Being Lakota explores contemporary Lakota identity and tradition through the life-story narratives of Melda and Lupe Trejo. Melda Trejo, ne Red Bear (1939), is an Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge Reservation, while Lupe Trejo (193899) is Mexican and a long-time resident at Pine Ridge.

The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history Named One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2019 - Named One of the 10 Best History Books of 2019 by Smithsonian Magazine - Winner of the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award for narrative nonfiction "Turned many of the stories I thought I knew about our nation inside out."--Cornelia Channing, Paris Review, Favorite Books of 2019 "My favorite non-fiction book of this year."--Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opinion "A briliant, bold, gripping history."--Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard, Best Books of 2019 "All nations deserve to have their stories told with this degree of attentiveness"--Parul Sehgal, New York Times This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then--in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion--as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. Hämäläinen's deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.

The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. —from “WHEREAS Statements” WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

For Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people, historical trauma, chronically underfunded federal programs, and broken promises on the part of the US government have resulted in gaping health, educational, and economic disparities compared to the general population. Crazy Horse Weeps, offers a thorough historical overview of how South Dakota reservations have wound up in these tragic circumstances, showing how discrimination, a disorganized tribal government, and a devastating dissolution of Lakota culture by the US government have transformed the landscape of Native life. Yet these extraordinary challenges, Marshall argues, can be overcome. Focusing on issues of identity and authenticity, he uses his extensive experience in traditional Lakota wisdom to propose a return to traditional tribal values and to outline a plan for a hopeful future.

"The real value of Lakota Belief and Ritual is that it provides raw narratives without any pretension of synthesis or analysis, as well as insightful biographical information on the man who contributed more than any other individual to our understanding of early Oglala ritual and belief." Plains Anthropologist"In the writing of Indian history, historians and other scholars seldom have the opportunity to look at the past through 'native eyes' or to immerse themselves in documents created by Indians. For the Oglala and some of the other divisions of the Lakota, the Walker materials provide this kind of experience in fascinating and rich detail during an important transition period in their history." Minnesota History"This collection of documents is especially remarkable because it preserves individual variations of traditional wisdom from a whole generation of highly developed wicasa wakan (holy men). . . . Lakota Belief and Ritual is a wasicun (container of power) that can make traditional Lakota wisdom assume new life." American Indian Quarterly"A work of prime importance. . . . its publication represents a major addition to our knowledge of the Lakotas' way of life" Journal of American FolkloreRaymond J. DeMallie, director of the American Indian Studies Research Institute and a professor of anthropology at Indiana University, is the editor of James R. Walker's Lakota Society (1982) and of The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt (1984, a Bison Book), both published by the University of Nebraska Press. Elaine A. Jahner, a professor of English at Dartmouth College, has edited Walker's Lakota Myth (1983), also a Bison Book.

The bestselling memoir of a Native American woman’s struggles and the life she found in activism: “courageous, impassioned, poetic and inspirational” (Publishers Weekly). Mary Brave Bird grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota in a one-room cabin without running water or electricity. With her white father gone, she was left to endure “half-breed” status amid the violence, machismo, and aimless drinking of life on the reservation. Rebelling against all this—as well as a punishing Catholic missionary school—she became a teenage runaway. Mary was eighteen and pregnant when the rebellion at Wounded Knee happened in 1973. Inspired to take action, she joined the American Indian Movement to fight for the rights of her people. Later, she married Leonard Crow Dog, the AIM’s chief medicine man, who revived the sacred but outlawed Ghost Dance. Originally published in 1990, Lakota Woman was a national bestseller and winner of the American Book Award. It is a story of determination against all odds, of the cruelties perpetuated against American Indians, and of the Native American struggle for rights. Working with Richard Erdoes, one of the twentieth century’s leading writers on Native American affairs, Brave Bird recounts her difficult upbringing and the path of her fascinating life.

“Happiness is a wonderful feeling. It makes you feel good in any situation. It gives you hope in times of despair. It makes you feel peace in aworld of turmoil. I want you to be happy anytime you wish it. To do that, you are invited to travel and learn with David, a young Lakota Indian who learned the secret of being happy. . . .” In this Native American allegory, a young Lakota boy named David is despondent over the death of his sister and fears that he will never know happiness again. His father gives him a gift, a scroll with seven pictures, which properly understood, hold the keys to self-understanding. In an entertaining and deeply moving way, Lessons of a Lakota blends traditional Native American beliefs in meditation, dreams, and respect for the harmony and balance of nature, with more modern principles such as positive thinking and self-awareness. This book will teach you about yourself, show you what it means to be happy, and lead you on your own personal journey to inner peace.