Tokei-ihto
Tokei-ihto , also "Inya he yukan" or "Stone has horns" or "Stone with horns", is the main character of the six-part novel cycle " The Sons of the Great Bear " by Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich .
Tokei-ihto is the warrior name of the Lakota Indian Harka, son of Mattotaupas (four bears), who was nicknamed "rock hard", "night eye", "wolf killer", "buffalo arrow dispatcher", "bear hunter" as a boy.
His sister Uinonah later marries his blood brother "Strong as a Deer" from the Blackfoot tribe , whose sister Sitopanaki "whose feet sing when she walks" becomes the wife of Tokei-ihtos. He stabs his younger brother Harpstennah on the instructions of his father, who is in a blood feud with his tribe because he is said to have betrayed one of the tribe's gold deposits to white gold seekers (Red Fox) while intoxicated.
Harka leaves the tribe at the age of twelve because he believes his father's protests of his innocence. Only after the violent end of his father (murderer: Red Fox) does he find his way back to the Lakota and become war chief of the bear gang.
He is captured by treason and after his release leads the gang of bears from the reservation in the " Badlands " to freedom in Canada .
Tokei-ihto appears again as an ancient man in the novel cycle " The Blood of the Eagle ". There he helps the son of his great-granddaughter, an ex-gangster with the real name "Joe King", who also got the name "Stonehorn" in Lakota, out of a difficult situation. Tokei-ihto recognizes Stonehorn as the heir to his ideas and can now die.
Stonehorn and his wife "Queenie" alias Tashina continued to fight in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s in the spirit of Tokei-ihto. The occupation of " Wounded Knee " by Indian civil rights activists is discussed in the last volume of "The Blood of the Eagle". Both Stonehorn and Tashina give their lives for the idea of a humane existence for the plains Indians in modern times.
The author borrowed the name Tokei-ihto from George Catlin , who portrayed a chief of the Yankton Sioux of the same name . Catlin had translated the name Tokei-ihto as "stone with horns", which Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich took over. This later turned out to be a translation error. Tokei-ihto actually means "go first, straight through". In the second series of novels, "The Eagle's Blood", the author then correctly translated "stone with horns" as "Inya he yukan".
Cultural references
- The GDR singer Frank Schöbel dedicated a song of the same name to Tokei-ihto on his album Come We Paint a Sun (1975).
literature
- Erik Lorenz: Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich and the Indians - A biography. 1st edition. Palisander Verlag, Chemnitz 2009, ISBN 978-3-938305-14-0 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Erik Lorenz: Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich and the Indians. 2009, p. 126.