Lakota

The Lakota ("friends" or "allies", sometimes also spelled "Lakhota") are a Native American tribe, also known as the Sioux (see Names). They form one of a group of seven tribes (the Great Sioux Nation or Seven Council Fires) that speak three different dialects, including Titonwan or Lakota proper, Santee or Dakota, and Nakoda. The Lakota, or Teton (Titonwon), are the westernmost of the three groups, occupying lands in both North and South Dakota. The Nakoda or Nakota, the smallest division, reside on the Yankton reservation in South Dakota, the Northern portion of Standing Rock Reservation, and Canada (the Stoney and Assiniboine), while the Dakota live mostly in Minnesota and Nebraska, but include bands in the Sisseton-Wahpeton, Flandreau, and Crow Creek Reservations in South Dakota.

Dakota

The original Dakota people migrated north and westward from the south and east into Ohio then to Minnesota. The Dakota were a woodland people who thrived on hunting, fishing and subsistence farming. Migrations of Anishinaabe/Chippewa people from the east in the 17th and 18th centuries, with rifles supplied by the French and English, pushed the Dakota further into Minnesota and west and southward, giving the name "Dakota Territory" to the northern expanse west of the Mississippi and up to its headwaters. The western Dakota obtained horses, probably in the 17th century (although some historians date the arrival of horses in South Dakota to 1720), and moved further west, onto the Great Plains, becoming the Titonwan tribe, subsisting on the buffalo herds and corn-trade with their linguistic cousins, the Mandan and Hidatsa along the Missouri.

Related Topics:
Ohio - Minnesota - Anishinaabe - Chippewa - Great Plains - Buffalo - Mandan - Hidatsa - Missouri

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In the 19th century, as the railroads hired hunters to exterminate the buffalo herds, the Indians' primary food supply, in order to force all tribes into sedentary habitations, the Dakota and Titonwan were forced to accept white-defined reservations in exchange for the rest of their lands, and domestic cattle and corn in exchange for buffalo, becoming dependent upon annual federal payments guaranteed by treaty.

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In 1862, after a failed crop the year before and a winter starvation, the federal payment was late to arrive. The local traders would not issue any more credit to the Dakota and the local federal agent told the Dakota that they were free to eat grass. As a result on August 17, 1862, the Sioux Uprising began when a few Dakota men attacked a white farmer, igniting further attacks on white settlements along the Minnesota River. Some 450 farmers, mostly German immigrants, were massacred until state and federal forces put the revolt down. Courts-martial tried and condemned 303 Dakota for war crimes.

Related Topics:
August 17 - 1862 - Sioux Uprising - Minnesota River - Courts-martial

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On November 5, 1862 in Minnesota, in court martials, 303 Santee Sioux were found guilty of rape and murder of hundreds of white farmers and were sentenced to hang. President Abraham Lincoln remanded the death sentence of 285 of the warriors, signing off on the execution of 38 Dakota men by hanging on December 29, 1862 in Mankato, Minnesota, the largest mass execution in US history.

Related Topics:
November 5 - 1862 - Court martials - Rape - Murder - Abraham Lincoln

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During and after the revolt, many Dakota and their Nakota kin fled Minnesota and Eastern Dakota, joining their relatives in the West, or settling in the James River Valley in a short-lived reservation before being forced to move to Crow Creek Reservation on the east bank of the Missouri. Others were able to remain in Minnesota and the east, in small reservations existing into the 21st Century, including Sisseton-Wahpeton, Flandreau, and Devils Lake (Spirit Lake or Fort Totten) Reservations in the Dakotas. Some ended up eventually in Nebraska, where the Santee Sioux Tribe today has a reservation on the south bank of the Missouri.

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