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Lakota people

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The Lakota ([laˈkˣota]; Lakota: Lakȟóta or Lakhóta) are a Native American people. Also known as the Teton Sioux (from Thítȟuŋwaŋ), they are one of the three prominent subcultures of the Sioux people, with the Eastern Dakota (Santee) and Western Dakota (Wičhíyena). Their current lands are in North and South Dakota. They speak Lakȟótiyapi—the Lakota language, the westernmost of three closely related languages that belong to the Siouan language family.

Lakota
Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota chief and holy man, c. 1831 – December 15, 1890
Total population
170,000
Regions with significant populations
United States
(North Dakota and South Dakota)
Canada
(Manitoba and Saskatchewan)
Languages
English, Lakota
Religion
Wocekiye, Lakota religion
Related ethnic groups
Other Sioux peoples (Santee, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, Yankton, Yanktonai)[1]
Lakota
transl. 'ally' or 'friend
PeopleLakȟóta Oyáte
LanguageLakȟótiyapi
Wíyutȟapi
CountryLakȟóta Makóce, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ

Originally based around the western Great Lakes, the Lakota were pushed onto the northern Great Plains during the seventeenth century by conflicts with the Anishinaabe and Cree; after adopting horse culture around 1730, they crossed the Missouri River and established themselves in the Black Hills by the 1770s as the spiritual center of their territory. The 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty recognized Lakota sovereignty over much of the central Plains in exchange for passage along the Oregon Trail; the 1868 treaty, concluding Red Cloud's War, closed the Black Hills to white settlement "for as long as the river flows and the eagle flies," a guarantee the 1874 discovery of gold there rendered meaningless within two years. The resulting Great Sioux War culminated in the destruction of Custer's column at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, but a reinforced army ended Lakota resistance by 1877, confining the bands to reservations under a Black Hills cession treaty whose legitimacy remains disputed. Conflict flared a final time in 1890, when the killing of Sitting Bull at Standing Rock was followed two weeks later by the Wounded Knee Massacre, in which the 7th Cavalry killed more than 250 Lakota men, women, and children—an event that has endured as a defining symbol of U.S. policy toward Native nations.

Today the Lakota live primarily on five reservations in South Dakota—Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Lower Brule, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock—with further communities in North Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, and the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the latter descended from bands that fled north during the Minnesota and Black Hills wars. Each reservation is governed by an elected tribal council as a "domestic dependent nation" of the federal government. In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court awarded the Sioux nations $122 million for the Black Hills taking in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, a settlement the tribes have refused on the grounds that acceptance would extinguish their claim to the land, leaving the award to accrue interest in a federal account now worth over $1 billion. A 2007 declaration of independence by a faction associated with Russell Means was repudiated by the tribes' elected governments.

The seven bands or "sub-tribes" of the Lakota are:

Notable Lakota figures include Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake (Sitting Bull) and Tȟašúŋke Witkó (Crazy Horse), leaders during the Plains wars; Maȟpíya Lúta (Red Cloud) and Siŋté Glešká (Spotted Tail), prominent in treaty diplomacy; Heȟáka Sápa (Black Elk); and, among more recent activists, Russell Means (Oglála).

History

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Scenes of battle and horse raiding decorate a muslin Lakota tipi from the late 19th or early 20th century

Early history

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Early Lakota history is recorded in their winter counts (Lakota: waníyetu wówapi), pictorial calendars painted on hides or later recorded on paper. The Battiste Good winter count records Lakota history to 900 CE, when White Buffalo Calf Woman gave the Lakota people the White Buffalo Calf Pipe.[2][a]

Siouan-language speakers originated in the central Mississippi Valley, part of a larger movement of Siouan-speaking peoples whose gradual northwestward migration was triggered in part by the collapse of the Mississippian mound-building cultures and their great center at Cahokia from the 12th century onward.[4] The ancestral Sioux shifted slowly northwestward until they reached the pine-oak forests spreading west from the Great Lakes; the Lakotas—the westernmost of the Očhethi Šakowiŋ (Seven Council Fires)—pushed farthest, settling on lands toward the Minnesota Valley, a transition zone where Eastern Woodlands and western grasslands met.[5] The Lakota's own tradition tells a different story of origins, holding that the people emerged from Wind Cave in the Black Hills and that their long migration eastward and eventual return was simply a journey home rather than an arrival anywhere new, but this will likely remain Lakota oral accounting and no additional corroboration is available.[6]

In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Dakota-Lakota speakers lived in the upper Mississippi region in territory now organized as Minnesota and Wisconsin. War parties consisting of Cree, armed with iron weapons and seeking beaver, began pressing the Sioux from the north, pushing them westward onto the Great Plains throughout the mid- to late-17th century.[7] In the early 18th century, Lakotas obtained horses through trade with the Cheyenne along the Missouri River—animals they called šuŋkawakaŋ ("dog of power/mystery/wonder")—and began their transformation into a horse-mounted buffalo hunting culture.[8] Both Lakota and Cheyenne tradition concur on this point of transmission; the Cheyenne had themselves only recently become mounted, having acquired horses by 1766 and moved into the vicinity of the Black Hills around 1790, where further acquisition allowed them to abandon agriculture for full-time bison hunting.[9] Within a few generations the Lakota, the Cheyenne, and most other peoples of the region had adopted a common seasonal rhythm—dispersed band life through spring and autumn, sheltered winter camps, and a great summer gathering for ceremony and communal hunt, their tipi circles forming what the Lakota called the sacred hoop of the nation.[10]

In 1660, French explorers estimated the total Sioux population (Lakota, Santee, Yankton, and Yanktonai) at 28,000. In 1805, the Lakota population was estimated at 8,500; in 1881 it reached 16,110. They were one of the few Native nations to increase in population during the 19th century. In 2010, the Lakota population exceeded 170,000,[11] of whom about 2,000 still spoke Lakȟótiyapi.[12]

After 1720, the Lakota branch of the Seven Council Fires split into two major groups: the Saône, who moved to the Lake Traverse area, and the Oglála-Sičháŋǧu, who occupied the James River valley. By about 1750 the Saône had moved to the east bank of the Missouri River, followed ten years later by the Oglála and Brulé. The large Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa villages had long prevented the Lakota from crossing the Missouri River.[13]

The smallpox epidemic that began in 1781—originating in Mexico City in 1779 and carried northward through trade networks—devastated the Missouri Valley villagers. Arikaras lost more than three-fourths of their people, abandoning all but seven of their thirty-two villages; Mandan villages were reduced from eight to two.[14] The Lakota crossed the river into the short-grass prairies of the High Plains. In 1765, a Saône exploring and raiding party led by Standing Bear discovered the Black Hills (Paha Sapa), then Cheyenne territory.[13] Under Lakota pressure, the Cheyenne moved west to the Powder River country.[8] The Lakota eventually made the Black Hills their home and a central component of their existence.[15]

Treaties and conflicts with the United States

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Native peace commissioners in council with the Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho, Fort Laramie, Wyoming, 1868

Initial contact between the Lakota peoples and the United States—at least in terms of individuals officially representing the government under a commission from President Thomas Jefferson—came in September 1804, when the Lewis and Clark Expedition entered Sicangu territory near the mouth of the Bad River.[16] A council originally intended as a routine display of American authority and diplomacy that included gift-giving, a military parade, and a taste of whiskey for the assembled chiefs, quickly soured when William Clark attempted to depart with the Sicangu leaders Black Buffalo and Medicine Bull still aboard the keelboat.[16] Warriors seized the bow cable of the accompanying pirogue and refused to let it go, and the war leader the Partisan declared that the Americans would not be permitted to advance further upriver without additional gifts.[17] Clark drew his sword, Lewis ordered the expedition's swivel gun and blunderbusses loaded, and Sicangu warriors strung their bows and leveled their weapons; for several tense minutes, the entire expedition stood on the brink of an armed clash that, had it erupted, might well have ended the discovery mission on the spot and delayed American expansion into the interior for years.[18] The standoff dissolved when Black Buffalo released the cable and invited the Americans' boats to continue upriver under Sicangu escort—a resolution that established, from the outset, the terms on which the Lakota would deal with the United States: as the dominant power of the region, granting passage on their own terms rather than submitting to it.[19]

Some Lakota bands became the first Indigenous allies of the U.S. Army in an intertribal war west of the Missouri during the Arikara War of 1823.[20] In 1843, southern Lakota attacked the Pawnee village of Chief Blue Coat near the Loup River, killing many and burning half the earth lodges.[21][b]

The 1851 Lakota treaty territory

The U.S. Army constructed Fort Laramie without permission on Lakota and Arapaho land, and in 1851 the U.S. Government convened a massive multi-tribal council at Horse Creek near the fort to negotiate what became known as the Fort Laramie Treaty.[23] The resulting document—signed by Sicangu and Two Kettle headmen including Mato Oyuhi—granted the Lakota an annuity in exchange for allowing roads and military posts along the Platte, and recognized Lakota title to nearly 100,000 square miles north of the North Platte, the largest Native domain the United States had yet ratified.[24] But the two sides understood the proceedings in fundamentally different terms: American agents believed they had secured legal sovereignty over the West through a cartographic instrument, while the Lakota—who had spent more than two weeks in council, exhausting the grass for miles around—remembered the treaty chiefly for the "Great Distribution" of goods that followed,[25] and considered its territorial provisions largely irrelevant against their own right to use whatever land and resources their hunts required.[26] Indeed, several Lakota winter counts for 1851 ignored the American treaty altogether, recording instead a separate peace concluded with the Crow—negotiated privately, without American mediation, and reflecting the geopolitics that actually mattered to the Lakota.[27]

The following year, General William S. Harney—summoned from Paris specifically to "whip" the Lakota—led some six hundred soldiers up the Platte and on September 2, 1855, attacked a village of Sicangu, Oglala, Miniconjou, and Cheyenne camped along Blue Water Creek near Ash Hollow, Nebraska.[28] Despite a parley in which Sicangu leader Little Thunder—who had no part in the Grattan affair—pleaded for peace and asked only time to remove the women and children, Harney's infantry advanced while his dragoons encircled the village from the rear; trapped in a ravine, the Lakota and Cheyenne were cut down by long-range rifle fire, with at least 86 killed and 70 women and children taken captive—the Lakota’s worst defeat in more than a century.[29] Harney pushed further into Lakota territory and occupied Fort Pierre in South Dakota.[30] In the process, General Harvey captured several chiefs' families, who he held hostage, extracting a treaty so coercive that Lakota winter counts remembered him simply as "The Butcher" and "Woman Killer."[31] His invasion of the Sioux homeland forced the tribesmen to move away from places where forts, soldiers, or roads were found and the subsequent military preoccupation with the U.S. Civil War resulted in a 10-year period of "relative peace."[32]

The Black Hills were sacred to the Lakota, who objected to mining. Between 1866 and 1868, the U.S. Army fought the Lakota and their allies along the Bozeman Trail in Red Cloud's War, as the government attempted to buttress the trail through the construction of Fort Fetterman, Fort Reno, Fort Phil Kearny, and Fort C.F. Smith; meanwhile, the Oglala chief Red Cloud led his people to victory, while the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty "closed the Bozeman Trail" and established the Great Sioux Reservation, covering the western half of present-day South Dakota.[33] The treaty ultimately divided the Lakota—those led by Red Cloud settled on the reservation, while the remaining third, including the bands led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, continued to live independently off the reservation.[34]

In 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills and confirmed the presence of gold; prospectors flooded the region in violation of the 1868 treaty, and the government made no effort to remove them.[34] General Philip Sheridan encouraged troops to destroy the buffalo to starve the Lakota into submission.[35]

Lakota, Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne forces defeated General George Crook at the Battle of the Rosebud, preventing him from locating their camp; a week later, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the combined Lakota and Cheyenne forces under Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull killed more than two hundred of Custer's soldiers—the greatest Indian military victory of the Plains wars, and the last.[36][37] The victory at Little Bighorn provoked an overwhelming response. Congress placed the northern reservations under direct army control, and a winter campaign broke the remaining resistance; Crazy Horse surrendered at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, on May 6, 1877, and was killed by a soldier later that year while resisting arrest.[34] Sitting Bull, who had fled to Canada, surrendered at Fort Buford on July 19, 1881.[34]

Artist's rendering of Crazy Horse and his band of Oglala on their way from Camp Sheridan to surrender to General Crook at Red Cloud Agency

In 1877, some Lakota bands signed a treaty ceding the Black Hills to the United States; the legitimacy of this treaty remains disputed. By 1890 a drought had collapsed that year's harvest across the reservations, deepening Lakota dependence on already-inadequate federal rations—conditions of starvation and despair into which the Ghost Dance movement, promising the resurrection of the old world and the disappearance of white settlers, spread rapidly.[38] The newly arrived Pine Ridge agent, Daniel F. Royer, read the dance as preparation for war rather than as the messianic revival it was, and his alarmed dispatches—invoking the 1862 Minnesota uprising as precedent—helped bring federal troops into the region in November; the press corps that traveled with them, finding no uprising to report, manufactured one, and the resulting rumors, circulating back to literate Lakotas on the reservations, hardened the divide the newspapers themselves had drawn between "hostile" and "friendly" bands.[39]

Wounded Knee Massacre

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On December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull was shot and killed at Standing Rock by Indian police sent to arrest him.[40] His death read, for many Lakotas, as a warning of what awaited Ghost Dancers; at Cheyenne River, the already-anxious Miniconjous under Spotted Elk (Big Foot) were persuaded by a local squatter, John Dunn—sent by the army to keep them in place—that the military instead intended to deport their men to an island in the Atlantic, and on his advice they fled toward Pine Ridge on the night of December 23, Big Foot himself gravely ill with pneumonia.[39] The army, having misidentified the ailing Spotted Elk as the successor to Sitting Bull and a key threat, intercepted the band five days later and ordered it escorted to Wounded Knee Creek; on December 29, after a struggle broke out during a weapons search, the 7th Cavalry opened fire, and Hotchkiss guns positioned on the surrounding hills poured shells into the camp.[41] At least 270 Lakota died, roughly 170 of them women and children; twenty soldiers were subsequently awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for their roles in the massacre.[40] The sixteen photographs taken during the January 3 burial of 146 Lakota in a single mass grave, circulated alongside newspaper accounts of the killing, fixed Wounded Knee in the public imagination as the enduring symbol of the violence underlying U.S. Indian policy.[42]

Oglala Sioux tribal flag

Reservation era

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Today, the Lakota are found mostly in the five reservations of western South Dakota:

Lakota presence beyond the Dakota reservations traces in part to Sitting Bull's flight after the Little Bighorn: by May 1877 he and some four hundred Hunkpapa followers had taken refuge in Saskatchewan, encamped between Wood Mountain and Fort Qu'Appelle—the "Grandmother's Land" of Lakota memory—before crossing back to surrender at Fort Buford in 1881 and, after a period of detention, rejoining the Hunkpapa at Standing Rock two years later.[48] Wood Mountain remains, to this day, one of the nine Dakota and Lakota First Nations recognized in Saskatchewan.[49] The mid-twentieth-century federal relocation program drew Lakota off the reservations on a far larger scale: by the late 1990s an estimated 25,000 Native Americans—mostly Navajo and Lakota—called metropolitan Denver home, while Rapid City and Sioux Falls each held Native populations of 10,000 to 15,000 that were predominantly Lakota.[50]

Government

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United States

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Lakota beaded storage bag, late 19th century, 15 in (38 cm) wide, Cleveland Museum of Art
Lakota parfleche, c. 1890, Speed Art Museum

The Lakota tribes are federally recognized and maintain government‑to‑government relations with the United States, primarily through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) within the Department of the Interior.[51] Several Lakota tribal nations—located in the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Nebraska—elect officials to tribal councils that govern their reservations and communities.[52]

As semi‑autonomous political entities, federally recognized tribes exercise inherent powers of self‑government that are not subject to most state laws.[53] Under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 (IGRA), tribes may operate Indian gaming on their lands as a means of promoting economic development, self‑sufficiency, and strong tribal governments.[54] Tribal–federal and tribal–state relationships over jurisdiction, land status, and gaming compacts are frequently negotiated and sometimes contested.[53]

Most Lakota tribal members are also citizens of the United States under the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and may vote in local, state, and federal elections.[55] They are represented at the state and national levels through the political districts of their respective states and Congressional districts.

Tribal members—whether living on or off reservation—are eligible to vote in their tribe’s periodic elections. Each Lakota tribe determines its own citizenship criteria and maintains its own constitution, bylaws, and electoral procedures, many of which were originally authorized under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.[56] Most Lakota governments follow a multi‑member tribal council model, with a chairman or president elected at-large by tribal voters.[53]

  • The current president of the Oglala Sioux, the majority tribe of the Lakota located primarily on the Pine Ridge reservation, is Kevin Killer.
  • The president of the Sičháŋǧu Lakota at the Rosebud reservation is Rodney M. Bordeaux.
  • The chairwoman of the Standing Rock reservation, which includes peoples from several Lakota subgroups including the Húŋkpapȟa, is Janet Alkire.
  • The chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe at the Cheyenne River reservation, comprising the Mnikȟówožu, Itázipčho, Sihá Sápa, and Oóhenuŋpa bands of the Lakota, is Harold Frazier.
  • The chairman of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe (also known as the Lower Sicangu Lakota), is Boyd I. Gourneau.

Canada

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Nine bands of Dakota and Lakota—Birdtail Sioux, Canupawakpa, Dakota Plains Wahpeton, Dakota Tipi, Sioux Valley, Standing Buffalo, Wahpeton, Whitecap, and Wood Mountain—reside in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, numbering roughly 6,000 members in total;[57] excluded from the numbered treaties of the 1870s on the premise that their ancestors had arrived as refugees from the United States following the Dakota War of 1862 and the subsequent Sioux wars rather than as Aboriginal peoples of Canada, the bands were left with smaller reserves, no access to the treaty land entitlement and resource-revenue arrangements afforded their neighbors, and—until 2024—no recognition as "Aboriginal peoples of Canada" under Section 35 of the Constitution.[58]

Ottawa formally rejected the bands' claim to Aboriginal title in 2007, and the following year the nine bands unanimously declined a one-time $60.3 million payment offered in exchange for renouncing any further claim to Aboriginal or treaty rights—a refusal that, like the Sioux Nation's rejection of the Black Hills settlement decades earlier, treated the offer as an attempted purchase of rights Canada had never acknowledged in the first place.[57] That history was formally addressed on July 15, 2024, when Canada apologized to the nine Dakota and Lakota First Nations, affirmed their constitutional status as Aboriginal peoples, and committed to negotiating modern treaties and self-government arrangements;[59] the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation's self-government agreement had already taken effect in 2014, and Whitecap Dakota Nation concluded its own the year before the broader apology.[60]

Independence movement

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Mildred "Midge" Wagner, a Lakota woman, singing at a pow wow in 2015

The Lakota are among tribal nations that have taken actions, participated in occupations, and proposed independence movements, particularly since the era of rising activism since the mid to late 20th century. They filed land claims against the federal government for what they defined as illegal taking of the Black Hills in the nineteenth century.

In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled in their favor and decided in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians to award US$122 million to eight bands of Sioux Indians as compensation for their Black Hills land claims. The Sioux have refused the money, because accepting the settlement would legally terminate their demands for return of the Black Hills. The money remains in a Bureau of Indian Affairs account, accruing compound interest. As of 2011, the account has grown to over $1 billion.[61]

In September 2007, the United Nations passed a non-binding Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Canada,[62] the United States, Australia, and New Zealand refused to sign.[63]

In December 2007, a small group of people led by American Indian Movement activist Russell Means, under the name Lakota Freedom Delegation, traveled to Washington D.C. to announce a withdrawal of the Lakota Sioux from all treaties with the United States government.[64] These activists had no standing under any elected tribal government.

Official Lakota tribal leaders issued public responses to the effect that, in the words of Rosebud Lakota tribal chairman Rodney Bordeaux, "We do not support what Means and his group are doing and they don't have any support from any tribal government I know of. They don't speak for us."[65][66]

Means declared "The Republic of Lakotah", defining it as a sovereign nation with property rights over thousands of square miles in South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana.[67] The group stated that they do not act for or represent the tribal governments "set up by the BIA or those Lakota who support the BIA system of government".[68]

"The Lakota Freedom Delegation" did not include any elected leaders from any of the tribes.[65][66] Means had previously run for president of the Oglala Sioux tribe and twice been defeated. Several tribal governments – elected by tribal members – issued statements distancing themselves from the independence declaration. Some said that they were watching the independent movement closely.[65][66] No elected tribal governments endorsed the declaration.[65][66]

Wind Cave National Park

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Wind Cave, in the southern Black Hills, is the site of the Lakota emergence story—the place of origin from which the people are said to have first entered the world—and the park built around it, designated in 1903, was the first national park created specifically to protect a cave; it presently sits within the same disputed territory underlying the Sioux Nation land claims.[69] An effort in the mid-1980s to return the park's land to the Lakota failed in the legislative process.[69] A 2016 study of seventeen Lakota interviewees found broad dissatisfaction with the park's interpretation of the site. The complaints levied: Lakota perspectives were felt to be absent, relegated to the past tense, or limited to a single band's viewpoint, cave-tour fees were resented as a charge for access to a homeland rather than an attraction, and recommendations centered on hiring Lakota staff, requiring tribal perspectives on cave tours, and consulting tribes when exhibits are redesigned.[70]

Current activism

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The Lakota People made national news when NPR's "Lost Children, Shattered Families" investigative story aired regarding issues related to foster care for Native American children.[71] It exposed what many critics consider to be the "kidnapping" of Lakota children from their homes by the state of South Dakota's Department of Social Services (D.S.S.). It was noted by NPR that over half of the children in foster care in South Dakota were of Native descent.

Lakota activists such as Madonna Thunder Hawk and Chase Iron Eyes, along with the Lakota People's Law Project, have alleged that Lakota grandmothers are illegally denied the right to foster their own grandchildren. They are working to redirect federal funding away from the state of South Dakota's D.S.S. to new tribal foster care programs. This would be a historic shift away from the state's traditional control over Lakota foster children.

A short film, Lakota in America, was produced by Square. The film features Genevieve Iron Lightning, a young Lakota dancer on the Cheyenne River Reservation, one of the poorest communities in the United States. Unemployment, addiction, alcoholism, and suicide are all challenges for Lakota on the reservation.[citation needed]

Ethnonyms

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The name Lakota comes from the Lakota autonym, Lakota "feeling affection, friendly, united, allied". The early French historic documents did not distinguish a separate Teton division, instead grouping them with other "Sioux of the West", Santee and Yankton bands.

The names Teton and Tetuwan come from the Lakota name thítȟuŋwaŋ, the meaning of which is obscure. This term was used to refer to the Lakota by non-Lakota Sioux groups. Other derivations and spelling variations include: ti tanka, Tintonyanyan, Titon, Tintonha, Thintohas, Tinthenha, Tinton, Thuntotas, Tintones, Tintoner, Tintinhos, Ten-ton-ha, Thinthonha, Tinthonha, Tentouha, Tintonwans, Tindaw, Tinthow, Atintons, Anthontans, Atentons, Atintans, Atrutons, Titoba, Tetongues, Teton Sioux, Teeton, Ti toan, Teetwawn, Teetwans, Ti-t'-wawn, Ti-twans, Tit'wan, Tetans, Tieton, and Teetonwan. The classification has itself shifted. For instance, during Ella Deloria's 1930s fieldwork at Pine Ridge, "Dakota" was applied broadly to the Teton division as well, whereas today Lakota and Dakota are sharply distinguished, united only under the wider designation Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the Seven Council Fires.[72]

Early French sources call the Lakota Sioux with an additional modifier, such as Sioux of the West, West Schious, Sioux des prairies, Sioux occidentaux, Sioux of the Meadows, Nadooessis of the Plains, Prairie Indians, Sioux of the Plain, Maskoutens-Nadouessians, Mascouteins Nadouessi, and Sioux nomades.

Lakota beaded saddle belt, made c. 1850

Today many of the tribes continue to officially call themselves Sioux. In the 19th and 20th centuries, this was the name which the US government applied to all Dakota/Lakota people. Some tribes have formally or informally adopted traditional names: the Rosebud Sioux Tribe is also known as the Sičháŋǧu Oyáte (Brulé Nation), and the Oglala often use the name Oglála Lakȟóta Oyáte, rather than the English "Oglala Sioux Tribe" or OST. The alternate English spelling of Ogallala is deprecated, even though it is closer to the correct pronunciation.

The Lakota have names for their own subdivisions. The Lakota also are the most western of the three Sioux groups, occupying lands in both North and South Dakota.

Language

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During the early 200s, the Lakota language was rendered into several competing orthographies; the one now most widely used, the Standard Lakota Orthography (SLO), forms the foundation for the New Lakota Dictionary with some 43,000 entries and contains a companion Lakota Grammar handbook.[73] Though produced chiefly through the Lakota Language Consortium, SLO has spread beyond it, into curricula at Sitting Bull College, the Oglala Lakota County School District, and Maȟpíya Lúta Owáyawa (formerly Red Cloud School).[74] Linguist Ella Deloria's orthography, devised in the course of the 1930s fieldwork she conducted, anticipated much of SLO and stands as one of its principal antecedents.[74]

Reservations

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Akta Lakota Museum in Chamberlain, South Dakota

Today, one half of all enrolled Sioux live on reservations.

Lakota reservations recognized by the U.S. government include:

Some Lakota also live on other Sioux reservations in eastern South Dakota, Minnesota, and Nebraska:

Several Lakota live on the Wood Mountain First Nation reserve, near Wood Mountain Regional Park in Saskatchewan, Canada.

See also

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References

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Notes

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  1. ↑ For more on the tale around White Buffalo Calf Woman, see the following sources: Erdoes, Richard, and Alfonso Ortiz, eds., American Indian Myths and Legends. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984; Jahner, Elaine A. "Lakota Genesis: The Oral Tradition," in Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987; Brown, Joseph Epes ed., The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953.[3]
  2. ↑ Roughly 40 years later, the next major Lakota blow to the Pawnee occurred in 1873 at Massacre Canyon, during which a large Lakota war party attacked a Pawnee hunting band in southwestern Nebraska, killing as many as 100 to 150 Pawnee men, women, and children in what became the last major inter-tribal battle on the Great Plains.[22]

Citations

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  1. ↑ Pritzker 2000, p. 328.
  2. ↑ Smithsonian 2012.
  3. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 443–444, fn1.
  4. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, p. 15.
  5. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 15–16.
  6. ↑ Wishart 2004, p. 2.
  7. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, p. 14.
  8. 1 2 Liberty 2008.
  9. ↑ Wishart 2004, p. 48.
  10. ↑ Wilson 1999, p. 255.
  11. ↑ The World Data, "Lakota Tribe".
  12. ↑ Lakhota.org 2016.
  13. 1 2 Kracht 2004.
  14. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 95–96.
  15. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 93, 166–168, 234–236.
  16. 1 2 Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 132–133.
  17. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 133–134.
  18. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 133–136.
  19. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 136–137, 150.
  20. ↑ Meyer 1977, p. 54.
  21. ↑ Jensen 1994, p. 307.
  22. ↑ Riley 1973, pp. 221–249.
  23. ↑ Cutlip 2018.
  24. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 219–220.
  25. ↑ Marshall 2005, p. 34.
  26. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 220–221.
  27. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 220–222.
  28. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 226–228.
  29. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 228–229.
  30. ↑ Barrett 2004a, p. 187.
  31. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 229–230.
  32. ↑ Barrett 2004a, pp. 187–188.
  33. ↑ Gibbon 2003, pp. 116–117.
  34. 1 2 3 4 Gibbon 2003, p. 117.
  35. ↑ LaDuke 1999, p. 141.
  36. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, p. 250.
  37. ↑ Kappler 1904, pp. 998–1004.
  38. ↑ Carter 2004, p. 222.
  39. 1 2 Carter 2004, p. 223.
  40. 1 2 Hämäläinen 2019, p. 379.
  41. ↑ Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 378–379.
  42. ↑ Carter 2004, pp. 223–224.
  43. ↑ Bureau of Indian Affairs, Pine Ridge Agency.
  44. ↑ Bureau of Indian Affairs, Rosebud Agency.
  45. ↑ Bureau of Indian Affairs, Lower Brule Agency.
  46. ↑ Bureau of Indian Affairs, Cheyenne River Agency.
  47. ↑ Bureau of Indian Affairs, Standing Rock Agency.
  48. ↑ Barrett 2004b, p. 189.
  49. ↑ CBC News 2024.
  50. ↑ Fixico 2004, pp. 212–213.
  51. ↑ Bureau of Indian Affairs 2023.
  52. ↑ Federal Register 2024.
  53. 1 2 3 CRS 2023.
  54. ↑ Murray, Donley & Scherer 2025.
  55. ↑ National Archives 1924.
  56. ↑ Bureau of Indian Affairs 2022.
  57. 1 2 CBC News 2007.
  58. ↑ Gwozdz 2024.
  59. ↑ Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada 2024.
  60. ↑ CKOM 2024.
  61. ↑ Streshinsky 2011.
  62. ↑ "Canada votes 'no' as UN native rights declaration passes". CBCNews. September 13, 2007. Canada's UN ambassador, John McNee, said Canada had "significant concerns" over the declaration's wording on provisions addressing lands and resources
  63. ↑ "UBB Message – ReaderRant". Archived from the original on March 3, 2021. Retrieved January 1, 2008.
  64. ↑ "Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US" Archived June 9, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, Agence France-Presse news Archived August 21, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  65. 1 2 3 4 Gale Courey Toensing (January 4, 2008). "Withdrawal from US treaties enjoys little support from tribal leaders". Indian Country Today. Archived from the original on May 4, 2016. Retrieved March 28, 2016.
  66. 1 2 3 4 Lakota Sioux Have NOT Withdrawn From the US; in The Daily Kos; December 23, 2007; accessed March 28, 2016
  67. ↑ Bill Harlan, "Lakota group secedes from U.S." Archived August 23, 2009, at the Wayback Machine, Rapid City Journal, December 20, 2007.
  68. ↑ "Lakota group pushes for new nation", Argus Leader, Washington Bureau, December 20, 2007
  69. 1 2 Smaldone & Rossi 2019, p. 99.
  70. ↑ Smaldone & Rossi 2019, pp. 101–104.
  71. ↑ NPR 2011.
  72. ↑ Firethunder 2025, p. 263.
  73. ↑ Firethunder 2025, pp. 263–264.
  74. 1 2 Firethunder 2025, p. 264.

Bibliography

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Further reading

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  • Andersson, Rani-Henrik & David C. Posthumus (2022). Lakĥóta: An Indigenous History, Norman: University of Oklahoma press.
  • Brown, Dee (1950). Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Macmillan.
  • Christafferson, Dennis M. (2001). "Sioux, 1930–2000". In R. J. DeMallie (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians: Plains (Vol. 13, Part 2, pp. 821–839). W. C. Sturtevant (Gen. Ed.). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-16-050400-7
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