A Shamanic Tale

At the beginning of Roger Welsch's Touching the Fire, the elders of Nebraska's Turtle Creek Nehawka tribe select a name by which the year just past will be remembered.
True to their traditions, the Nehawkas maintain a winter count--an orally transmitted chronology of the most memorable events of each "winter," or year as measured from the first snowfall of one year to the first snowfall of the next. Plains tribes that kept such records often augmented verbal descriptions of events with drawings, images intended to trigger knowledgeable persons' memories.