History & Stories

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...

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...