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.

The story of the Lakota Sioux's loss of their spiritual homelands and their remarkable legal battle to regain it The Lakota Indians counted among their number some of the most famous Native Americans, including Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Their homeland was in the magnificent Black Hills in South Dakota, where they found plentiful game and held religious ceremonies at charged locations like Devil's Tower. Bullied by settlers and the U. S. Army, they refused to relinquish the land without a fight, most famously bringing down Custer at Little Bighorn. In 1873, though, on the brink of starvation, the Lakotas surrendered the Hills. But the story does not end there. Over the next hundred years, the Lakotas waged a remarkable campaign to recover the Black Hills, this time using the weapons of the law. In The Lakotas and the Black Hills, the latest addition to the Penguin Library of American Indian History, Jeffrey Ostler moves with ease from battlefields to reservations to the Supreme Court, capturing the enduring spiritual strength that bore the Lakotas through the worst times and kept alive the dream of reclaiming their cherished homeland.

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 Last Sovereigns is the story of how Sioux chief Sitting Bull resisted the white man’s ways as a last best hope for the survival of an indigenous way of life on the Great Plains—a nomadic life based on buffalo and indigenous plants scattered across the Sioux’s historical territories that were sacred to him and his people. Robert M. Utley explores the final four years of Sitting Bull’s life of freedom, from 1877 to 1881. To escape American vengeance for his assumed role in the annihilation of Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull led his Hunkpapa following into Canada. There he and his people interacted with the North-West Mounted Police, in particular Maj. James M. Walsh. The Mounties welcomed the Lakota and permitted them to remain if they promised to abide by the laws and rules of Queen Victoria, the White Mother. But the Canadian government wanted the Indians to return to their homeland and the police made every effort to persuade them to leave. They were aided by the diminishing herds of buffalo on which the Indians relied for sustenance and by the aggressions of Canadian Native groups that also relied on the buffalo. Sitting Bull and his people endured hostility, tragedy, heartache, indecision, uncertainty, and starvation and responded with stubborn resistance to the loss of their freedom and way of life. In the end, starvation doomed their sovereignty. This is their story.

The Dakota people, alternatively referred to as Sioux Native Americans or Oceti Sakowin (The People of the Seven Council Fires), have a storied history that extends to a time well before the arrival of European settlers. This work offers a comprehensive history of the Dakota people and is largely based on eyewitness accounts from the Dakota themselves, including legends, traditions, and winter counts. Included are detailed analyses of the various divisions (tribes and bands) of the Dakota people, including the Lakota and Nakota tribes. Topics explored include the Dakotas' early government, the role of women within the Dakota tribes, the rituals and rites of the Dakota people, and the influence of the white man in destroying Dakotan culture.

On December 28, 1894, the day before the fourth anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee, Lakota chief Two Sticks was hanged in Deadwood, South Dakota. The headline in the Black Hills Daily Times the next day read “A GOOD INDIAN”—a spiteful turn on the infamous saying “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” On the gallows, Two Sticks, known among his people as Can Nopa Uhah, declared, “My heart knows I am not guilty and I am happy.” Indeed, years later, convincing evidence emerged supporting his claim. The story of Two Sticks, as recounted in compelling detail in this book, is at once the righting of a historical wrong and a record of the injustices visited upon the Lakota in the wake of Wounded Knee. The Indian unrest of 1890 did not end with the massacre, as the government willfully neglected, mismanaged, and exploited the Oglala in a relentless, if unofficial, policy of racial genocide that continues to haunt the Black Hills today. In From Wounded Knee to the Gallows, Philip S. Hall and Mary Solon Lewis mine government records, newspaper accounts, and unpublished manuscripts to give a clear and candid account of the Oglala’s struggles, as reflected and perhaps epitomized in Two Sticks’s life and the miscarriage of justice that ended with his death. Bracketed by the run-up to, and craven political motivation behind, Wounded Knee and the later revelations establishing Two Sticks’s innocence, this is a history of a people threatened with extinction and of one man felled in a battle for survival hopelessly weighted in the white man’s favor. With eyewitness immediacy, this rigorously researched and deeply informed account at long last makes plain the painful truth behind a dark period in U.S. history.