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Sioux

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For the helicopter H-13 Sioux, see Bell 47
Sioux

Photograph of Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota chief and holy man, circa 1885
Regions with significant populations
United States of America (SD, MN, NE, MT, ND), Canada (MB, SK, AB)
Languages
English, Sioux
Religion
Christianity (incl. syncretistic forms), other
Related ethnic groups
Assiniboine, Stoney (Nakoda), and other Siouan peoples
Wahktageli ("Gallant Warrior"), a Yankton Sioux chief (Karl Bodmer)
Funeral scaffold of a Sioux chief (Karl Bodmer)
Horse racing of the Sioux Indians (Karl Bodmer)

The Sioux (IPA /su/) are a Native American people. The term can describe any ethnic group within the Great Sioux Nation or any of the nation's many dialects. The Sioux are often divided into three main groups based on dialect and subculture:

  • Teton (translation uncertain): the westernmost Sioux known for their hunting and warrior culture. Often referred to as the Lakota.
  • Isanti ("Knife," originating from the name of a lake in present-day Minnesota): the extreme east of the Dakotas, Minnesota, and northern Iowa. Often referred to as the Santee or Dakota.
  • Ihanktowan-Ihanktowana ("Village-at-the-end" and "little village-at-the-end") respectively. Often referred to as the Yankton-Yanktonai or Nakota.

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.[citation needed] In any of the three main dialects, "Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota" all translate to mean "friend," or more properly, "ally". 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". Each fire represented a tiyospaye (family or band). The seven nations that comprise the Sioux are: Mdewakanton, Wahpetowan (Wahpeton), Wahpekute, Sissetowan (Sisseton), the Ihantowan (Yankton), Ihanktowana (Yanktonai), and the Teton (Lakota people|Lakota). The first four comprise the main branches of the Isanti (Santee or Dakota).

The name "Sioux" is an abbreviated form of Nadouessioux borrowed into French Canadian from Nadoüessioüak from the early Ottawa exonym: na·towe·ssiwak "Sioux". The Proto-Algonquian form *nātowēwa meaning "Northern Iroquoian" has reflexes in several daughter languages that refer to a small rattlesnake (massasauga, Sistrurus). This information was interpreted by some that the Ottawa borrowing was an insult. However, this proto-Algonquian term most likely is ultimately derived from a form *-ātowē meaning simply "speak foreign language", which was later extended in meaning in some Algonquian languages to refer to the massasauga. 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.[citation needed] However, some of the tribes have formally or informally adopted traditional names: the Rosebud Sioux Tribe is also known as the Sicangu Oyate, and the Oglala often use the name Oglala Lakota Oyate, rather than the English "Oglala Sioux Tribe" or OST. (The alternative 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 & Assiniboine. This classification was based in large part on each group's particular pronunciation of the autonym Dakhóta-Lakhóta-Nakhóta. However, more recent research has shown that Assiniboine (and also Stoney) are not mutually intelligible with the Sioux groups, while the Yankton-Yanktonai, Santee, and Teton groups all spoke mutually intelligible varieties of a Sioux idiom.[citation needed] This more recent classification identifies Assiniboine and Stoney as two separate languages with Sioux being the third language that has three similar dialects: Teton, Santee-Sisseton, Yankton-Yanktonai. Furthermore, the Yankton-Yanktonai never referred to themselves using the pronunciation Nakhóta but rather pronounced it the same as the Santee (i.e. Dakhóta). (Assiniboine and Stoney speakers use the pronunciation Nakhóta 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. This was due in large part to the misrepresented translation of the Ottawa word from which Sioux is derived (supposedly meaning "snake", see above).

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. The Lakota are the westernmost of the three groups, occupying lands in both North and South Dakota.

Yankton-Yanktonai (Nakota)

The Yankton-Yanktonai are a branch of Sioux peoples who moved into northern Minnesota. They originally constituted of two main ethnic groups: the Yankton ("campers at the end") and Yanktonai ("lesser campers at the end"). Economically, they were involved in quarrying pipestone.

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. The word khóda in Dakota (and khóla in Lakota) means ‘friend’ or ‘ally.’ Therefore, “Dakota means an alliance of friends. The root word is frequently come upon in the Siouan language, as in okodakiciye, meaning society, association, republic. The tribe consists of seven bands closely related, springing from one parent stock [sic] and still joined in alliance for mutual protection” (Doane Robinson 1904 [1952]:19).

The three 'divisions' are somewhat arbitrary and are based primarily on relatively minor dialectical differences; there are many kinship ties throughout the three groups, since these 'groups' were historically (and are probably today as well) much more fluid than discrete.[citation needed] Furthermore, due to land expropriation and massive social upheavals caused by the "Dakota-U.S. Wars" (circa 1862-1890), some members of all three groups fled to Rupert's Land, later the Northwest Territories of Canada (est. 1870). 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.

Teton (Lakota)

The Santee people migrated north and westward from the south and east into Ohio then to Minnesota. The Santee were a woodland people who thrived on hunting, fishing and subsistence farming. 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.[citation needed]

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... who as Diah observed, were rovers... their intelligence, superior morals, stature and manner of living...[were such] that here, in the Sioux nation, aboriginal life was most attractive." (pp. 16, 17) "The distant appearance of these lodges, when many Indians are encamped together, cannot fail of pleasing. Clustered together with their yellow sides and painted tops, the children playing around in the intervals between them, the men going out or coming in from hunting, the horses feeding on the neighboring prairie, the dogs sleeping or playing in the sun or shade, the squaws at their several labors, and the boys at their several sports--these, taken in conjunction with a beautiful mingling of prairie and woodland, or some undulation of the land, or some bend of the great River that brings them all at once to view, and above all, eyes that are not accustomed to such a sight, would almost persuade a man to renounce the world, take the lodge, and live the careless, lazy life of an Indian!" (p. 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. Outside a warrior's lodge, on a tripod made of decorated poles, was hung the medicine sack of the owner, and over the sack a piece of scarlet blanket or the skin of a white wolf.
Within, the squaw was busy with her household labors, while the master of the lodge was seated, 'leaning back, with no borrowed dignity', against a mat made of peeled willows supported by a tripod of sticks....In the moral scale, as their appearance would indicate, they rank above the mass of Indians." (p. 17) (see Bibliography below) Such was the approving opinion of at least one white mountain man of the time and indeed, many of these mountain men attempted to live in some fashion among the 'Indians'."

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,[citation needed] 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. In Minnesota, the treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota in 1851 left the Sioux with a reservation twenty miles wide on each side of the Minnesota River.

The 1862 Sioux Uprising

Main article: Dakota War of 1862

In 1862, after a failed crop the year before and a winter starvation, the federal payment was late to arrive. The local traders would not issue any more credit to the Santee and one trader, Andrew Myrick, went so far as to tell them that they were 'free to eat grass or their own dung'. As a result, on August 17, 1862 the Dakota War of 1862 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. The Santee then attacked the trading post, and Myrick was later found among the dead with his mouth stuffed full of grass.[citation needed] No one knows the exact number but between 500 to 1000 civilian men, women, and children, mostly German immigrants, were massacred until state and federal forces put down the revolt. Courts-martial tried and condemned 303 Santee for 'war crimes'. Numerous first-hand accounts describe rapes and murders of the whites by the Santee.[citation needed] (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. President Abraham Lincoln remanded the death sentence of 284 of the warriors, signing off on the execution of 38 Santee men by hanging on December 26, 1862 in Mankato, Minnesota, the largest mass-execution in US history. [citation needed]

During and after the revolt, many Santee and their kin fled Minnesota and Eastern Dakota, joining 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. Others were able to remain in Minnesota and the east, in small reservations existing into the 21st Century, including Sisseton-Wahpeton, Flandreau, and Devils Lake (Spirit Lake or Fort Totten) Reservations in the Dakotas. Some ended up eventually in Nebraska, where the Santee Sioux Tribe today has a reservation on the south bank of the Missouri.

Ethnic divisions

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

  • Santee division
  • Yankton-Yanktonai
    • Ihanktonwan (Yankton, "End Village")
    • Ihanktonwana (Yanktonai, "Little End Village")
  • Stoney (Canada)
  • Assiniboine (Canada)

Reservations in the United States

Today, one half of all enrolled Sioux in the United States live off the reservation.

Sioux reservations established by the US government include:

Canadian First Nations

Sioux First Nations recognised by the Canadian government include:

Derived names

The U.S. states of North Dakota and South Dakota are named after the Dakota tribe. One other U.S. state has a name of Siouan origin: Minnesota is named from mni ("water") plus sota ("hazy/smoky, not clear"), and the name Nebraska comes from the related Chiwere language. Furthermore, the states Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri are named for cousin Siouan tribes, the Kansa, Iowa, and Missouri, respectively, as are the cities Omaha, Nebraska and Ponca City, Oklahoma. 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 derived her stage Lakotaname from the "Sioux".

Media

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  • "Elegy to the Sioux," a poem by Norman Dubie

Famous Sioux

Historical

Contemporary

See also

Bibliography

  • Albers, Patricia C. (2001). Santee. In R. J. DeMallie (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians: Plains (Vol. 13, Part 2, pp. 761-776). W. C. Sturtevant (Gen. Ed.). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-16-050400-7.
  • Christafferson, Dennis M. (2001). Sioux, 1930-2000. In Handbook of North American Indians: Plains (Vol. 13, Part 2, pp. 821-839). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
  • Cox, Hank H. (2005). Lincoln and the Sioux Uprising of 1862. Nashville, TN: Cumberland House. ISBN 1-58182-457-2.
  • DeMallie, Raymond J. (2001a). Sioux until 1850. In Handbook of North American Indians: Plains (Vol. 13, Part 2, pp. 718-760). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
  • DeMallie, Raymond J. (2001b). Teton. In Handbook of North American Indians: Plains (Vol. 13, Part 2, pp. 794-820). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
  • DeMallie, Raymond J. (2001c). Yankton and Yanktonai. In Handbook of North American Indians: Plains (Vol. 13, Part 2, pp. 777-793). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
  • DeMallie, Raymond J.; & Miller, David R. (2001). Assiniboine. In Handbook of North American Indians: Plains (Vol. 13, Part 1, pp. 572-595). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
  • Getty, Ian A. L.; & Gooding, Erik D. (2001). Stoney. In Handbook of North American Indians: Plains (Vol. 13, Part 1, pp. 596-603). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
  • Hein, David (Advent 2002). "Episcopalianism among the Lakota / Dakota Indians of South Dakota." The Historiographer, vol. 40, pp. 14-16. [The Historiographer is a publication of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church and the National Episcopal Historians and Archivists.]
  • Hein, David (1997). "Christianity and Traditional Lakota / Dakota Spirituality: A Jamesian Interpretation." The McNeese Review, vol. 35, pp. 128-38.
  • Parks, Douglas R.; & Rankin, Robert L. (2001). The Siouan languages. In Handbook of North American Indians: Plains (Vol. 13, Part 1, pp. 94-114). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
  • Sullivan, Maurice S.: "Jedediah Smith, Trader and Trail Breaker", New York Press of the Pioneers (1936) contains 'politically incorrect' white man's terminology and stereotypical attitudes toward the 'Indians'.
  • Robert M. Utley, "The Last Days of the Sioux Nation" (Yale University, 1963) ISBN 0-300-00245-9

Notes


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