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Sioux

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For the helicoptor H-13 Sioux, see Bell 47
The Sioux are a Native American people. The term describes any of three divisions of seven tribes (the Seven Council Fires; also referred to as the Great Sioux Nation), speaking four distinct dialects of the Sioux language, including the Lakota (also known as Teton), Assiniboine, Santee, and Nakota/Yankton-Yanktonai.

The Sioux name for "the Nation" is Oceti Sakowin, meaning "Seven Council Fires". Those Seven Council Fires, or tribes, are the Mdewakanton, Wahpeton, Wahpekute, Sisseton, Yankton, Yanktonai, and Teton. There are three geographic/dialectic divisions of the Sioux:

Contents

Synonymy and Etymology

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 tribes 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 & 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. 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 with the 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).

The Yankton, Yanktonai, Santee, and Lakota have names for their own subdivisions. The "Yankton" received this name which meant 'people from the villages of far away'. The "Santee" received this name from camping for long periods in a place where they collected stone for making knives. The "Tetonwan" were known as people who moved west with the coming of the horse (which was apparently not 'native' to North America, but instead was brought by the Spaniards to the New World) to live and hunt buffalo on the prairie. From these three principal groups, came seven sub-tribes.

Social divisions

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 two main tribes: the Yankton ("campers at the end") and Yanktonai ("lesser campers at the end"). Economically, they were involved in quarrying pipestone.

During the 19th Century, these people migrated or were forced west into Santee Territory, and today, the Yankton Sioux Tribe occupies a reservation "without boundaries" on the east bank of the Missouri in south-central South Dakota. The Yanktonai are scattered in a number of reservations in North and South Dakota.

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 koda in Dakota (and kola in Lakota for example) 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. 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.

Santee (Dakota)

A Dakota warrior
Enlarge
A Dakota warrior

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 rifles supplied by the French and English, 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.

Teton (Lakota)

See Lakota

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 18th 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. The local traders would not issue any more credit to the Santee and the local federal agent told the Santee that they were 'free to eat grass'. 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. 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. (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 285 of the warriors, signing off on the execution of 38 Santee men by hanging on December 29, 1862 in Mankato, Minnesota, the largest mass-execution in US history.

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. 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.

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

Reservations

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

Lakota reservations established by the US government include:

Derived placenames

The U.S. states of North Dakota and South Dakota are named after the Dakota tribe. Two other U.S. states have names of Siouan origin: Minnesota is named from mni ("water") plus sota ("hazy/smoky, not clear"), while Nebraska is named from a language close to Santee, in which mni plus blaska ("flat") refers to the Platte (French for "flat") River. Also, 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, Hot Springs (Minnelusa), Minnehaha County, Belle Fourche (Mniwasta, or "Good water"), Inyan Kara, and others.

Media

  • [Sioux buffalo dance, 1894] ([file info])
    • Video clip of a dance performed by a Sioux tribe from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. This is part of a group of films constituting the first appearance of Native Americans in motion pictures. (3.23 MB, ogg/Theora format).
  • Problems seeing the videos? See .

See also

External links

Bibliography

 

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