Mondo's NAT #286 - Lakota
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Native American Tribes series.
The Lakota
Sometimes also spelled "Lakhota,” this group consists of seven tribes who were known as warriors and buffalo-hunters. Sometimes called the Tetons, meaning "prairie dwellers,” the seven tribes include: Ogalala ("they scatter their own," or "dust scatterers"), Sicangu or Brule ("Burnt Thighs"), Hunkpapa ("end of the circle"), Miniconjou ("planters beside the stream"), Sihasapa or Blackfoot (Ntote confused with the separate Blackfoot tribe), Itazipacola (or Sans Arcs: "without bows"), and Oohenupa ("Two Boilings" or "Two Kettle").
This band migrated west from Minnesota after the tribe began to use horses. There were about 20,000 Lakota in the mid 18th century, a number which has increased to about 70,000 today, of which approximately 1/3 still speak their ancestral language. The Lakota were located in Minnesota when Europeans began to explore and settle the land in the 1600s. Living on small game, deer, and wild rice, they were surrounded by large rival tribes. Conflict with their enemy, the Ojibwa eventually forced the Lakota to move west. By the 1700s, the Lakota had acquired horses and flourished hunting buffalo on the high plains of Wisconsin, Iowa, the Dakotas, and as far north as Canada. The Tetons, the largest of the Lakotatribes dominated the region.
As white settlers continued to push west onto Sioux lands and multiple treaties were made and broken, the Sioux retaliated, resulting in three major wars and numerous other battles and skirmishes. The first major clash occurred in 1854 near Fort Laramie, Wyoming , when 19 U.S. soldiers were killed. In retaliation, in 1855 U.S. troops killed about 100 Sioux at their encampment in Nebraska and imprisoned their chief. In 1866-1867, Red Cloud’s War was fought that ended in a treaty granting the Black Hills in perpetuity to the Sioux. The treaty, however, was not honored by the United States; gold prospectors and miners flooded the region in the 1870s. In the ensuing conflict, General George Armstrong Custer and 300 troops were killed at Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, by the Sioux Chief Sitting Bull and his warriors.
After that battle the Sioux separated into their various groups. The massacre by U.S. troops of about 150 to 370 Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in December 1890 marked the end of Sioux resistance until modern times. Today, the majority of the Lakota live at the 2,782 square mile Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Zhssyre