This book covers the entire historical range of the Sioux, from their emergence as an identifiable group in late prehistory to the year 2000. The author has studied the material remains of the Sioux for many years. His expertise combined with his informative and engaging writing style and numerous photographs create a compelling and indispensable book. A leading expert discusses and analyzes the Sioux people with rigorous scholarship and remarkably clear writing. Raises questions about Sioux history while synthesizing the historical and anthropological research over a wide scope of issues and periods. Provides historical sketches, topical debates, and imaginary reconstructions to engage the reader in a deeper thinking about the Sioux. Includes dozens of photographs, comprehensive endnotes and further reading lists.

2021 Scholarly Writing Award in the Saskatchewan Book Awards This book presents two of the most important traditions of the Dakota people, the Red Road and the Holy Dance, as told by Samuel Mniyo and Robert Goodvoice, two Dakota men from the Wahpeton Dakota Nation near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada. Their accounts of these central spiritual traditions and other aspects of Dakota life and history go back seven generations and help to illuminate the worldview of the Dakota people for the younger generation of Dakotas, also called the Santee Sioux. "The Good Red Road," an important symbolic concept in the Holy Dance, means the good way of living or the path of goodness. The Holy Dance (also called the Medicine Dance) is a Dakota ceremony of earlier generations. Although it is no longer practiced, it too was a central part of the tradition and likely the most important ceremonial organization of the Dakotas. While some people believe that the Holy Dance is sacred and that the information regarding its subjects should be allowed to die with the last believers, Mniyo believed that these spiritual ceremonies played a key role in maintaining connections with the spirit world and were important aspects of shaping the identity of the Dakota people. In The Red Road and Other Narratives of the Dakota Sioux, Daniel Beveridge brings together Mniyo and Goodvoice's narratives and biographies, as well as songs of the Holy Dance and the pictographic notebooks of James Black (Jim Sapa), to make this volume indispensable for scholars and members of the Dakota community.

The Sioux constitute a diverse group of tribes who claimed and controlled almost a quarter of the continental U.S. from the late 1700s to the 1860s. The name Sioux was coined by French traders and was taken from the Anishinabe word Nadoweisiw-eg, meaning little snake or enemy. The rival Chippewa (Ojibway/Anishinabe) tribe used this term to describe the group. The Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, a central part of the Great Sioux Reservation, is home to four bands of the Western Lakota Sioux prominently featured in this book: the Minnicoujou, Itazipco, Siha Sapa, and Oohenumpa.

Black Hills/White Justice tells of the longest active legal battle in United States history: the century-long effort by the Sioux nations to receive compensation for the seizure of the Black Hills. Edward Lazarus, son of one of the lawyers involved in the case, traces the tangled web of laws, wars, and treaties that led to the wresting of the Black Hills from the Sioux and their subsequent efforts to receive compensation for the loss. His account covers the Sioux nations? success in winning the largest financial award ever offered to an Indian tribe and their decision to turn it down and demand nothing less than the return of the land.

"It was held a distinct adventure back in the demure 1880s for a properly brought-up New England girl to open a day school in a primitive Sioux village," Elaine Goodale Eastman recalled in later years. With boundless energy and dedication she had set out to teach the white man's ways to the Sioux. The Indian women called her "little sister" as she entered wholeheartedly into village activities. She watched the emergence of the Ghost Dance religion, visited with Sitting Bull shortly before his death, and was at Pine Ridge during the last month of 1890—"a time of grim suspense." There she met her future husband, Dr. Charles Eastman, the agency physician and a mixed-blood Sioux. A short time later they shared in the heart-wrenching job of caring for the survivors of the Wounded Knee massacre.

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.