Culture

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...

The great Native American warriors and their resistance to the U.S. government in the war against the Plains Indians is a well known chapter in the story of the American West. In the aftermath of the great resistance, as the Indian nations recovered from...