Culture

Few places provide a more storied backdrop for key events related tot he high plains Indian wars than fort Robinson, Nebraska. Established in 1874 just south of the Black Hills, Fort Robinson witnessed many of the most dramatic and most tragic...

Fifty extraordinary letters, written by Dakota men imprisoned after the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862, give direct witness to a harsh and painful history by Minnesotans today.In April 1863 - after the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862, after the hanging of thirty eight...

"Allen's work is a lively account of his life and contemporary events from early years in Dakota Territory during the 1870's to the tragic day at Wounded Knee. Those interested will find here an early and detailed description of the Lakota Ghost Dance...

Includes 150 black & white photographs plus biographical references and index. EYEWITNESS AT WOUNDED KNEE brings together and assesses for the first time some 150 photographs that were made before and immediately after the massacre.On a wintry day in...

This book is an excellent overview of Lakota religious thought and practice, introducing readers to it's essential components.Through finely detailed descriptions of rituals and various types of religious figures, the author explains the significance of...

Indian views of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877. The Great Sioux War comprised a series of sequential battles and skirmishes that arrayed elements of the U.S. Army against diverse tribes of Teton, or Western Sioux and Northern Cheyenne Indians during a...

The "Images of America" series is a celebration of the history of towns and cities across the country. Each photograph and title depicts stories from the past that have shaped the character of the community as it exists today.The county seat Dupree;...

"1876 FACTS ABOUT CUSTER is impressive, Jerry Russell's full-length effort is a gold mine of myths, legends and contemporary accounts of the most famous massacre in history, all presented in an original style. Especially welcome is the inclusion of an...

Against the backdrop of contemporary reservation life and the majestic spaces of the western Dakotas, Neither Wolf Nor Dog tells the story of two men, one white and one Indian, locked in their own understandings yet struggling to find a common voice. In...

After Sitting Bull's surrender at Fort Buford in what is now North Dakota in 1881, the United States Army transported the chief and his followers down the Missouri River to Fort Randall, roughly seventy miles west of Yankton. The famed Hunkpapa leader...

Winner of the 2015 American Book Award. Today in the United Staes, there are more than 500 federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native peoples who once inhabited this land.The...

Eagle Elk’s story of his life, practice, and beliefs provides a uniquely introspective, demystified, and informative look at the career of a traditional Native American healer. We learn how a persistent vision and recurring visits by thunder...

The study of government policy, at any level, is best done by hindsight. Avowed beliefs of politicians and political parties are often subject to the expediencies of the moment and the road to programmatic hell is well paved, a beautiful boulevard of...

For the residents of the Pine Ridge Sioux reservation in South Dakota, mainstream medical care is often supplemented or replaced by a host of traditional practice: the Sun Dance, herbalism, the Sioux Religion, the peyotism of the Native American Church,...

"It did not occur to me at the time that I was going away to learn the ways of the white man. My idea was that I was leaving the reservation and going to stay away long enough to do some brave deed and then come home again alive. If I could just do that,...

In VOICES OF WOUNDED KNEE, William S.E. Coleman brings together for the first time all of the available sources - Lakota, military and civilian - on the massacre of December 29, 1890.He recreates the Ghost Dance in detail and shows how it related to the...

A note is left on a car windshield, an old dog dies and Kent Nerburn finds himself back on the Lakota reservation where he traveled more than a decade before with a tribal elder named Dan (as told in the classic "Neither Wolf Nor Dog"). The touching,...

Established as the Pine Ridge Agency in southwestern South Dakota between Nebraska and the Black Hills in 1878, Pine Ridge became a reservation in 1889.The second largest reservation in the country, comprised of almost 2 million acres, it is home to...

"I am Crow Dog, I am the fourth of that name. Crow Dogs have played a big part in the history of our tribe and in the history of all the Indian nations of the Great Plains during the last two hundred years. We are still making history."Thus opens the...

The general focus in Lakota oral literary research has been relatively in the study of content rather than the process in oral traditions. In Delphine Red Shirt’s new book, George Sword’s Warrior Narratives: Compositional Process in Lakota...

In August 1862, after decades of broken treaties, increasing hardship and relentless encroachment on their lands, a group of Dakota warriors convened a council at the teepee of their leader, Little Crow. Knowing the strength and resilience of the young...

Called the "Fighting Cock of the Sioux" by U.S. soldiers, Hunkpapa warrior Gall was a great Lakota chief who, along with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, resisted efforts by the U.S. government to annex the Black Hills.It was Gall, enraged by the slaughter...

Almost any mention made of Custer's Last Stand today is a reference not to history but to myth. ~Excerpt from book.Defeat and death at the Little Bighorn gave General George Custer and his Seventh Cavalry a kind of immortality. IN CUSTERS LAST STAND,...

President U.S. Grant's national Peace Policy of 1869 set in motion the South Dakota Missionary movement. The peace plan assigned one religious denomination to each Indian Reservation to "Christianize and Civilize" the Indian. When religious groups...