Lakȟóta: An Indigenous History, A Review
A Native History Up To Current Time
Rani-Hendrik Andersson and David C. Posthumus
Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022. xx + 415 pp. $34.95 (hardcover). Contents, illustrations, preface, pronunciation guide, afterward, glossary, abbreviations, notes, bibliography, and index.
“For writing the Lakȟóta language, we use the most current orthography, which was developed first by Indiana University’s American Indian Studies Research Institute (AISRI) and expanded upon by the Lakȟóta Language Consortium (LLC).” So begins a narrative that employs a western institutional writing system. Like Pekka Hämäläinen and his “Lakota America,” Andersson and Posthumus craft a story that relies on foreign alphabet with international accents and glottal indicators. On the surface, LLC standardization works (ex. Wiyáka means “sand,” while wíyaka means “feather”), but so do the orthographies that have been developed by Lakxota people.
Do these standard orthographies work for speakers? Certainly not for Lakota America. The audiobook version of that fine work is absolutely marred by the efforts of that narrator, who pronounces French terms with ease and familiarity. One only hopes for correct pronunciation of Lakxóta terms in Lakȟóta: An Indigenous History since so much effort has gone in to employ a standard orthography to ensure it.
Andersson and Posthumus begin their work with the emergence narrative of the Títxunwaŋ Lakxóta people, which is followed by the story of the White Buffalo Calf Woman and her gift of the sacred pipe. The emergence narratives of the Eastern Dakhóta and Middle Dakhóta are excluded, though their place and part of the collective Ochéti Shakówiŋ, the Seven Council Fires or Great Sioux Nation, is not.
The authors understand how and why the pipe is important to the Lakxóta. They get it. This reader appreciates how respectful and mindful they are in their treatment of the covenant narrative. The Lakxóta place the appearance of the White Buffalo Calf Woman in many places on the Great Plains but the where and how of these stories is excluded.
Equally important to understanding the story of place is the savior narrative of the Fallen Star cycle of stories. This reader laments that these stories are excluded. Where the White Buffalo Calf Woman story is one about peace and interrelationship it is also about how to greet others - with water; the Fallen Star story is about practice of virtue and about how to say goodbye - with proper affection and gesture.
The strength of Lakȟóta is it’s inclusion of Lakxóta history drawn from the pictographic records known as winter counts. It is immensely gratifying that historians treat these primary resource documents as more than art pieces.
Lakȟóta is neatly divided into three parts. Each explores themes of culture (part one), conflict (part two), and survival (part three). The authors’ work is heavily drawn from Oglála voices, though much indeed of spiritual or philosophical belief or practice is shared in common. For a work that is representative and inclusive of the Lakxóta, why draw so heavily from one of seven divisions? The answer might be that there is so much more material recorded of Oglála voices. Part one carefully constructs a window into the daily cultural life of nineteenth century Lakxóta.
After expertly establishing the philosophies, spiritual beliefs, and organization of society, the authors pick up with the history of the Lakxóta at the turn of 1800. The Lakxóta encounter with the Corps of Discovery is only touched on; the Arikara War of 1823, the first punitive campaign against a plains Indian tribe, is passed over; the exclusion of these events minimizes the growing political, social, and military strength of the Lakxóta.
The authors pick up the history of the nineteenth century Lakxóta in earnest in the 1840s with immigration on the Oregon Trail, but they describe it best as tension as the bison population begins to drop. Competition with cattle over water and grass? Bovine disease? The authors offer an excellent summary that it was all the above. In order to get the resources that the Lakxóta and their horses need to pursue the vanishing bison ganges and expand their ranges into other tribally occupied lands.
There is little attention paid to the 1863-1864 punitive campaigns led by generals Sibley and Sully. The authors also split the Lakxóta into “northern” and “southern” divisions, but the Lakxóta people do this too in a manner of their own with the division coming from those who live north of the Cheyenne River and those who live south of the river. The authors construct the plains filled with rising tensions and escalating conflict that builds to a breaking point when they write of inevitable conflict.
The authors stated that when they write of the Battle of the Little Bighorn they would write from the Lakxóta perspective, and they do just that. They also do not aggrandize this fight, rather it is merely an endcap to chapter seven. There are so many books about this fight already, this treatment of the fight describes real people in tension and worry. The outcome of the fight, a victory co-celebrated with the Cheyenne.
The Ghost Dance, its origins, development, and practice by the Lakxóta is wonderfully broken down. The authors touch on the issue of syncretism in sharing not a Christian worldview that natives and nonnatives share a belief in one common god, but Sitting Bull’s own letter informing Agent McLaughin this very perspective. This doesn’t equate the Christian redemption narrative with sundance, rather, the Lakxóta have their own worship and tradition with the same god.
The last third of Lakȟóta reaches past the tragedy of Sitting Bull’s death and Wounded Knee. Readers explore the Lakxóta world in the post-reservation era, deaths of the last great pre-reservation leaders, crushing poverty, ranching & farming, the legacies of the Dawes Allotment Act and the Indian Reorganization Act, and more. The struggle of Self-Determination brings the Lakxóta story up to the Dakota Access Pipeline. The authors take one step more as they wrap up their work and offer a look into life on the reservations during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Lakȟóta does not have the same scope as Lakota America and it should not. The authors shine a bright light on the story of leadership in the twentieth century and most importantly, that the Lakxóta are present and active in the modern world.
