The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising ...history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty†'first century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter†'gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then-in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion-as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. Hämäläinen's deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.
The general focus in Lakota oral literary research has been in the study ofcontentrather thanprocessin oral traditions. In a new disclosure of the characteristics of Lakota oral style, Delphine Red ...Shirt shows how its composition and structure are reflected in the work of George Sword, who composed 245 pages of text in the Lakota language using the English alphabet. What emerges in Sword's Lakota narratives are the formulaic patterns inherent in the Lakota language that are used to tell the narratives, as well as recurring themes and story patterns. Red Shirt's primary conclusion is that this cadence originates from a distinctly Lakota oral tradition.Red Shirt analyzes historic documents and original texts in Lakota to answer the question: How is Lakota literature defined? Her groundbreaking discernment of the process of composition of Native literature uncovers the epistemological basis of this literature, which provides the object for literary studies, anthropological linguistics, translation studies, and linguistics. Her analysis of Sword's texts can be used to determine whether the origin of any given narrative in Lakota tradition is oral and opens avenues for further research.
InAll My RelativesDavid C. Posthumus offers the first revisionist history of the Lakotas' religion and culture in a generation. He applies key insights from what has been called the "ontological ...turn," particularly the dual notions of interiority/soul/spirit and physicality/body and an extended notion of personhood, as proposed by A. Irving Hallowell and Philippe Descola, which includes humans as well as nonhumans.All My Relativesdemonstrates how a new animist framework can connect and articulate otherwise disparate and obscure elements of Lakota ethnography. Stripped of its problematic nineteenth-century social evolutionary elements and viewed as an ontological or spiritual alternative, this reevaluated concept of animism for a twenty-first-century sensibility provides a compelling lens through which traditional Lakota mythology, dreams and visions, and ceremony may be productively analyzed and more fully understood.Posthumus explores how Lakota animist beliefs permeate the understanding of the real world in relation to such phenomena as the personhood of rocks, ghosts or spirits of deceased humans and animals, meteorological phenomena, familiar spirits or spirit helpers, and medicine bundles.All My Relativesoffers new insights into traditional Lakota culture for a deeper and more enduring understanding of indigenous cosmology, ontology, and religion.
The Dakota Way of Life Deloria, Ella Cara; DeMallie, Raymond J; Veyrié, Thierry
12/2022
eBook
Ella Cara Deloria was the most prolific Native scholar of the greater Sioux Nation, and the results of her lifelong work comprise an essential source for the study of the greater Sioux Nation culture ...and language.
To Come to a Better Understandinganalyzes the cultural encounters of the medicine men and clergy meetings held on Rosebud Reservation in St. Francis, South Dakota, from 1973 through 1978. Organized ...by Father Stolzman, a Catholic priest studying Lakota religious practice, the meetings fit the goal of the recently formed Medicine Men's Association to share its members' knowledge about Lakota thought and ritual. Both groups stated that the purpose of the historic theological discussions was "to come to a better understanding." Though the groups ended their formal discussions after eighty-four meetings, Sandra L. Garner shows how this cultural exchange reflects a rich Native intellectual tradition and articulates the multiple meanings of "understanding" that necessarily characterize intercultural encounters.Garner examines the exchanges of these two very different cultures, which share a history of inequitable power relationships, to explore questions of cultural ownership and activism. These meetings were another form of activism, a "quiet side" without the militancy of the American Indian Movement. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival analysis, this volume focuses on the medicine men participants-who served as translators, interpreters, and cultural mediators-to explore how modern political, social, and religious issues were negotiated from an indigenous perspective that valued experience as critical to understanding.
The Last Sovereigns is the story of how Sitting Bull resisted the white man's ways as a last best hope for the survival of an Indigenous way of life--a nomadic life based on the buffalo--that was ...sacred to him and to his people.
Too Strong to Be Broken explores the dynamic life of
Edward J. Driving Hawk, a Vietnam and Korean War veteran, chairman
of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, former president of the National
Congress of ...American Indians, husband, father, recovered alcoholic,
and convicted felon. Driving Hawk's story begins with his childhood
on the rural plains of South Dakota, then follows him as he travels
back and forth to Asia for two wars and journeys across the Midwest
and Southwest. In his positions of leadership back in the United
States, Driving Hawk acted in the best interest of his community,
even when sparring with South Dakota governor Bill Janklow and the
FBI. After retiring from public service, he started a construction
business and helped create the United States Reservation Bank and
Trust. Unfortunately, a key participant in the bank embezzled
millions and fled, leaving Driving Hawk to take the blame. Rather
than plead guilty to a crime he did not commit, the
seventy-four-year-old grandfather went to prison for a year and a
day, even as he suffered the debilitating effects of Agent Orange.
Driving Hawk fully believes that the spirits of his departed
ancestors watched out for him during his twenty-year career in the
U.S. Air Force, including his exposure to Agent Orange, and
throughout his life as he survived surgeries, strokes, a tornado, a
plane crash, and alcoholism. With the help of his sister, Virginia
Driving Hawk Sneve, Driving Hawk recounts his life's story
alongside his wife, Carmen, and their five children.
In this autobiography, Viola Burnette braids the history of the Lakota people with the story of her own life as an Iyeska , or mixed-race Indian. Bringing together her years growing up on a ...reservation, her work as a lawyer and legal advocate for Native peoples, and her woman’s perspective, she draws the reader into an intelligent and intimate conversation.
The Fort Laramie treaties of 1851 and 1868 changed everything for the Sioux. When Burnette was born on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in the late 1930s, her people were still striving to make sense of how to live under the impoverished conditions created by the imposed land restrictions. Like most Native children at that time, she was forced by federal law to attend boarding school and assimilate into white culture. Her story reveals the resulting internal conflict that she and her people faced in embracing their own identity in a world where those in authority taught that speaking Lakota and being Indian were wrong. After a difficult jump into adulthood, Burnette emerged from an abusive marriage and, while raising four children, enrolled in junior college in her thirties and law school in her forties. She went on to become an advocate for women subjected to domestic violence and the first attorney general for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe.
Borne out under the far-reaching effects of the government-enforced restructuring of her people, Burnette’s inspiring narrative of strength and determination makes clear the importance of understanding history from a Native standpoint.
“I am an Iyeska and I am assimilated, but on my own terms. I choose when, where, and how I use the knowledge and skills I have learned. As long as we continue to teach our children and grandchildren the language, values, and traditions of the Lakota people, we will survive.”—from the book
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