Lakota Texts is a treasure trove of stories told in the original language by modern Lakota women who make their home in Denver, Colorado. Sometimes witty, often moving, and invariably engaging and fascinating, these stories are both autobiographical and cultural. The stories present personal experiences along with lessons the women have learned or were taught about Lakota history, culture, and legends. The women share aspects of their own lives, including such rituals as powwows, the sweatlodge, and rites of puberty. The women also include details of the older Lakota world and its customs, revered myths, more recent stories, and jokes. In addition to the valuable light Lakota Texts sheds on the lives of modern Lakota women, these stories also represent a significant contribution to American Indian linguistics. Regina Pustet has meticulously transcribed and translated the stories in a detailed, interlinear format that makes the texts a rich source of information about modern Lakota language itself.

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Lakota Tradition -- 2. Lakota Practice -- 3. George Sword -- 4. Lakota Formulas -- 5. Textual Analysis -- 6. Lakota Theme -- 7. Traditional Implications -- Appendix 1: Narrative 1 and Literary Translation -- Appendix 2: Narrative 2 and Literary Translation -- Appendix 3: Narrative 3 and Literary Translation -- Appendix 4: Sun Dance Narrative andLiterary Translation -- Notes -- References -- Index

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.

Lakota Texts is a treasure trove of stories told in the original language by modern Lakota women who make their home in Denver, Colorado. Sometimes witty, often moving, and invariably engaging and fascinating, these stories are both autobiographical and cultural. The stories present personal experiences along with lessons the women have learned or were taught about Lakota history, culture, and legends. The women share aspects of their own lives, including such rituals as powwows, the sweatlodge, and rites of puberty. The women also include details of the older Lakota world and its customs, revered myths, more recent stories, and jokes. In addition to the valuable light Lakota Texts sheds on the lives of modern Lakota women, these stories also represent a significant contribution to American Indian linguistics. Regina Pustet has meticulously transcribed and translated the stories in a detailed, interlinear format that makes the texts a rich source of information about modern Lakota language itself.

A ledger book of drawings by Lakota Sioux warriors found in 1876 on the Little Bighorn battlefield offers a rare first-person Native American record of events that likely occurred in 1866–1868 during Red Cloud’s War. This color facsimile edition uncovers the origins, ownership, and cultural and historical significance of this unique artifact.

As agency physician on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1896 to 1914, Dr. James R. Walker recorded a wealth of information on the traditional lifeways of the Oglala Sioux. Lakota Society presents the primary accounts of Walker's informants and his syntheses dealing with the organization of camps and bands, kinship systems, beliefs, ceremonies, hunting, warfare, and methods of measuring time.

LAKOTA TALES AND TEXTS IN TRANSLATION has a remarkable history of its own. The original Lakota manuscript was rescued from destruction during the violent occupation of the village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, during the late winter of 1973. In 1970, Paul Manhart, a Catholic priest of the Society of Jesus and at the time a pastor in that village, had published Eugene Buechel, S.J.'s monumental Lakota-English Dictionary, with the late Louis and Daisy Whirlwind Horse assisting. Louis had been a tribal interpreter and Daisy was a highly perceptive translator. Father Manhart had an office in the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church overlooking the mass grave of Lakota visitor victims of the 1890 massacre. At the time of occupation, he had borrowed the original manuscript of Buechel's "Lakota Tales and Texts" from the Holy Rosary Mission archives. He was planning soon to publish it. So he kept it on a lower shelf in the far corner of his small library. Early during the occupation, he and two local men, Benjamin White Butterfly and Ruben Mesteth, took a box and went to the office, only to find it in shambles and the room and library shelves stripped of books - all except the Tales and Texts manuscript in the corner, a dingy home-made book in Lakota long-hand, untouched. All else was gone. In June of 1978 then, "Lakota Tales and Texts" was published in St. Louis. Father Manhart prepared this translation to answer many requests from teachers of history, social sciences, and language; and to lay a groundwork for preparing a series of Lakota language texts for systematically teaching the language in a two or four-year high school course. In Louis and Daisy Whirlwind Horse's words: "Our children will lose some real and conscious contact with their roots unless we continue to record and study Lakota."