President U.S. Grant's national Peace Policy of 1869 set in motion the South Dakota Missionary movement. The peace plan assigned one religious denomination to each Indian Reservation to 'Christianize and civilize' the Indian. When religious groups protested the government's policy of exclusion, the limitations of the policy were lifted in 1881. Soon thereafter, many denominations were allowed to establish missions where they wanted. Soon missions, churches, and schools of many different Christian affiliations dotted the reservations, often within a few miles of one another. In Lakota Sioux Missions, over two hundred historical photographs illustrate the story of the mission era, its intended policy of assimilation, the resistance to change, and eventual compromise.

President U.S. Grant's national Peace Policy of 1869 set in motion the South Dakota Missionary movement. The peace plan assigned one religious denomination to each Indian Reservation to 'Christianize and civilize' the Indian. When religious groups protested the government's policy of exclusion, the limitations of the policy were lifted in 1881. Soon thereafter, many denominations were allowed to establish missions where they wanted. Soon missions, churches, and schools of many different Christian affiliations dotted the reservations, often within a few miles of one another. In Lakota Sioux Missions, over two hundred historical photographs illustrate the story of the mission era, its intended policy of assimilation, the resistance to change, and eventual compromise.

This study examines the development of ministry at the St. Francis and Holy Rosary missions in South Dakota. Using primary sources, this study seeks to understand the points of views of the Lakota Sioux Catholics during the 1920s and 1930s, and the Jesuit missionaries who reached them. It takes into particular account the patterns which develop in missiology.

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.

„Christian Missions and Indian Assimilation“ was originally written as a Master thesis paper in Geography and was completed in 2001 at the Karl-Franzens-University in Graz, Austria. It is one of the most accurate and comprehensive books there are on Lakota history & culture as well as intercultural contact and its implications. Driven by the idea of culture clash and its consequences Andrea Schmidt was curious to find out how two seemingly so very different or even contradictory cultural and religious systems, the Oglala Lakota cultural system and the (European) system of Christian belief and mission, can exist, side by side, within the Lakota individuals, tribes and within the reservation. The contents of this book are based upon comprehensive field study and data collection at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for several months starting in 1999, accompanied by literary and historical research at the archives of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and several other academic institutions including the Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, South Dakota. Things changed dramatically after 2001, when the paper first came out as a thesis paper; a lot of clergy left the reservation, missionaries seemed to be less active and less interested in Lakota culture than their predecessors. No such paper could have been written at any other point of time.

German missionaries played an important role in the early years of the St Francis mission on the Rosebud Reservation, and the Holy Rosary mission on the Pine Ridge Reservation, both in South Dakota. This work presents a collection of eyewitness accounts by German Catholic missionaries among the Lakotas in the late nineteenth century.