In The Pursuit of Family Thomas Grillot examines how Dakota and Lakota people on the Standing Rock Reservation have lived as families since the 1870s in what is now North Dakota and South Dakota. Grillot examines the collective and individual efforts that made survival possible on Standing Rock, one of the most understudied reservations despite being one of the best-known Native locations in the United States—Sitting Bull died there in 1890, and a protest camp organized there against the Dakota Access pipeline made international news in 2016. Yet this is a book not about famous people or events but about ordinary people confronted with a deceptively simple question: How can we be a family on the reservation? Integrating archival material, oral history, and fieldwork, Grillot tells the history of dozens of reservation-based Dakota and Lakota families from the beginning of the reservation era to today.
The Pursuit of Family reveals how the Dakotas and Lakotas, tied by a common language and way of life, developed under the pressures of settler colonialism and shifted formations of kinship across time and space. It is a story of resistance, negotiation, and adaptation.