The Sioux or Oceti Sakowin (, SOO; Dakota and Lakota: Očhéthi Šakówiŋ [oˈtʃʰeːtʰi ʃaˈkoːwĩ]) are groups of Native American tribes and First Nations people from the Great Plains of North America. The Sioux have two major linguistic divisions: the Dakota and Lakota peoples (translation: 'friend, ally' referring to the alliances between the bands). Collectively, they are the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, or 'Seven Council Fires'. The term Sioux, an exonym from a French transcription (Nadouessioux) of the Ojibwe term Nadowessi, can refer to any ethnic group within the Great Sioux Nation or to any of the nation's many language dialects.
Before the 17th century, the Santee Dakota (Isáŋyathi: 'Knife', also known as the Eastern Dakota) lived around Lake Superior with territories in present-day northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. They gathered wild rice, hunted woodland animals, and used canoes to fish. Wars with the Ojibwe throughout the 18th century pushed the Dakota west into southern Minnesota, where the Western Dakota (Yankton, Yanktonai) and Lakota (Teton) lived. In the 19th century, the Dakota signed land cession treaties with the United States for much of their Minnesota lands. The United States' failure to make treaty payments or provide rations on time led to starvation and the Dakota War of 1862, which resulted in the Dakota's exile from Minnesota. They were forced onto reservations in Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota, and some fled to Canada. After 1870, the Dakota people began to return to Minnesota, creating the present-day reservations in the state. The Yankton and Yanktonai Dakota (Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋ and Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋna; 'Village-at-the-end' and 'Little village-at-the-end'), collectively also called by the endonym Wičhíyena, lived near the Minnesota River before ceding their land and moving to South Dakota in 1858. Despite ceding their lands, their treaty with the US government allowed them to maintain their traditional role in the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ as the caretakers of the Pipestone Quarry, a cultural center for Sioux people. Considered the Western Dakota, they have in the past been erroneously classified as Nakota. Nakota are the Assiniboine and Stoney of Western Canada and Montana.
The Lakota, also called Teton (Thítȟuŋwaŋ; possibly 'dwellers on the prairie'), are the westernmost Sioux, known for their Plains Indians hunting and warrior culture. With the arrival of the horse in the 18th century, the Lakota became a powerful tribe on the Northern Plains by the 1850s. They fought the US Army in the Sioux Wars and defeated the 7th Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of Little Big Horn. The armed conflicts with the US ended with the Wounded Knee Massacre.
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the Dakota and Lakota continued to fight for their treaty rights, including the Wounded Knee incident, Dakota Access Pipeline protests, and the 1980 Supreme Court case United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, in which the court ruled that the US government had illegally taken tribal lands covered by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and that the tribe was owed compensation plus interest. As of 2018, this amounted to more than $1 billion; the Sioux have refused the payment, demanding instead the return of the Black Hills. Today, the Sioux maintain many separate tribal governments across several reservations and communities in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Montana in the United States and reserves in Manitoba and Saskatchewan in Canada.
Etymology
The Sioux people refer to their whole nation of people (sometimes called the Great Sioux Nation) as the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (meaning 'Seven Council Fires'). Each fire symbolizes an oyate (people or nation). Today the seven nations that comprise the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ are:
Thítȟuŋwaŋ (also known collectively as the Lakota or Teton)
Bdewákaŋthuŋwaŋ, Waȟpéthuŋwaŋ, Waȟpékhute, and Sisíthuŋwaŋ (also known collectively as the Santee or Eastern Dakota)
Iháŋkthuŋwaŋ and Iháŋkthuŋwaŋna (also known collectively as the Yankton/Yanktonai or Western Dakota).
They are also referred to as the Lakota or Dakota based on dialect differences. In any of the dialects, Lakota or Dakota translates as 'friend, ally', referring to the alliances between the bands.
The name Sioux was adopted in English by the 1760s from French. It is abbreviated from the French Nadouessioux, first attested by Jean Nicolet in 1640. The name is sometimes said to be derived from Nadowessi (plural Nadowessiwag), an Ojibwe-language exonym for the Sioux meaning 'little snakes' or 'enemy' (compare nadowe 'big snakes', used for the Iroquois). The French pluralized the Ojibwe singular Nadowessi by adding the French plural suffix -oux to form Nadowessioux, which was later shortened to Sioux. The Proto-Algonquian form *na·towe·wa, meaning 'Northern Iroquoian', has reflexes in several daughter languages that refer to a small rattlesnake (massasauga, Sistrurus). An alternative explanation is derivation from an (Algonquian) exonym, na·towe·ssiw (plural na·towe·ssiwak), from a verb *-a·towe· meaning 'to speak a foreign language'. The current Ojibwe term for the Sioux and related groups is Bwaanag (singular Bwaan), meaning 'roasters'. Presumably, this refers to the style of cooking the Sioux used in the past.
In recent times, some of the tribes have formally or informally reclaimed traditional names: the Rosebud Sioux Tribe is also known as the Sičháŋǧu Oyáte, and the Oglala often use the name Oglála Lakȟóta Oyáte, rather than the formal Oglala Sioux Tribe or OST. The alternative English spelling of Ogallala is considered incorrect.
Culture
Traditional social structure
The traditional social structure of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ strongly relied on kinship ties that extend beyond human interaction and includes the natural and supernatural worlds. Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ ('all are related') represents a spiritual belief of how human beings should ideally act and relate to other humans, the natural world, the spiritual world, and to the cosmos. The thiyóšpaye represents the political and economic structure of traditional society.
Thiyóšpaye (community) kinship
Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the different Očhéthi Šakówiŋ villages (oyáte, 'tribe, nation') consisted of many thiyóšpaye ('camp circles'), which were large extended families united by kinship (thiwáhe, 'immediate family'). Thiyóšpaye varied in size, were led by a leader appointed by an elder council and were nicknamed after a prominent member or memorable event associated with the band. Dakota ethnographer Ella Cara Deloria noted the kinship ties were all-important, they dictated and demanded all phrases of traditional life:
"I can safely say that the ultimate aim of Dakota life, stripped of accessories, was quite simple: one must obey kinship rules; one must be a good relative. No Dakota who participated in that life will dispute that… every other consideration was secondary—property, personal ambition, glory, good times, life itself. Without that aim and constant struggle to attain it, the people would no longer be Dakotas in truth. They would no longer even be human. To be a good Dakota, then, was to be humanized, civilized. And to be civilized was to keep the rules imposed by kinship for achieving civility, good manners, and a sense of responsibility toward every individual dealt with".
During the fur trade era, the thiyóšpaye refused to trade only for economic reasons. Instead the production and trade of goods was regulated by rules of kinship bonds. Personal relationships were pivotal for success: in order for European-Americans to trade with the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, social bonds had to be created. The most successful fur traders married into the kinship society, which also raised the status of the family of the woman through access to European goods. Outsiders are also adopted into the kinship through the religious Huŋkalowaŋpi ceremony. Early European explorers and missionaries who lived among the Dakota were sometimes adopted into the thiyóšpaye (known as "huŋka relatives"), such as Louis Hennepin who noted, "this help'd me to gain credit among these people". During the later reservation era, districts were often settled by clusters of families from the same thiyóšpaye.
Religion
The traditional social system extended beyond human interaction into the supernatural realms. It is believed that Wakȟáŋ Tháŋka ('Great Spirit/Great Mystery') created the universe and embodies everything in the universe as one. The preeminent symbol of Sioux religion is the Čhaŋgléska Wakȟaŋ or medicine wheel ('sacred hoop'), which visually represents the concept that everything in the universe is intertwined. The creation stories of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ describe how the various spirits were formed from Wakȟáŋ Tháŋka. Black Elk describes the relationships with Wakȟáŋ Tháŋka as:
"We should understand well that all things are the works of the Great Spirit. We should know that He is within all things: the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, and all the four-legged animals, and the winged peoples; and even more important, we should understand that He is also above all these things and peoples. When we do understand all this deeply in our hearts, then we will fear, and love, and know the Great Spirit, and then we will be and act and live as He intends".
Prayer is believed to invoke relationships with one's ancestors or spiritual world. The Lakota word for 'prayer', wočhékiye, means 'to call on for aid, to pray, to claim relationship with'. Their primary cultural prophet is Ptesáŋwiŋ, White Buffalo Calf Woman, who came as an intermediary between Wakȟáŋ Tháŋka Tȟáŋka and humankind to teach them how to be good relatives by introducing the Seven Sacred Rites and the čhaŋnúŋpa (sacred pipe). The seven ceremonies are Inípi (purification lodge), Haŋbléčheyapi (crying for vision), Wiwáŋyaŋg Wačhípi (Sun Dance), Huŋkalowaŋpi (making of relatives), Išnáthi Awíčhalowaŋpi (female puberty ceremony), Tȟápa Waŋkáyeyapi (throwing of the ball) and Wanáǧi Yuhápi (soul keeping). Each part of the sacred pipe (stem, bowl, tobacco, breath, and smoke) is symbolic of the relationships of the natural world, the elements, humans and the spiritual beings that maintain the cycle of the universe.
Dreams can also be a means of establishing relationships with spirits and are important to the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ. One can gain supernatural powers through dreams. Dreaming of the Wakíŋyaŋ (thunder beings) is believed to involuntarily make someone a Heyókȟa, a sacred clown. Black Elk, a famous Heyókȟa said: "Only those who have had visions of the thunder beings of the west can act as heyokas. They have sacred power and they share some of this with all the people, but they do it through funny actions".
Governance
Historical leadership organization
The thiyóšpaye of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ assembled each summer to hold council, renew kinships, decide tribal matters, and participate in the Sun Dance. The seven divisions selected four leaders known as Wičháša Yatápika from among the leaders of each division. Being one of the four leaders was considered the highest honor for a leader; however, the annual gathering meant the majority of tribal administration was cared for by the usual leaders of each division. The last meeting of the Seven Council Fires was in 1850. The historical political organization was based on individual participation and the cooperation of many to sustain the tribe's way of life. Leaders were chosen based upon noble birth and demonstrations of chiefly virtues, such as bravery, fortitude, generosity, and wisdom.
Political leaders were members of the Načá Omníčiye society and decided matters of tribal hunts, camp movements, whether to make war or peace with their neighbors, or any other community action.
Societies were similar to fraternities; men joined to raise their position in the tribe. Societies were composed of smaller clans and varied in number among the seven divisions. There were two types of societies: Akíčhita, for the younger men, and Načá, for elders and former leaders.
Akíčhita (Soldier) societies existed to train warriors, hunters, and to police the community. There were many smaller Akíčhita societies, including the Kit-Fox, Strong Heart, Elk, and so on.
Leaders in the Načá societies, per Načá Omníčiye, were the tribal elders and leaders. They elected seven to ten men, depending on the division, each referred to as Wičháša Itȟáŋčhaŋ ("chief man"). Each Wičháša Itȟáŋčhaŋ interpreted and enforced the decisions of the Načá.
The Wičháša Itȟáŋčhaŋ elected two to four shirt-wearers, who were the voice of the society. They settled quarrels among families and also foreign nations. Shirt-wearers were often young men from families with hereditary claims of leadership. However, men with obscure parents who displayed outstanding leadership skills and had earned the respect of the community might also be elected. Crazy Horse is an example of a common-born shirt-wearer".
A Wakíčhuŋza 'pipe-holder' ranked below the "Shirt Wearers". The pipe-holders regulated peace ceremonies, selected camp locations, and supervised the Akíčhita societies during buffalo hunts.
Gender roles
Within the Sioux tribes, there were defined gender roles. The men in the village were tasked as the hunters, traveling outside the village. The women within the village were in charge of making clothing and similar articles while also taking care of, and owning, the house. However, even with these roles, both men and women held power in decision-making tasks and sexual preferences were flexible and allowed. The term wíŋtke refers to men who partook in traditional feminine duties while the term witkówiŋ ('crazy woman') was used for women who rejected their roles as either mother or wife to be a prostitute.
Funeral practices
Traditional funeral practices
It is a common belief amongst Siouan communities that the spirit of the deceased travels to an afterlife. In traditional beliefs, this spiritual journey was believed to start once funeral proceedings were complete and spanned over a course of four days. Mourning family and friends took part in that four-day wake in order to accompany the spirit to its resting place. In the past, bodies were not embalmed but put up on a burial tree or scaffold for one year before a ground burial. A platform to rest the body was put up on trees or, alternately, placed on four upright poles to elevate the body from the ground. The bodies were securely wrapped in blankets and cloths, along with many of the deceased personal belongings and were always placed with their head pointed towards the south. Mourning individuals spoke to the body and offer food as if it were still alive. This practice, along with the Ghost Dance, helped individuals mourn and connect the spirits of the deceased with those who were alive. The only time a body was buried in the ground right after their death was if the individual was murdered: the deceased were placed in the ground with their heads towards the south, while faced down along with a piece of fat in their mouth.
Contemporary funeral practices
According to Pat Janis, director of the Oglala Sioux Tribe's Burial Assistance Program, funeral practices of communities today are often a mix of traditions and contemporary Christian practices. While tree burials and scaffold burials are not practiced anymore, it is also now rare to see families observe a four-day wake period. Instead, the families opt for one- or two-day wake periods which include a funeral feast for all the community. Added to the contemporary funeral practices, it is common to see prayers conducted by a medicine man along with traditional songs often sung with a drum. One member of the family is also required to be present next to the body at all times until the burial. Gifts are placed within the casket to aid with the journey into the afterworld, which is still believed to take up to four days after death.
Music
History
Creation stories
There are a number of creation stories within the tribes. One widely noted creation story for Dakota people is at Bdóte, the area where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet. Lakota people relate to Wind Cave in South Dakota as their site of emergence.
Ancestral Sioux
The ancestral Sioux most likely lived in the Central Mississippi Valley region and later in Minnesota for at least two or three thousand years. The ancestors of the Sioux arrived in the northwoods of central Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin from the Central Mississippi River shortly before 800 AD. Archaeologists refer to them as the Woodland Blackduck-Kathio-Clam River Continuum. Around 1300 AD, they adopted the characteristics of a northern tribal society and became known as the Seven Council Fires.
First contact with Europeans
The Dakota are first recorded to have resided at the source of the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes during the seventeenth century. They were dispersed west in 1659 due to warfare with the Iroquois. During the 1600s, the Lakota began their expansion westward into the Plains, taking with them the bulk of people of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ. By 1700 the Dakota were living in Wisconsin and Minnesota. As the Sioux nation began expanding with access to horses, the Dakota were put in a weakened position to defend the eastern border: new diseases (smallpox and malaria) and increased intertribal warfare (between the migration of tribes fleeing the Iroquois into their territory of present-day Wisconsin) put a strain on their ability to maintain their territory. As a result, their population in the Mississippi valley is believed to have declined by one-third between 1680 and 1805.
French trade and intertribal warfare
Late in the 17th century, the Dakota entered into an alliance with French merchants. The French were trying to gain advantage in the struggle for the North American fur trade against the English, who had recently established the Hudson's Bay Company. Algonquian peoples such as the Ojibwe, Potawatomi and Odawa were among the first to trade with the French as they migrated into the Great Lakes region. Upon their arrival, Dakota were in an economic alliance with them until the Dakota were able to trade directly for European goods with the French. The first recorded encounter between the Sioux and the French occurred when Radisson and Groseilliers reached what is now Wisconsin during the winter of 1659–60. Later visiting French traders and missionaries included Claude-Jean Allouez, Daniel Greysolon Duluth, and Pierre-Charles Le Sueur who wintered with Dakota bands in early 1700.
The Dakota began to resent the Ojibwe trading with the hereditary enemies of the Sioux, the Cree and Assiniboine. Tensions rose in the 1720s into a prolonged war in 1736. The Dakota lost their traditional lands around Leech Lake and Mille Lacs as they were forced south along the Mississippi River and St. Croix River Valley as a result of the battles. These intertribal conflicts also made it dangerous for European fur traders: whichever side they traded with, they were viewed as enemies from the other. For example, in 1736 a group of Sioux killed Jean Baptiste de La Vérendrye and twenty other men on an island in Lake of the Woods for such reasons. However, trade with the French continued until the French gave up North America in 1763. Europeans repeatedly tried to make truce between the warring tribes in order to protect their interests.
One of the larger battles between the Dakota and Ojibwe took place in 1770 fought at the Dalles of the St. Croix. According to William Whipple Warren, a Métis historian, the fighting began when the Meskwaki (Fox) engaged the Ojibwe (their hereditary enemies) around St. Croix Falls. The Sioux were the former enemies of the Meskwaki and were enlisted to make a joint attack against the Ojibwe. The Meskwaki were first to engage with the large Ojibwe war party led by Waubojeeg: the Meskwaki allegedly boasted to the Dakota to hold back as they would quickly destroy their enemies. When the Dakota joined the battle, they had the upper hand until Sandy Lake Ojibwe reinforcements arrived. The Dakota were driven back and Warren states: "Many were driven over the rocks into the boiling floods below, there to find a watery grave. Others, in attempting to jump into their narrow wooden canoes, were capsized into the rapids". While Dakota and Ojibwe suffered heavy losses, the Meskwaki were left with the most dead and forced to join their relatives, the Sauk people. The victory for the Ojibwe secured control of the Upper St. Croix and created an informal boundary between the Dakota and Ojibwe around the mouth of the Snake River.
As the Lakota entered the prairies, they adopted many of the customs of the neighboring Plains tribes, creating new cultural patterns based on the horse and fur trade. Meanwhile, the Dakota retained many of their Woodlands features. By 1803, the three divisions of the Sioux (Western/Eastern Dakota and Lakota) were established in their different environments and had developed their own distinctive lifeways. However, due to the prevalent cultural concept of thiyóšpaye (community), the three divisions maintained strong ties throughout the changing times to present day.
Treaties and reservation period beginnings
In 1805, the Dakota signed their first treaty with the American government. Zebulon Pike negotiated for 100,000 acres of land at the confluence of the St. Croix River about what now is Hastings, Minnesota and the confluence of the Minnesota River and Mississippi River about what now is Saint Paul, Minnesota. The Americans wanted to establish military outposts and the Dakota wanted a new source of trading. An American military post was not established at the confluence of the St. Croix with the Mississippi, but Fort Snelling was established in 1819 along the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. In return, Dakota were promised the ability to "pass and repass, hunt, or make other uses of the said districts as they have formerly done".
In an attempt to stop intertribal warfare and to better able to negotiate with tribes, the American government signed the 1825 Treaty of Prairie du Chien with the Dakota, Ojibwe, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox, Iowa, Potawatomi, and Odawa tribes. In the 1830 Treaty of Prairie de Chien, the Western Dakota (Yankton, Yanktonai) ceded their lands along the Des Moines river to the American government. Living in what is now southeastern South Dakota, the leaders of the Western Dakota signed the Treaty of April 19, 1858, which created the Yankton Sioux Reservation. Pressured by the ongoing arrival of Europeans, Yankton chief Struck by the Ree told his people, "The white men are coming in like maggots. It is useless to resist them. They are many more than we are. We could not hope to stop them. Many of our brave warriors would be killed, our women and children left in sorrow, and still we would not stop them. We must accept it, get the best terms we can get and try to adopt their ways." Despite ceding their lands, the treaty allowed the Western Dakota to maintain their traditional role in the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ as the caretakers of the Pipestone Quarry, which is the cultural center of the Sioux people.
With the creation of Minnesota Territory by the US in 1849, the Eastern Dakota (Sisseton, Wahpeton, Mdewakanton, and Wahpekute) people were pressured to cede more of their land. The reservation period for them began in 1851 with the signing of the Treaty of Mendota and the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux. The Treaty of Mendota was signed near Pilot Knob on the south bank of the Minnesota River and within sight of Fort Snelling. The treaty stipulated that the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands were to receive US$1,410,000 in return for relocating to the Lower Sioux Agency on the Minnesota River near present-day Morton, Minnesota along with giving up their rights to a significant portion of southern Minnesota. In the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands of the Dakota ceded 21 million acres for $1,665,000, or about 7.5 cents an acre. However, the American government kept more than 80% of the funds with only the interest (5% for 50 years) being paid to the Dakota.
The US set aside two reservations for the Sioux along the Minnesota River, each about 20 miles (30 km) wide and 70 miles (110 km) long. Later the government declared these were intended to be temporary, in an effort to force the Sioux out of Minnesota. The Upper Sioux Agency for the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands was established near Granite Falls, Minnesota, while the Lower Sioux Agency for the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands was established about thirty miles downstream near what developed as Redwood Falls, Minnesota. The Upper Sioux were not satisfied with their reservation because of low food supplies, but as it included several of their old villages, they agreed to stay. The Lower Sioux were displaced from their traditional woodlands and were dissatisfied with their new territory of mostly prairie.
The US intended the treaties to encourage the Sioux to convert from their nomadic hunting lifestyle into more European-American settled farming, offering them compensation in the transition. By 1858, the Dakota only had a small strip of land along the Minnesota River, with no access to their traditional hunting grounds. They had to rely on treaty payments for their survival, which were often late. The forced change in lifestyle and the much lower than expected payments from the federal government caused economic suffering and increased social tensions within the tribes. By 1862, many Dakota were starving and tensions erupted in the Dakota War of 1862.
Dakota War of 1862 and the Dakota diaspora
By 1862, shortly after a failed crop the year before and a winter starvation, the federal payment was late. The local traders refused to issue any credit to the Dakota. One trader, Andrew Myrick, went so far as to say, "If they're hungry, let them eat grass."