Sioux

Oceti Sakowin

Today it is popular to refer to the Teton, Isanti, or Ihanktowan/Ihanktowana as either Lakota (otherwise known as the sioux), Dakota, or Nakota respectively. Usage of either Lakota, Dakota, or Nakota may then refer to the alliance that once bound the Great Sioux Nation together. The historical Sioux referred to the Great Sioux Nation as the Oceti Sakowin, meaning "Seven Council Fires". The seven nations that comprise the Sioux are: Mdewakanton, Wahpetowan (Wahpeton), Wahpekute, Sissetowan (Sisseton), the Ihantowan (Yankton), Ihanktowana (Yanktonai), and the Teton (Lakota).

The name Sioux is an abbreviated form of Nadouessioux borrowed into French Canadian from Nadoüessioüak from the early Ottawa exonym: na•towe•ssiwak "Sioux". Thus, contrary to many accounts, the Ottawa word na•towe•ssiwak never equated the Sioux with snakes.

Today, many of the ethnic groups continue to officially call themselves "Sioux", which the Federal Government of the United States applied to all Yankton/Yanktonai/Santee/Lakota people in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, some of the tribes have formally or informally adopted traditional names: the Rosebud Sioux Tribe is also known as the Sicangu Oyate (Brule Nation), and the Oglala often use the name Oglala Lakota Oyate, rather than the English "Oglala Sioux Tribe" or OST. (The alternate English spelling of Ogallala is not considered proper.)

The earlier linguistic 3-way division of the Dakotan branch of the Siouan family identified Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota as dialects of a single language, where Lakota = Teton, Dakota = Santee and Yankton, Nakota = Yanktonai & Dakóta or Nakhóda.)

The term Dakota has also been applied by anthropologists and governmental departments to refer to all Sioux groups, resulting in names such as Teton Dakota, Santee Dakota, etc.

Modern geographic divisions

The Sioux maintain many separate tribal governments scattered across several reservations and communities in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and even Canada (southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba).

The Yankton-Yanktonai, the smallest division, reside on the Yankton reservation in South Dakota and the Northern portion of Standing Rock Reservation, while the Santee live mostly in Minnesota and Nebraska, but include bands in the Sisseton-Wahpeton, Flandreau, and Crow Creek Reservations in South Dakota.

Yankton-Yanktonai (Nakota)

The Yankton-Yanktonai are a branch of Sioux peoples who moved into northern Minnesota.

It should be remembered that the 'divisions' of the old political organization of the Dakota Nations, collectively referred to as the Seven Council Fires, or Oċéti Śakówiŋ, is used to index the entire Dakota collective. Their descendants reside on eight small Dakota Reserves in Canada, four of which are located in Manitoba (Sioux Valley, Long Plain [Dakota Tipi], Birdtail Creek, and Oak Lake [Pipestone]) and the remaining four (Standing Buffalo, Moose Woods [White Cap], Round Plain [Wahpeton], and Wood Mountain) in Saskatchewan.

Santee (Dakota)

The Santee people migrated north and westward from the south and east into Ohio then to Minnesota. Migrations of Anishinaabe/Chippewa people from the east in the 17th and 18th centuries, with muskets supplied by the French and English, pushed the Santee further into Minnesota and west and southward, giving the name "Dakotas Territory" to the northern expanse west of the Mississippi and up to its headwaters. The western Santee obtained horses, probably in the 17th century (although some historians date the arrival of horses in South Dakota to 1720), and moved further west, onto the Great Plains, becoming the Titonwan tribe, subsisting on the buffalo herds and corn-trade with their linguistic cousins, the Mandan and Hidatsa along the Missouri.

Teton (Lakota)

The Santee people migrated north and westward from the south and east into Ohio then to Minnesota. Migrations of Anishinaabe/Chippewa people from the east in the 17th and 18th centuries, with muskets supplied by the French and British, pushed the Santee further into Minnesota and west and southward, giving the name "Dakota Territory" to the northern expanse west of the Mississippi and up to its headwaters. The western Santee obtained horses, probably in the 17th century (although some historians date the arrival of horses in South Dakota to 1720), and moved further west, onto the Great Plains, becoming the Titonwan tribe, subsisting on the buffalo herds and corn-trade with their linguistic cousins, the Mandan and Hidatsa along the Missouri.

The clash of Sioux and white cultures

The Appearance of the Sioux from the Eyes of a White Explorer of the Nineteenth Century

According to the journal kept by Jedediah Strong Smith, the fur-trapper, hunter and explorer who effectively opened up the West for later white settlement and gold prospecting, as reported by author Maurice Sullivan: "...When he first saw the proud Sioux... their intelligence, superior morals, stature and manner of living...[were such] that here, in the Sioux nation, aboriginal life was most attractive." 16) "The lodges of the Sioux, he recorded, were gaudily decorated with paintings of the buffalo hunt, battles and other events of historical importance to the occupants.

Forced Relocation of the Sioux by the United States Government

Later in the 19th century, as the railroads hired hunters to exterminate the buffalo herds, the Indians' primary food supply, in order to force all tribes into sedentary habitations, the Santee and Lakota were forced to accept white-defined reservations in exchange for the rest of their lands, and domestic cattle and corn in exchange for buffalo, becoming dependent upon annual federal payments guaranteed by treaty.

The 1862 Sioux Uprising

In 1862, after a failed crop the year before and a winter starvation, the federal payment was late to arrive. As a result, on August 17, 1862 the Sioux Uprising began when a few Santee men murdered a white farmer and most of his family, igniting further attacks on white settlements along the Minnesota River. (Relatively recently published are the first hand accounts of two German-American women who describe the murders they observed of family and friends.) On November 5, 1862 in Minnesota, in courts-martial, 303 Santee Sioux were found guilty of rape and murder of hundreds of white farmers and were sentenced to hang.

During and after the revolt, many Santee and their kin fled Minnesota and Eastern Dakota, joining their relatives in the West, or settling in the James River Valley in a short-lived reservation before being forced to move to Crow Creek Reservation on the east bank of the Missouri. Some ended up eventually in Nebraska, where the Santee Sioux Tribe today has a reservation on the south bank of the Missouri.

The sioux are divided into ethnic groups, the larger of which are divided into sub-groups, and further branched into bands.

Reservations

Today, one half of all Enrolled Sioux live off the Reservation.

Sioux reservations established by the US government include:

Derived names

The U.S. states of North Dakota and South Dakota are named after the Dakota tribe. The names vividly demonstrate the wide dispersion of the Siouan peoples across the Midwest U.S.

More directly, several Midwestern municipalities utilize Sioux in their names, including Sioux City (IA), Sioux Center (IA) and Sioux Falls (SD). Midwestern rivers include the Little Sioux River in Iowa and Big Sioux River along the Iowa/South Dakota border.

Many smaller towns and geographic features in the Northern Plains retain their Sioux names or bear English translations of those names, including Wasta, Owanka, Oacoma, Rapid City (Mne luza: "cataract" or "rapids"), Sioux Falls/Minnehaha county (Mne haha: "waterfall"), Belle Fourche (Mniwasta, or "Good water"), Inyan Kara, Sisseton (Sissetowan: tribal name, origin uncertain), Winona ("first daughter"), etc.

Frontwoman Siouxsie Sioux of the postpunk band Siouxsie and the Banshees also derrived her stage name from the "Sioux".

Media

Famous Sioux

Bibliography