As agency physician on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1896 to 1914, Dr. James R. Walker recorded a wealth of information on the traditional lifeways of the Oglala Sioux. Lakota Society presents the primary accounts of Walker's informants and his syntheses dealing with the organization of camps and bands, kinship systems, beliefs, ceremonies, hunting, warfare, and methods of measuring time.

Creation story of the Lakota in which Tatanka turned himself into a Buffalo and sacrificed his powers for the people.

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.

Through his artwork, Arthur Amiotte offers insight into the early reservation period, a time of great upheaval for the Lakota people. In words and images, he tells the fascinating story of his great-grandfather Standing Bear, a Lakota artist whose family uniquely blended Native and European ways of life.

"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.

A concise and engrossing account of the Lakota and the battle to regain their homeland. The Lakota Indians made their home in the majestic Black Hills mountain range during the last millennium, drawing on the hills' endless bounty for physical and spiritual sustenance. Yet the arrival of white settlers brought the Lakotas into inexorable conflict with the changing world, at a time when their tribe would produce some of the most famous Native Americans in history, including Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse. Jeffrey Ostler's powerful history of the Lakotas' struggle captures the heart of a people whose deep relationship with their homeland would compel them to fight for it against overwhelming odds, on battlefields as varied as the Little Bighorn and the chambers of U.S. Supreme Court.

Crazy Horse was as much feared by tribal foes as he was honored by allies. His war record was unmatched by any of his peers, and his rout of Custer at the Little Bighorn reverberates through history. Yet so much about him is unknown or steeped in legend. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life corrects older, idealized accounts—and draws on a greater variety of sources than other recent biographies—to expose the real Crazy Horse: not the brash Sioux warrior we have come to expect but a modest, reflective man whose courage was anchored in Lakota piety. Kingsley M. Bray has plumbed interviews of Crazy Horse’s contemporaries and consulted modern Lakotas to fill in vital details of Crazy Horse’s inner and public life. Bray places Crazy Horse within the rich context of the nineteenth-century Lakota world. He reassesses the war chief’s achievements in numerous battles and retraces the tragic sequence of misunderstandings, betrayals, and misjudgments that led to his death. Bray also explores the private tragedies that marred Crazy Horse’s childhood and the network of relationships that shaped his adult life. To this day, Crazy Horse remains a compelling symbol of resistance for modern Lakotas. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life is a singular achievement, scholarly and authoritative, offering a complete portrait of the man and a fuller understanding of his place in American Indian and United States history.