when his first opportunity to write for a public audience came from an editor at the Casper Star-Tribune.
Once he began writing, the pages filled with words and Marshall filled shelves with his own books.
Founder of College, Then On To Movies
It was not enough for Joe to know and write about his culture. He also became a profound educator.
He taught the art of bowmaking to young people for Lakota Youth Initiative on the Rosebud Reservation. He was one of the founders of Sinte Gleske University, one of the first three tribal colleges in the United States.
It was a seminal idea with tribal colleges also developed at Pine Ridge on the Oglala Lakota Reservation and on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico and Arizona. The movement caught on so today there are 38 Indian colleges.
Joe’s first work with movies was as a technical and language advisor on the film “The Lakota Moon” written by John Wilder and directed by Christopher Cain. It starred Rodney Grant, Gordon Tootoosis, Casey Camp-Horinek, and Zahn McClarnon.
He then had a non-speaking role as a warrior in “Return to Lonesome Dove” based on the Larry McMurtry novel.
For “Into the West” produced by Turner Network Television, Joe was again working as a technical advisor and he also played the elder, Loved by the Buffalo.
“I had never acted before” Marshall told me. “I was terrified that I would come across very unauthentically. The basic thing was I was picked a role to play that was a native person, so at least I had that in the bag. It wasn’t too much of a stretch.”
That was Joe, strong, confident, willing to poke a little fun at himself. He was a tremendous writer, an inspiring speaker, an imposing figure. And I’m grateful to say, a friend of mine, who was always so willing to share his Lakota ways and understanding.
I’ll give him the last words:
“The old man cleared his throat…. Life is a circle like all of these stones. Look at the sun. It is round, a circle, and so is the moon. Drop a stone in a pond, and you see circles grow.
“The seasons go in a circle: winter, spring, summer, and autumn, over and over. When we pray, we start by facing west, where the Great Powers live; then we turn north, then east, then south.
“We show our respect to all our relatives by moving in a circle.” – Joseph Marshall II, The Lakota Way of Strength and Courage: Lessons in Resilience from the Bow and Arrow
Candy Moulton can be reached at Candy.L.Moulton@gmail.com
