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.
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.
After centuries of colonization, this important new work recovers the literary record of Oceti Sakowin (historically known to some as the Sioux Nation) women, who served as their tribes’ traditional ...culture keepers and culture bearers. In so doing, it furthers discussions about settler colonialism, literature, nationalism, and gender.
Women and land form the core themes of the book, which brings tribal and settler colonial narratives into comparative analysis. Divided into two parts, the first section of the work explores how settler colonizers used the printing press and boarding schools to displace Oceti Sakowin women as traditional culture keepers and culture bearers with the goal of internally and externally colonizing the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations. The second section focuses on decolonization and explores how contemporary Oceti Sakowin writers and scholars have started to reclaim Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota literatures to decolonize and heal their families, communities, and nations.
This article examines the materiality of the Ghost Dance shirt - ógle wakȟáŋ kiŋ - among the Lakota, and its associated symbols and functions. By cross-referencing sources on the Ghost Dance to ...sources on traditional Lakota belief and ritual, it is shown that the practice of interrituality - the use of established ritual elements and acts in novel contexts - enabled traditional ritual dynamics and ontological understandings to be actualized and materialized in the Ghost Dance. This gave it performative powers and a sense of cultural familiarity with which participants could navigate a turbulent period with recognizable ritual elements. Considering the primacy of visions, concepts such as wakȟáŋ, wašíčuŋ, tȟúŋ, and wótȟawe, protective designs, and ritual processes, the article problematizes a tradition-innovation dichotomy, suggesting instead that ritual materiality mediated between the two. Likewise, it is argued that the protective nature of the shirts was primarily existential and spiritual rather than exhibitions of militarism.
The interest of nineteenth-century Lakotas in the sun, moon, and stars was an essential part of their never-ending quest to understand their world.The Spirit and the Skypresents a survey of the ...ethnoastronomy of the nineteenth-century Lakota and relates Lakota astronomy to their cultural practices and beliefs. The center of Lakota belief is the incomprehensible, extraordinary, and sacred nature of the world in which they live. The earth beneath and the stars above constitute their holistic world.Mark Hollabaugh offers a detailed analysis of all aspects of Lakota culture that have a bearing on their astronomy, including telling time, Lakota names for the stars and constellations as they appeared on the Great Plains, and the phenomena of meteor showers, eclipses, and the aurora borealis. Hollabaugh's explanation of the cause of the aurora that occurred at the death of Black Elk in 1950 is a new contribution to ethnoastronomy.
Summary
Sporting contests between communities actively engaged in societal struggle comprise an event I call “engaged acrimony.” In these sporting contests, ideas of sport as promoting harmony get ...tested and often give way to demonstrations of vitriol that mirror actual relations. In this article, I discuss Lakota basketball teams from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation as they played against neighboring white teams, examining how their responses to racism were safely expressed within and around sporting events. I analyze two of the best‐known instances of engaged acrimony using Turner's sense of performance and Butler's theory of performativity. In doing so, I offer an understanding of how Native communities can fashion an empowering response to racism.
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