American culture

Sioux

The Sioux (also Dakota) are a Native American tribe. They form one of three groups of seven tribes (the Great Sioux Nation or Seven Council Fires) that speak three different varieties of the Sioux language, including the Lakota, Santee, and Yankton-Yanktonai.

1. Social divisions

The Yankton-Yanktonai, the smallest division, reside on the Yankton reservation in South Dakota and the Northern portion of Standing Rock Reservation, while the Santee live mostly in Minnesota and Nebraska, but include bands in the Sisseton-Wahpeton, Flandreau, and Crow Creek Reservations in South Dakota. The Lakota are the westernmost of the three groups, occupying lands in both North and South Dakota.

1.1 Yankton-Yanktonai

The Yankton-Yanktonai are a branch of Sioux peoples who moved into northern Minnesota. They originally constituted two main tribes: the Yankton ("campers at the end") and Yanktonai ("lesser campers at the end"). Economically, they were involved in quarrying pipestone.

During the 19th Century, these people migrated or were forced west into Santee Territory, and today, the Yankton Sioux Tribe occupies a reservation "without boundaries" on the east bank of the Missouri in south-central South Dakota. The Yanktonai are scattered in a number of reservations in North and South Dakota.

1.2 Santee (Dakota)

The Santee (a.k.a. Dakota) people migrated north and westward from the south and east into Ohio then to Minnesota. The Santee were a woodland people who thrived on hunting, fishing and subsistence farming. Migrations of Anishinaabe/Chippewa people from the east in the 17th and 18th centuries, with rifles supplied by the French and English, pushed the Santee further into Minnesota and west and southward, giving the name "Dakota Territory" to the northern expanse west of the Mississippi and up to its headwaters.

The western Santee obtained horses, probably in the 17th century (although some historians date the arrival of horses in South Dakota to 1720), and moved further west, onto the Great Plains, becoming the Titonwan tribe, subsisting on the buffalo herds and corn-trade with their linguistic cousins, the Mandan and Hidatsa along the Missouri.

In the 19th century, as the railroads hired hunters to exterminate the buffalo herds, the Indians' primary food supply, in order to force all tribes into sedentary habitations, the Santee and Lakota were forced to accept white-defined reservations in exchange for the rest of their lands, and domestic cattle and corn in exchange for buffalo, becoming dependent upon annual federal payments guaranteed by treaty.

In 1862, after a failed crop the year before and a winter starvation, the federal payment was late to arrive. The local traders would not issue any more credit to the Santee and the local federal agent told the Santee that they were free to eat grass. As a result on August 17, 1862, the Sioux Uprising began when a few Santee men attacked a white farmer, igniting further attacks on white settlements along the Minnesota River. Some 450 farmers, mostly German immigrants, were massacred until state and federal forces put the revolt down.

Courts-martial tried and condemned 303 Santee for war crimes. On November 5, 1862 in Minnesota, in court martials, 303 Santee Sioux were found guilty of rape and murder of hundreds of white farmers and were sentenced to hang. President Abraham Lincoln remanded the death sentence of 285 of the warriors, signing off on the execution of 38 Santee men by hanging on December 29, 1862 in Mankato, Minnesota, the largest mass execution in US history.

During and after the revolt, many Santee and their kin fled Minnesota and Eastern Dakota, joining their relatives in the West, or settling in the James River Valley in a short-lived reservation before being forced to move to Crow Creek Reservation on the east bank of the Missouri. Others were able to remain in Minnesota and the east, in small reservations existing into the 21st Century, including Sisseton-Wahpeton, Flandreau, and Devils Lake (Spirit Lake or Fort Totten) Reservations in the Dakotas. Some ended up eventually in Nebraska, where the Santee Sioux Tribe today has a reservation on the south bank of the Missouri.

1.3 Lakota (Teton)

After their adoption of the horse, in the early 18th Century, the Lakota became part of the Great Plains culture with their eventual Algonkin-speaking allies, the Tsitsistas (Cheyenne), living in the northern Great Plains. Their society centered on the buffalo hunt with the horse. There were 20,000 Titonwan Lakota in the mid-18th century. The number has now increased to about 70,000, of whom about 20,500 still speak their ancestral language. (See Languages in the United States).

After 1720, the Lakota branch of the Seven Council Fires split into two elements, the Saone who moved to the Lake Traverse area on the South Dakota-North Dakota-Minnesota border, and the Oglala-Brule who occupied the James River Valley. By about 1750, however, the Saone had moved to the east bank of the Missouri, followed 10 years later by the Oglala and Brule (Sicangu).

The large and powerful Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa villages had prevented the Lakota from crossing the Missouri for an extended period, but when smallpox and other diseases nearly destroyed these tribes, the way was open for the first Lakota to cross the Missouri into the drier, short-grass prairies of the High Plains. These Saone, well-mounted and increasingly confident, spread out quickly. In 1765, an Saone exploring and raiding party led by Chief Standing Bear discovered the Black Hills (which they called the Paha Sapa Pahasapa).

Just a decade later, in 1775, the Oglala and Brule also crossed the river, following the great small pox epidemic of 1772-1780, which destroyed 3/4 of the population of the Missouri Valley populations. In 1776, they defeated the Cheyenne as the Cheyenne had earlier defeated the Kiowa, and gained control of the land which became the center of the Lakota universe.

Initial contacts between the Lakota and the United States, during the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-06, were friendly. But as more and more settlers crossed Lakota lands, this changed. In Nebraska on September 3, 1855, 700 soldiers under American General William S. Harney avenged the Grattan Massacre by attacking a Lakota village, killing 100 men, women, and children. Other wars followed; and in 1862-1864, as refugees from the "Sioux Uprising" in Minnesota fled west to their allies in Montana and Dakota Territory, the war followed them.

Because the Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota, they objected to mining in the area, which has been attempted since the early years of the 19th century. In 1868, the US government signed the Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) with them exempting the Black Hills from all white settlement forever. Four years later, gold was publicly discovered there, and an influx of prospectors descended upon the area, abetted by army commanders like General George Armstrong Custer. The latter tried to administer a lesson of noninterference with white policies, resulting in the Black Hills War of 1876-77.

Initially, the Titonwan with their allies, the Arapaho and the Cheyenne, defeated the 7th U.S. Cavalry in 1876 at the Battle at the Greasy Grass/Battle of the Little Bighorn, known also as Custer's Last Stand, since he and all 200 of the troopers under his immediate command perished there. Some 60 troopers under the independent commands of Major Reno and Captain Benteen also died. But like the Zulu triumph over the British in Africa three years later, it was a pyrrhic victory.

The Titonwan were defeated in a series of subsequent battles by the reinforced U.S. Army, and were herded back onto reservations, by preventing buffalo hunts and enforcing government food distribution policies to 'friendlies' only. A treaty in 1877 ceded the Black Hills to the United States, but a low-intensity war continued, culminating, fourteen years later, in the killing of Sitting Bull (December 15, 1890) at Standing Rock and the Massacre of Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890) at Pine Ridge.

Today, the Lakota are found mostly in the five reservations of western South Dakota: Rosebud (home of the Upper Sicangu or Brule), Pine Ridge (home of the Oglala), Lower Brule (home of the Lower Sicangu), Cheyenne River (home of several other of the seven Lakota bands, including the Sihasapa and Hunkpapa), and Standing Rock, also home to people from many bands.

But Lakota are also found far to the north in the Fort Peck Reservation of Montana, the Fort Berthold Reservation of northwestern North Dakota, and several small reserves in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, where their ancestors fled to "Grandmother's Land" (Canada) during the Minnesota or Black Hills War. Large numbers of Lakota also live in Rapid City and other towns in the Black Hills, and in Metro Denver.