History
The Sioux
The Sioux, also known as the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota, are a group of Native American tribes who traditionally lived on the Great Plains of North America. They are known for their rich cultural heritage, including their nomadic lifestyle, buffalo hunting, and spiritual traditions. The Sioux played a significant role in the history of the American West, particularly during the conflicts with European settlers and the US government.
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- Bruce Vandervort(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
In 1870, on the eve of their last great contest with the bluecoat soldiers, the several branches of The Sioux totalled just under 32,000 members. 36 Historians believe The Sioux once inhabited the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys, but around 1650, French explorers, the first whites to make contact with them, found them living in the forests of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Sioux of this early period were a semi-sedentary people who supported themselves through a mix of hunting and farming. Not long afterwards, they began to migrate in large numbers towards the plains. Until recently, it was thought that the move came as a result of pressure from their Cree and Ojibwa neighbours, who had been armed with gunpowder weapons by the French. 37 The current wisdom, however, holds that it was the pull of the plains and the buffalo herds that proliferated there rather than the push of Ojibwa and Cree aggression that propelled The Sioux onto the plains. 38 Migration splintered The Sioux into three distinct groups: the sedentary Santee Sioux, who continued to occupy lands in southern Minnesota and who would rise up in a bloody revolt against their white settler neighbours in 1862 39 ; the semi-sedentary Yankton and Yanktonais Sioux, who lived in northeastern South Dakota; and, finally, the seven branches of the Teton Sioux, who by the mid-1700s had acquired guns and horses and were following the buffalo on the Great Plains. The Tetons are The Sioux of legend, the fierce nomads who massacred the troops of Grattan, Fetterman, and, most famously, George Armstrong Custer before succumbing to force majeure and confinement on reservations in South Dakota
- Brad D. Lookingbill(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Most early explorers described The Sioux as proud, honest, and noble-looking people, who took great honor in war. Early missionaries, mostly Jesuits, compared The Sioux with the Iroquois, who were the strongest and most warlike of the eastern Indians. Many travelers described The Sioux with respect mixed with fear, while they used words that are rarely seen in their depictions of other Indians. The early white reports are fragmented and mostly deal with the Eastern Sioux. By the late eighteenth century more trappers, traders, explorers, and artists ventured beyond the Missouri River, providing us with a fuller description of the Western Sioux, the Lakota. Perhaps the most detailed accounts come from Jean Baptiste Truteau and Pierre-Antoine Tabeau. Artists like George Catlin have preserved information on clothing and other ethnographic data from the early nineteenth century. The most comprehensive ethnographic account of The Sioux from the earlier part of the century is Edwin Denig’s Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri (1961). Denig gathered material for his book for more than 20 years starting in the 1830s. His work is still considered to be one of the classics in Native American studies (see DeMallie 1975; DeMallie & Parks 2003; DeMallie 2001a, 718–722). An interesting early nineteenth-century description comes from the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who described The Sioux as “the vilest miscreants of the savage race.” The Lakotas were the only tribe with whom they nearly had a serious engagement during their two-year trek across the continent
eBook - PDFThe Sioux
The Dakota and Lakota Nations
- Guy Gibbon(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Since these activities were the very base of male social life in traditional Western Sioux culture, their culture began to radically change, too. This radical shift was hastened by the forceful and deliberate suppression of many other traditional practices of Western Sioux culture. For example, in 1887 Indian Affairs prohibited intertribal trading and celebration, for fear that intertribal interaction would foment revolt. Also as important, these activities, which included storytelling and general visiting among relatives, were considered counterproductive to the adoption of the American ideal of hard work. Individuals would wander from their reservation tasks at odd times and often for extended periods. The Sioux would never become mainstream Americans unless they were made to change their customs. In-creasingly, the warriors realized that their traditional way of life was over. With no way to gain war honor by showing the people how brave they were, some men, with nothing to replace their old activities, turned to dissolute lives of uselessness and drunkenness. Some tried to show how brave they were by getting into trouble with their non-Indian neighbors. It seemed that nothing would ever be the same again. Looking Through Pictures A picture is a visual representation painted, drawn, photographed, or oth-erwise rendered on a flat surface. The earliest Euro-American pictures of Figure 5.5 Western Sioux watermelon feast at a county fair, 1885 (Minnesota Historical Society Photograph Collection) Fighting for Survival, 1850–1889 121 The Sioux are sketches and paintings, most of which were drawn before the westward spread of the camera and photographs in the 1860s. These sketches and paintings are of two general types. The first type is com-posed of portraits of members of delegations who traveled to Washing-ton, DC to call on the “Great White Father.” Drawn in the artist’s studio, the subjects were usually in a sitting position, wearing their ceremonial best.
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