FARGO - One day soon, Dakota Goodhouse will take a rolled-up canvas out of the trunk of his car and paint a picture on it that sums up his remembrance of the past year.

The picture Goodhouse paints will depict a man with whiskers on his chin - a representation of an Iraqi militant to signify that 2004 was the year of fighting insurgents.

Goodhouse is helping revive the "winter count," a traditional practice among Dakota and Lakota Sioux for keeping time by painting pictographs marking the year's memorable events.

"Some years are harder to picture than others," said Goodhouse, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and an instructor at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck.

Goodhouse, 30, is part of a movement to bring back the winter count to Sioux reservations in North Dakota and South Dakota. The Standing Rock reservation straddles the border between the two states along the Missouri River.

Goodhouse's interest, which evolved slowly, can be traced to the day 10 years ago when he saw a photograph of an old man hanging in his father's home.

The old man was Blue Thunder, Goodhouse's great-great-grandfather. As Goodhouse would later learn, Blue Thunder's life reflected the rapid changes that overtook members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in the 19th century.

Blue Thunder once served as the village crier for his band when it was camped near old Fort Rice, an army post located near the reservation's northern fringe. He also served as an Indian scout for the Army in the 1870s.

In 1875, for instance, 19 Standing Rock Sioux worked as scouts, said Goodhouse, who has become an avid amateur tribal historian.

"They did what they had to do to feed their families," Goodhouse says of tribal members who served as Army scouts. "You just respect that. They were not considered traitors, even then."

Blue Thunder also kept a winter count, and that calendar became the central model for Goodhouse when he decided to start keeping his own record of history.

That was five years ago, when Goodhouse was searching for a senior thesis project at the University of Mary in Bismarck.

Goodhouse also studied a variant of Blue Thunder's count, kept by Theresa Yellow Lodge, who died in 1954. As an old man, Blue Thunder lived with relatives in the Yellow Lodge family. It appears that someone took over Blue Thunder's count for several years after his death, in the mid-1920s.

That's because the pictographs were drawn in a markedly different hand for the last few years, Goodhouse said.

Artistic flair wasn't a key consideration when a band or tribe assigned a member the role of keeping a winter count. It was more important that the memory custodian for an extended family be a good oral historian, a talented storyteller.

The pictographs in a winter count served as memory aids to help the oral historian when recounting events. Therefore, pictographs were selected for the most memorable events, not necessarily the most important.

Goodhouse has examined 27 Dakota and Lakota winter counts, many of them variants, or counts at least partly based on earlier versions.

Several striking patterns emerged from his study of the counts. The earlier counts tended to arrange the pictographs in a spiral moving outward from the center.

Years later, in the 1800s, the era when the Sioux were restricted to reservations, many of the counts turned around: spirals wound inward, in a circle that kept getting smaller and smaller - just as the world of the Dakota and Lakota was shrinking.

They also sometimes depicted spiritual ceremonies, such as sweat lodge rituals and relative-naming ceremonies.

The practice of keeping winter counts began dying off around the turn of the past century, when the Dakota and Lakota began learning English. The written word gradually began to take over.

The creeping influence of written language can be seen in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when numbers and names began showing up in winter counts, says Candace Greene, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

Researchers from the Smithsonian Institution are collaborating with a half-dozen Standing Rock residents to create an Internet exhibit called "Lakota Winter Counts."

Because Goodhouse used Blue Thunder's winter count as his primary guide, he had to select his own events, beginning in the late 1920s. "I thought I'd pick up where his left off," he said.

But the winter count record was very spotty by then, and he had to turn to other sources - often newspaper archives - to decide which events to depict.

By the time Goodhouse's count reached the 1950s, within living memory of relatives, it became easier to decide what should signify each year, a span bracketed between winters.

Sometimes he chose events close to Standing Rock; other times he picked national events.

As with Blue Thunder's count, Goodhouse's spirals inward. He figures he has space for 35 to 40 more pictographs before he runs out of room in the center of his 3-foot-by-12-foot muslin canvas. By then he'll be 65 or 70.

"At that point I'm going to turn over the duties to my sons," ages 10 and 4, he says.

Maybe, Goodhouse says, they'll start with a blank buffalo hide, once a traditional surface for painting pictographs. Like the buffalo, Goodhouse says, winter counts are coming back to the Dakotas.