Briefly traces the history of the Sioux along with their customs and culture.

The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history Named One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2019 - Named One of the 10 Best History Books of 2019 by Smithsonian Magazine - Winner of the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award for narrative nonfiction "Turned many of the stories I thought I knew about our nation inside out."--Cornelia Channing, Paris Review, Favorite Books of 2019 "My favorite non-fiction book of this year."--Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opinion "A briliant, bold, gripping history."--Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard, Best Books of 2019 "All nations deserve to have their stories told with this degree of attentiveness"--Parul Sehgal, New York Times 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.

2021 Scholarly Writing Award in the Saskatchewan Book Awards This book presents two of the most important traditions of the Dakota people, the Red Road and the Holy Dance, as told by Samuel Mniyo and Robert Goodvoice, two Dakota men from the Wahpeton Dakota Nation near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada. Their accounts of these central spiritual traditions and other aspects of Dakota life and history go back seven generations and help to illuminate the worldview of the Dakota people for the younger generation of Dakotas, also called the Santee Sioux. "The Good Red Road," an important symbolic concept in the Holy Dance, means the good way of living or the path of goodness. The Holy Dance (also called the Medicine Dance) is a Dakota ceremony of earlier generations. Although it is no longer practiced, it too was a central part of the tradition and likely the most important ceremonial organization of the Dakotas. While some people believe that the Holy Dance is sacred and that the information regarding its subjects should be allowed to die with the last believers, Mniyo believed that these spiritual ceremonies played a key role in maintaining connections with the spirit world and were important aspects of shaping the identity of the Dakota people. In The Red Road and Other Narratives of the Dakota Sioux, Daniel Beveridge brings together Mniyo and Goodvoice's narratives and biographies, as well as songs of the Holy Dance and the pictographic notebooks of James Black (Jim Sapa), to make this volume indispensable for scholars and members of the Dakota community.

This book covers the entire historical range of the Sioux, from their emergence as an identifiable group in late prehistory to the year 2000. The author has studied the material remains of the Sioux for many years. His expertise combined with his informative and engaging writing style and numerous photographs create a compelling and indispensable book. A leading expert discusses and analyzes the Sioux people with rigorous scholarship and remarkably clear writing. Raises questions about Sioux history while synthesizing the historical and anthropological research over a wide scope of issues and periods. Provides historical sketches, topical debates, and imaginary reconstructions to engage the reader in a deeper thinking about the Sioux. Includes dozens of photographs, comprehensive endnotes and further reading lists.

This volume, first published in 2004, presents an overview of the history of the Plains Sioux as they became increasingly subject to the power of the United States in the 1800s. Many aspects of this story - the Oregon Trail, military clashes, the deaths of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, and the Ghost Dance - are well-known. Besides providing fresh insights into familiar events, the book offers an in-depth look at many lesser-known facets of Sioux history and culture. Drawing on theories of colonialism, the book shows how the Sioux creatively responded to the challenges of US expansion and domination, while at the same time revealing how US power increasingly limited the autonomy of Sioux communities as the century came to a close. The concluding chapters of the book offer a compelling reinterpretation of the events that led to the Wounded Knee massacre of December 29, 1890.

Black Hills/White Justice tells of the longest active legal battle in United States history: the century-long effort by the Sioux nations to receive compensation for the seizure of the Black Hills. Edward Lazarus, son of one of the lawyers involved in the case, traces the tangled web of laws, wars, and treaties that led to the wresting of the Black Hills from the Sioux and their subsequent efforts to receive compensation for the loss. His account covers the Sioux nations? success in winning the largest financial award ever offered to an Indian tribe and their decision to turn it down and demand nothing less than the return of the land.

The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America is the story of the Sioux Nation's fight to regain its land and sovereignty, highlighting the events of 1973-74, including the protest at Wounded Knee. It features pieces by some of the most prominent scholars and Indian activists of the twentieth century, including Vine Deloria Jr., Simon Ortiz, Dennis Banks, Father Peter J. Powell, Russell Means, Raymond DeMallie, and Henry Crow Dog.

For many people the Sioux, as warriors and as buffalo hunters, have become the symbol of all that is Indian colorful figures endowed with great fortitude and powerful vision. They were the heroes of the Great Plains, and they were the villains, too. Royal B. Hassrick here attempts to describe the ways of the people, the patterns of their behavior, and the concepts of their imagination. Uniquely, he has approached the subject from the Sioux's own point of view, giving their own interpretation of their world in the era of its greatest vigor and renown –the brief span of years from about 1830 to 1870. In addition to printed sources, the author has drawn from the observation and records of a number of Sioux who were still living when this book was projected, and were anxious to serve as links to the vanished world of their forebears. Because it is true that men become in great measure what they think and want themselves to be, it is important to gain this insight into Sioux thought of a century ago. Apparently, the most significant theme in their universe was that man was a minute but integral part of that universe. The dual themes of self-expression and self-denial reached through their lives, helping to explain their utter defeat soon after the Battle of the Little Big Horn. When the opportunity to resolve the conflict with the white man in their own way was lost, their very reason for living was lost, too. There are chapters on the family and the sexes, fun, the scheme of war, production, the structure of the nation, the way to status, and other aspects of Sioux life.

"Explains Sioux history and highlights Sioux life in modern society"--

The bestselling memoir of a Native American woman’s struggles and the life she found in activism: “courageous, impassioned, poetic and inspirational” (Publishers Weekly). Mary Brave Bird grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota in a one-room cabin without running water or electricity. With her white father gone, she was left to endure “half-breed” status amid the violence, machismo, and aimless drinking of life on the reservation. Rebelling against all this—as well as a punishing Catholic missionary school—she became a teenage runaway. Mary was eighteen and pregnant when the rebellion at Wounded Knee happened in 1973. Inspired to take action, she joined the American Indian Movement to fight for the rights of her people. Later, she married Leonard Crow Dog, the AIM’s chief medicine man, who revived the sacred but outlawed Ghost Dance. Originally published in 1990, Lakota Woman was a national bestseller and winner of the American Book Award. It is a story of determination against all odds, of the cruelties perpetuated against American Indians, and of the Native American struggle for rights. Working with Richard Erdoes, one of the twentieth century’s leading writers on Native American affairs, Brave Bird recounts her difficult upbringing and the path of her fascinating life.