The Lakota ( or , ) are a Native American people. Also known as the Teton Sioux (from ), they are one of the three prominent subcultures of the Sioux people, with the Eastern Dakota (Santee) and Western Dakota (). Their current lands are in North and South Dakota. They speak —the Lakota language, the westernmost of three closely related languages that belong to the Siouan language family. Originally based around the western Great Lakes, the Lakota were pushed onto the northern Great Plains during the seventeenth century by conflicts with the Anishinaabe and Cree; after adopting horse culture around 1730, they crossed the Missouri River and established themselves in the Black Hills by the 1770s as the spiritual center of their territory.
The 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty recognized Lakota sovereignty over much of the central Plains in exchange for passage along the Oregon Trail; the 1868 treaty, concluding Red Cloud's War, closed the Black Hills to white settlement "for as long as the river flows and the eagle flies," a guarantee the 1874 discovery of gold there rendered meaningless within two years. The resulting Great Sioux War culminated in the destruction of Custer's column at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, but a reinforced army ended Lakota resistance by 1877, confining the bands to reservations under a Black Hills cession treaty whose legitimacy remains disputed. Conflict flared a final time in 1890, when the killing of Sitting Bull at Standing Rock was followed two weeks later by the Wounded Knee Massacre, during which the 7th Cavalry killed more than 250 Lakota men, women, and children—an event that has endured as a defining symbol of U.S. policy toward Native nations.
Today the Lakota live primarily on five reservations in South Dakota—Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Lower Brule, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock—with further communities in North Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, and the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the latter descended from bands that fled north during the Minnesota and Black Hills wars. Each reservation is governed by an elected tribal council as a "domestic dependent nation" of the federal government. In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court awarded the Sioux nations $122 million for the Black Hills taking in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, a settlement the tribes have refused on the grounds that acceptance would extinguish their claim to the land, leaving the award to accrue interest in a federal account now worth over $1 billion. A 2007 declaration of independence by a faction associated with Russell Means was repudiated by the tribes' elected governments.
The seven bands or "sub-tribes" of the Lakota are: (, Burned Thighs) ("They Scatter Their Own") (, Without Bows) (Hunkpapa, "Camps at the End of the Camp Circle") (Miniconjou, "Planters by the Water") ("Blackfeet" or "Blackfoot") (Two Kettles)
Notable Lakota figures include (Sitting Bull) and (Crazy Horse), leaders during the Plains wars; (Red Cloud) and (Spotted Tail), prominent in treaty diplomacy; (Black Elk); and, among more recent activists, Russell Means ().
History
Lakota origin records and legends Early Lakota history is recorded in their winter counts (Lakota: waníyetu wówapi), pictorial calendars painted on hides or later recorded on paper. The Battiste Good winter count records Lakota history to 900 CE, when White Buffalo Calf Woman gave the Lakota people the White Buffalo Calf Pipe. According to this legend, which remains central to Lakota religious tradition, the very beautiful Ptesáŋwiŋ (White Buffalo Woman) appeared to two hunters, destroyed the one who approached her with impure intentions, and then presented the sacred buffalo calf pipe (ptehíŋčala čhaŋnúŋpa) to the people through the chief Standing Hollow Horn—its bowl of red stone representing the Earth, its wooden stem all growing things, its twelve eagle feathers all winged creatures, together binding the Lakota to every element of the universe through prayer to Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka. Departing, she transformed successively into a red-and-brown calf, a white buffalo, and a black buffalo—bowing to the four quarters of the universe before disappearing—with a promise to return at the end. The pipe she left behind was not merely a ritual object but the symbolic center of Lakota cosmology: its fire the universe's focal point, its smoke a direct conduit to the Great Mystery, and White Buffalo Woman herself the mediating link between the sacred and the human.
Early history Siouan-language speakers originated in the central Mississippi Valley, part of a larger movement of Siouan-speaking peoples whose gradual northwestward migration was triggered in part by the collapse of the Mississippian mound-building cultures and their great center at Cahokia from the 12th century onward. The ancestral Sioux shifted slowly northwestward until they reached the pine-oak forests spreading west from the Great Lakes; the Lakota—the westernmost of the Očhethi Šakowiŋ (Seven Council Fires)—pushed farthest, settling on lands toward the Minnesota Valley, a transition zone where Eastern Woodlands and western grasslands met. The Lakota's own tradition tells a different story of origins, holding that the people emerged from Wind Cave in the Black Hills and that their long migration eastward and eventual return was simply a journey home rather than an arrival anywhere new, but this will likely remain Lakota oral accounting and no additional corroboration is available.
In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Dakota-Lakota speakers lived in the upper Mississippi region in territory now organized as Minnesota and Wisconsin. War parties consisting of Cree, armed with iron weapons and seeking beaver, began pressing the Sioux from the north, pushing them westward onto the Great Plains throughout the mid- to late-17th century. In the early 18th century, Lakota obtained horses through trade with the Cheyenne along the Missouri River—animals they called šuŋkawakaŋ ("dog of power/mystery/wonder")—and began their transformation into a horse-mounted buffalo hunting culture. Both Lakota and Cheyenne tradition concur on this point of transmission; the Cheyenne had themselves only recently become mounted, having acquired horses by 1766 and moved into the vicinity of the Black Hills around 1790, where further acquisition allowed them to abandon agriculture for full-time bison hunting. Within a few generations the Lakota, the Cheyenne, and most other peoples of the region had adopted a common seasonal rhythm—dispersed band life through spring and autumn, sheltered winter camps, and a great summer gathering for ceremony and communal hunt, their tipi circles forming what the Lakota called the sacred hoop of the nation.
In 1660, French explorers estimated the total Sioux population (Lakota, Santee, Yankton, and Yanktonai) at 28,000. In 1805, the Lakota population was estimated at 8,500; in 1881 it reached 16,110. They were one of the few Native nations to increase in population during the 19th century. In 2010, the Lakota population exceeded 170,000, of whom about 2,000 still spoke Lakȟótiyapi.
After 1720, the Lakota branch of the Seven Council Fires split into two major groups: the Saône, who moved to the Lake Traverse area, and the Oglála-Sičháŋǧu, who occupied the James River valley. By about 1750 the Saône had moved to the east bank of the Missouri River, followed ten years later by the Oglála and Brulé. The large Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa villages had long prevented the Lakota from crossing the Missouri River.
The smallpox epidemic that began in 1781—originating in Mexico City in 1779 and carried northward through trade networks—devastated the Missouri Valley villagers. Arikaras lost more than three-fourths of their people, abandoning all but seven of their thirty-two villages; Mandan villages were reduced from eight to two. The Lakota crossed the river into the short-grass prairies of the High Plains. Under Lakota pressure, the Cheyenne moved west to the Powder River Country. The Lakota eventually made the Black Hills their home and a central component of their existence.
Preliminary intercultural relations Before the treaty era imposed its framework of cession and capitulation, the Lakota—like other tribes—engaged neighboring Indigenous nations and successive waves of French, British, and American traders through channels of negotiation, gift exchange, and ritualized alliance-making (if not kinship). These negotiations were deployed with strategic precision, and the associated trade networks were calibrated to maximize access to horses and firearms alike, while Lakota diplomacy was sophisticated enough to reshape their internal political geography as much as it resulted from outside interactions. What emerged was neither passive accommodation nor unilateral disruption but a pattern of selective adoption—new economic networks grafted onto existing structures of oyáte sovereignty—that would define Lakota relations with the wašíču (whites) well into the treaty period itself.
Treaties and conflicts
Initial contact between the Lakota peoples and the United States—at least in terms of individuals officially representing the government under a commission from President Thomas Jefferson—came in September 1804, when the Lewis and Clark Expedition entered Sicangu territory near the mouth of the Bad River. A council originally intended as a routine display of American authority and diplomacy that included gift-giving, a military parade, and a taste of whiskey for the assembled chiefs, quickly soured when William Clark attempted to depart with the Sicangu leaders Black Buffalo and Medicine Bull still aboard the keelboat. Warriors seized the bow cable of the accompanying pirogue and refused to let it go, and the war leader declared that the Americans would not be permitted to advance further upriver without additional gifts. Clark drew his sword, Lewis ordered the expedition's swivel gun and blunderbusses loaded, and Sicangu warriors strung their bows and leveled their weapons; for several tense minutes, the entire expedition stood on the brink of an armed clash that, had it erupted, might well have ended the discovery mission on the spot and delayed American expansion into the interior for years. The standoff dissolved when Black Buffalo released the cable and invited the Americans' boats to continue upriver under Sicangu escort—a resolution that established, from the outset, the terms on which the Lakota would deal with the United States: as the dominant power of the region, granting passage on their own terms rather than submitting to it.