Lakota people

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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

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.

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

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

Lakota origin records and legends

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] According to this legend, which remains central to Lakota religious tradition, the very beautiful Ptesáŋwiŋ (White Buffalo Woman) appeared to two hunters, destroyed the one who approached her with impure intentions, and then presented the sacred buffalo calf pipe (ptehíŋčala čhaŋnúŋpa) to the people through the chief Standing Hollow Horn—its bowl of red stone representing the Earth, its wooden stem all growing things, its twelve eagle feathers all winged creatures, together binding the Lakota to every element of the universe through prayer to Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka.[3] Departing, she transformed successively into a red-and-brown calf, a white buffalo, and a black buffalo—bowing to the four quarters of the universe before disappearing—with a promise to return at the end.[4] The pipe she left behind was not merely a ritual object but the symbolic center of Lakota cosmology: its fire the universe's focal point, its smoke a direct conduit to the Great Mystery, and White Buffalo Woman herself the mediating link between the sacred and the human.[5][a]

Early history

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.[7] 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.[8] 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.[9]

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.[10] 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.[11] 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.[12] 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.[13]

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,[14] of whom about 2,000 still spoke Lakȟótiyapi.[15]

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.[16]

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.[17] 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.[16] Under Lakota pressure, the Cheyenne moved west to the Powder River Country.[11] The Lakota eventually made the Black Hills their home and a central component of their existence.[18]

Preliminary intercultural relations

Before the treaty era imposed its framework of cession and capitulation, the Lakota—like other tribes—engaged neighboring Indigenous nations and successive waves of French, British, and American traders through channels of negotiation, gift exchange, and ritualized alliance-making (if not kinship).[19] These negotiations were deployed with strategic precision, and the associated trade networks were calibrated to maximize access to horses and firearms alike, while Lakota diplomacy was sophisticated enough to reshape their internal political geography as much as it resulted from outside interactions.[20][21] What emerged was neither passive accommodation nor unilateral disruption but a pattern of selective adoption—new economic networks grafted onto existing structures of oyáte sovereignty—that would define Lakota relations with the wašíču well into the treaty period itself.[20]

Treaties and conflicts

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.[22] 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.[22] Warriors seized the bow cable of the accompanying pirogue and refused to let it go, and the war leader declared that the Americans would not be permitted to advance further upriver without additional gifts.[23] 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.[24] 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.[25]

Some Lakota bands became the first Indigenous allies of the U.S. Army—led by Col. Henry Leavenworth—in an intertribal war west of the Missouri during the Arikara War of 1823,[26] an effort during which the Lakota were unimpressed by the American soldier's battlefield performance.[27] The Northern Lakota, convinced that the American soldiers were weak, hardened their preference for British trade and set the northern and southern oyáte on divergent courses before the expedition even departed Fort Leavenworth for its 1825 treaty circuit.[28] The American Horse ledger's account of the Oglála deliberations preceding the council offers an uncommonly direct view of Lakota governance in action: a thiyóthipi (council lodge) convened, elder headmen presided, wakíčhuŋza (deciders) served as heralds, and akíčhita societies enforced order—structures that almost certainly predated 1825 by a considerable margin.[28] The deliberations themselves were fractious; fierce opposition to any treaty engagement with the wašíču (whites) was overcome only through the forceful intervention of Bull Bear (Matȟó Tȟatȟáŋka), whose pressure carried the Oglála toward the council table—the division between accommodation and resistance that would fracture Lakota policy toward the United States across the entire nineteenth century already fully legible by the summer of 1825.[29]

Still, the first two decades of the nineteenth century passed without a single recorded killing between Lakota and whites; the winter counts instead document new trading posts, expanding commerce, and—for the Oglála and Sičháŋğu—a strategic preference for American trade over British, a division that already set the northern and southern oyáte at cross-purposes.[30] The 1825 Atkinson-O'Fallon expedition[31] secured the first formal treaty between the United States and the Lakota of the Plains, though most winter counts ignored it entirely in favor of recording that year's Missouri River flood—a hierarchy of significance that accurately reflected the treaty's negligible practical effect on Lakota life.[32] The peace held until the Oregon Trail fractured it: emigrant cattle consumed the prairie grasses upon which the buffalo subsisted, bovine disease decimated the herds, and the great herd that had sustained Lakota prosperity began its irreversible division into northern and southern remnants—a crisis the Oglála and Sičháŋğu documented in a remarkable January 1846 letter to the President of the United States, invoking the custom of iglúwašte (reciprocity) and asserting themselves not as supplicants but as equal negotiating partners demanding compensation under the terms of the 1825 treaty itself.[33]

Intertribal warfare remained a fact of indigenous life on the plains and the growing influence and expansion of the Lakota continued to challenge the Mandan, Crow, Pawnee, and Arikara well into the 1840s.[34] Perhaps the only exception to the ongoing intertribal warfare for the Lakota was the treaty they made with the Cheyenne between 1840 and 1841.[35] In 1843, southern Lakota attacked the Pawnee village of Chief Blue Coat near the Loup River, killing many and burning half the earth lodges.[36][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.[38] 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.[39] 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,[40] and considered its territorial provisions largely irrelevant against their own right to use whatever land and resources their hunts required.[41] 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.[42]

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.[43] 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.[44] Harney pushed further into Lakota territory and occupied Fort Pierre in South Dakota.[45] 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."[46] 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."[47]

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.[48] 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.[49]

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.[49] General Philip Sheridan encouraged troops to destroy the buffalo to starve the Lakota into submission.[50]

Rosebud, Little Big Horn, and the Black Hills Treaty

On 17 June 1876, a united assemblage of Lakota, Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne forces defeated General George Crook at the Battle of the Rosebud, preventing him from locating their camp; a victory that the late native speaking Lakota teacher, writer, activist, and actor Joseph M. Marshall III—drawing from long-standing oral heritage among the Lakota—claims his people feared at the time, realizing that the "Long Knives"[51] (a term applied to U.S. soldiers in their blue coats, carrying swords and bayonets affixed to their rifles) would ultimately seek revenge despite the tactical success of the indigenous forces.[52] Only a week later, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the combined Lakota and Cheyenne forces under Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeated Custer—the greatest Indian military victory of the Plains wars, and the last.[53][54] Custer's annihilation at the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876—twelve officers, 247 soldiers, and three Arikara scouts lost, per Sherman's report—sent shockwaves through the American military establishment and its political class alike;[55] yet the search for explanation revealed, above all, how thoroughly the army had miscalculated its enemy.[56] General Terry's orders to Custer had been framed around preventing flight, not repelling a disciplined defense—a directive that exposed the command's foundational assumption that the Lakota and Cheyenne would scatter rather than fight.[56] Whether Custer underestimated the camp's scale or simply could not afford, under his orders, to withdraw, remains contested; what is not debated is that the failure of intelligence extended well above him.[56][c] The victory, for whatever its worth to the indigenous tribesmen, carried its own burden: Sitting Bull had warned that the desecration of his vision—the prohibition against taking spoils from the fallen, left unheeded—would later consign the Lakota to permanent dependence on the wašíču; a prophecy confirmed in the subsequent decades.[56] 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.[49] Sitting Bull, who had fled to Canada, surrendered at Fort Buford on July 19, 1881.[49]

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;[57] the legitimacy of this treaty remains disputed.[58] 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.[59] 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.[60]

Wounded Knee Massacre

On December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull was shot and killed at Standing Rock by Indian police sent to arrest him.[61] For many Lakotas, his death represented 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.[60] 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.[62] At least 270 Lakota died, roughly 170 of them women and children; twenty U.S. soldiers were subsequently awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for their roles in the massacre.[61] 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.[63]

Oglala Sioux tribal flag

Government

United States

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.[64] Several Lakota tribal nations—located in the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Nebraska—elect officials to tribal councils that govern their reservations and communities.[65]

As semi‑autonomous political entities, federally recognized tribes exercise inherent powers of self‑government that are not subject to most state laws.[66] 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.[67] Tribal–federal and tribal–state relationships over jurisdiction, land status, and gaming compacts are frequently negotiated and sometimes contested.[66]

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.[68] 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.[69] Most Lakota governments follow a multi‑member tribal council model, with a chairman or president elected at-large by tribal voters.[66]

Canada

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;[70] 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.[71]

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.[70] 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;[72] 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.[73]

Independence movement

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

The Lakota have participated in occupations, treaty‑rights actions, and sovereignty or independence movements since the rise of Indigenous activism in the mid‑ to late‑20th century.[74] They also filed land claims against the federal government for what they defined as the illegal taking of the Black Hills in the nineteenth century, a position affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in 1980.[75]

In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled in their favor in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, awarding US$122 million to eight Sioux tribes as compensation for the Black Hills land seizure. The tribes refused the settlement because accepting it would legally terminate their claim to the Black Hills. The funds remain in a Bureau of Indian Affairs account, accruing interest; by 2011 the total exceeded $1 billion.[76]

In September 2007, the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand initially voted against the declaration.[77] Then in December 2007, a small group led by American Indian Movement activist Russell Means, calling itself the Lakota Freedom Delegation, traveled to Washington, D.C., to announce a unilateral withdrawal of the Lakota Sioux from all treaties with the United States. Official Lakota tribal leaders rejected the declaration.[78] Rosebud Sioux tribal chairman Rodney Bordeaux stated: "We do not support what Means and his group are doing...They don't speak for us."[78] Additional commentary from Lakota community members and journalists likewise emphasized that the delegation did not represent any tribal government.[78] No elected tribal governments endorsed the declaration, and several issued statements distancing themselves from the movement.[78]

Wind Cave National Park

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.[79] An effort in the mid-1980s to return the park's land to the Lakota failed in the legislative process.[79] 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.[80]

Ethnonyms

The name Sioux derives from a French corruption of the Ojibwe Nadowessiwak, "little snakes."[4] The autonym Lakȟóta—shared in dialectal variant with Dakȟóta and Nakȟóta across the three divisions—carries the meaning "allies," a rendering that supersedes the occasionally suggested gloss of "people."[81] The Teton designation derives from the Lakȟóta thítȟuŋwaŋ, possibly meaning "dwellers on the plains."[81]

Lakota beaded saddle belt, made c. 1850

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French documentation drew no distinction between the Teton and the other western divisions of the Sioux; all three—Santee, Yankton, and Teton—were grouped indiscriminately as "Sioux of the West," set against the "Sioux of the East" on the opposite bank of the Mississippi.[82] The seven Lakȟóta tribes collectively designate themselves the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the Seven Council Fires—a term that sometimes extends to the Sioux Nation as a whole rather than the Lakȟóta alone, and which, despite the absence of historical evidence for a unified political entity of that number, functions as a powerful symbol of collective identity for both Lakȟóta and Dakȟóta peoples.[81][d]

Language

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.[84] 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).[85] 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.[85]

Reservations

Akta Lakota Museum in Chamberlain, South Dakota

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

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

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.[91] Wood Mountain remains, to this day, one of the nine Dakota and Lakota First Nations recognized in Saskatchewan.[92] 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.[93]

Modern activism about Lakota children

The over-representation of Lakota and other Native American children in South Dakota's foster care system has been a persistent site of activism and litigation. National attention first focused on the issue in 2011, when NPR's investigative series "Lost Children, Shattered Families" documented what critics characterized as the systematic removal of Lakota children by the state Department of Social Services (DSS), with Native children constituting more than half of all children then in South Dakota foster care.[94] Lakota activists—among them Madonna Thunder Hawk and Chase Iron Eyes of the Lakota People's Law Project—have alleged that Lakota grandmothers are routinely and illegally denied the right to foster their own grandchildren, and have pressed for the redirection of federal child welfare funding from the state DSS to tribal foster care programs.[94]

The problem has only deepened in the intervening years. A joint investigation by South Dakota Searchlight and the Argus Leader, published in November 2023 under the title "The Lost Children," found that Native American children accounted for nearly 74 percent of all children in South Dakota's foster care system at the close of fiscal year 2023—despite constituting only 13 percent of the state's overall child population; by comparison, white children, who make up 70 percent of the state's child population, accounted for only 21 percent of the foster care population.[95] The disparity has persisted: Native American children made up 72.5 percent of South Dakota's foster care population at the close of fiscal year 2024, and 70 percent at the close of fiscal year 2025.[96]

The legal framework governing Native child placement, the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA), survived a major constitutional challenge when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7–2 in Haaland v. Brackeen, 599 U.S. (2023), that ICWA does not exceed Congress's authority under the Indian Commerce Clause and does not violate the Tenth Amendment's anti-commandeering doctrine.[97] Chase Iron Eyes, then serving as an attorney with the Lakota Law Project, described the decision as a "watershed moment" for tribal sovereignty.[98] Notwithstanding the ruling, advocates and tribal ICWA coordinators have noted that widespread noncompliance with the Act in South Dakota's state courts and child welfare system continues to drive Native children into non-Native placements.[95]

See also

References

Notes

  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.[6]
  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.[37]
  3. Post-battle mythologization began almost immediately. Sitting Bull acquired the improbable legend of a West Point education; Custer migrated from scapegoat to martyr; and Indian Agent James McLaughlin, operating with particular animus through the 1880s, systematically recast Sitting Bull—formerly celebrated as a tactician—as a coward who had fled the field.[56]
  4. 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.[83]

Citations

  1. Pritzker 2000, p. 328.
  2. Smithsonian 2012.
  3. Andersson & Posthumus 2022, pp. 7–10.
  4. Andersson & Posthumus 2022, pp. 9–10.
  5. Andersson & Posthumus 2022, p. 10.
  6. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 443–444, fn1.
  7. Hämäläinen 2019, p. 15.
  8. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 15–16.
  9. Wishart 2004, p. 2.
  10. Hämäläinen 2019, p. 14.
  11. Liberty 2008.
  12. Wishart 2004, p. 48.
  13. Wilson 1999, p. 255.
  14. The World Data, "Lakota Tribe".
  15. Lakhota.org 2016.
  16. Kracht 2004.
  17. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 95–96.
  18. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 93, 166–168, 234–236.
  19. Blakeslee 1981, pp. 759–768.
  20. Andersson & Posthumus 2022, pp. 45–58.
  21. DeMallie 2001a, pp. 720–725.
  22. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 132–133.
  23. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 133–134.
  24. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 133–136.
  25. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 136–137, 150.
  26. Meyer 1977, p. 54.
  27. Andersson & Posthumus 2022, p. 77.
  28. Andersson & Posthumus 2022, pp. 77–78.
  29. Andersson & Posthumus 2022, p. 78.
  30. Andersson & Posthumus 2022, pp. 76–79.
  31. Nichols 1963, pp. 65–82.
  32. Andersson & Posthumus 2022, pp. 77–79.
  33. Andersson & Posthumus 2022, pp. 79–82.
  34. Andersson & Posthumus 2022, p. 80.
  35. Andersson & Posthumus 2022, pp. 81–82.
  36. Jensen 1994, p. 307.
  37. Riley 1973, pp. 221–249.
  38. Cutlip 2018.
  39. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 219–220.
  40. Marshall 2005, p. 34.
  41. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 220–221.
  42. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 220–222.
  43. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 226–228.
  44. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 228–229.
  45. Barrett 2004a, p. 187.
  46. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 229–230.
  47. Barrett 2004a, pp. 187–188.
  48. Gibbon 2003, pp. 116–117.
  49. Gibbon 2003, p. 117.
  50. LaDuke 1999, p. 141.
  51. Marshall 2005, p. 22.
  52. Marshall 2005, pp. 220–235.
  53. Hämäläinen 2019, p. 250.
  54. Kappler 1904, pp. 998–1004.
  55. Carney 2015, pp. 111–129.
  56. Andersson & Posthumus 2022, pp. 167–168.
  57. Buecker 1995, pp. 110–111.
  58. Hanson 1980, p. 459–484.
  59. Carter 2004, p. 222.
  60. Carter 2004, p. 223.
  61. Hämäläinen 2019, p. 379.
  62. Hämäläinen 2019, pp. 378–379.
  63. Carter 2004, pp. 223–224.
  64. Bureau of Indian Affairs 2023.
  65. Federal Register 2024.
  66. CRS 2023.
  67. Murray, Donley & Scherer 2025.
  68. National Archives 1924.
  69. Bureau of Indian Affairs 2022.
  70. CBC News 2007.
  71. Gwozdz 2024.
  72. Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada 2024.
  73. CKOM 2024.
  74. Ostler 2011, pp. 171–182, 183–192.
  75. U.S. Supreme Court 1980.
  76. Streshinsky 2011.
  77. CBC News 2007b.
  78. Toensing 2008.
  79. Smaldone & Rossi 2019, p. 99.
  80. Smaldone & Rossi 2019, pp. 101–104.
  81. Andersson & Posthumus 2022, pp. 10–11.
  82. DeMallie 2001a, p. 722.
  83. Firethunder 2025, p. 263.
  84. Firethunder 2025, pp. 263–264.
  85. Firethunder 2025, p. 264.
  86. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Pine Ridge Agency.
  87. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Rosebud Agency.
  88. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Lower Brule Agency.
  89. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Cheyenne River Agency.
  90. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Standing Rock Agency.
  91. Barrett 2004b, p. 189.
  92. CBC News 2024.
  93. Fixico 2004, pp. 212–213.
  94. NPR 2011.
  95. Huber & Todd 2023.
  96. Huber 2025.
  97. U.S. Supreme Court 2023.
  98. Dakota News Now 2023.

Bibliography

Further reading

  • 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