Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power

Journal of World-Systems Research, 2015

This paper discusses changing "national" identities of the Lakota and Dakota on Standing Rock, "Sioux" Indian Reservation, through an overview of the traditional Lakota, the United States, conceptual differences of Lakota Oyate with U.S. sovereign power, and political representations. Envelopment/incorporation of the Lakota are discussed as struggles over sovereignty and treaty rights leading to formation of the "Sioux Nation" and six separated Lakota-Sioux reservations.…

United States must secure their consent prior to any U.S. policy decision which would effect the Lakota. Thus the formative years of Lakota-American interactions are replete with examples of treaties and agreements which recognized this norm of obtaining Lakota political consent.

Humanities, 2019

Oglala Lakota ethos manifests a pre-Socratic/Heideggerian variant of ethos: ethos as “haunt”. Within this alternative to the Aristotelian ethos-as-character, Oglala ethos marks out the “dwelling place” of the Oglala Lakota people. That is, the Oglala Lakota ground their cultural- and self-identity in the land: their ethology, in effect, expresses an ecology. Thus, an Oglala Lakotan ethos cannot be understood apart from its nation’s understanding of the natural world—of its primacy and sacredness. A further aspect of the Oglala Lakotan ethos rests in the nation’s history of conflict with EuroAmericans. Through military conflict, forced displacement, and material/economic exploitation of reservation lands, an Oglala Lakota ethos bears within itself a woundedness that continues to this day. Only through an understanding of ethos-as-haunt, of cultural trauma or woundedness, and of the ways of healing can Oglala Lakota ethos be fully appreciated.

Studies in American Indian Literatures, 2013

The American Indian Quarterly

In 1980, more than a hundred years after the Native American tribe called the Lakotas were removed from the Black Hills, the US Supreme Court found that this land had been taken without just compensation. The case had been making its way through the courts for fi fty-seven years, but rather than celebrate this victory and accept the offered compensation, the Lakotas rejected the payment. They want their land back. Jeffrey Ostler, professor of history at the University of Oregon, documents the intimate relationship between the Lakotas and the Black Hills with 320 endnotes and great attention to detail. Ostler avoids explicitly advocating for the return of the Black Hills to the Lakotas, but the attentive reader may fi nd a tinge of this throughout the text. The fi rst hint may be in the dedication, "For the next generation." After a brief introduction highlighting the white man's stamp of ownership on the Black Hills-the faces carved into Mount Rushmore-Ostler begins by sketching the archaeological fi ndings of human inhabitants of the Black Hills and relating the scant written evidence. The Lakotas were the westernmost Sioux tribe encountered by French explorers in the mid to late 1600s. The Seven Council Fires that comprised the Lakotas (Oglalas, Brulés, Minneconjous, Hunkpapas, Two Kettles, Shiasapas, and Sans Arcs) migrated westward to avoid confl ict with other tribes or to tap richer hunting grounds. By the 1750s there is evidence that the Lakotas were established in villages along the Missouri River and hunted on the plains east of the Black Hills. By 1804 Lewis and Clark encountered Lakotas on their ascent of the Missouri and noted the confl ict between the Lakotas and other Native American tribes occupying the southern Black Hills. By the 1820s and early 1830s the Lakotas dominated the Black Hills, abandoned

Leidschrift : Empire & Resistance. Religious Beliefs versus the Ruling Power, 2009

2008

Continuity and Change of Lakota Hunting and Gathering Practices and their Cultural Implications throughout Colonial Times, 2018

In this thesis I contrast historical and contemporary forms of hunting and gathering among Lakota people currently living in village-communities on reservations in the states of North and South Dakota (USA). In particular, the focus and main locus of analysis is laid on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, while examples from other Lakota reservations as well as Plains Cree reserves in Alberta, Canada, are only brought up as a means for making transnational or cross-tribal/cultural comparisons among Plains peoples yet regionally limited to the Northern Great Plains. I show that although social organization, economic relevance of hunting and type of animals predominantly hunted by the Lakota have changed throughout history in processes of adaption responding to larger infrastructural shifts, specific aspects of a worldview related to hunting, which was strongly shaped by the nomadic way of life of these peoples on the Northern Plains during the 19th century, have persisted and still ideationally permeate many spheres of social life. I argue that shared communal values and emic perceptions about human-nature relationships among Lakota and other Plains peoples are to a great extent ontologically rooted in a cosmology that was an outcome of a historical lifestyle as hunter(-gatherers) of buffalo. Despite socio-economic changes leading to the demise of that very foundational subsistence-based nomadic existence, elements of this lifestyle have nevertheless survived into modern day by their sustained relevance, adaption and application in social, economic, political, healthcare and educational contexts (to serve individuals’ quests for self-discovery and to support political aims for self-determined development of Native nations). Hunting and gathering are analyzed along two dimensions - as a practice and as a constitutive basis of a worldview and values. While, when looking at historical processes, it can be seen that the practice has changed in many ways due to technological, political and socio-economic shifts, its pursuit remains an economic necessity for some and it is still regarded by many as a continuation of a traditional way of life reflecting certain values, serving also as a source or marker of cultural identity. Furthermore, I argue that these cultural values, which originally fulfilled particular social functions (and to some extent still do today) in a nomadic hunter-gatherer societal structure and its contemporary remnants (for instance by regulating the distribution of food, encouraging commensality and defining social hierarchies), have been adapted in political contexts by tribal agents; They are either emphasized, silenced or reinterpreted to foster conditions of social, economic and political well-being on reservations or reserves and thus aiding nation-building processes embedded within larger institutional contexts of (inter-)national politics in a global market economy.

LUD, 2020

The article analyzes the Mashpee Wampanoag Nation's fight for recognition as a tribe and the recent attempts by the US federal government to take their land out of trust. Mashpee's 1977-1978 lost court case was famously described by James Clifford in a chapter of his book, The Predicament of Culture (1988). The text looks at the continuation of their legal struggle, their recognition as a tribe under the Code of Federal Regulations in 2007 and their recent legal battle to keep their lands. Mashpee's case is illustrative of the changes in the general perspective of tribal nations' identities and histories which have taken place in the United States since the 1970s, as reflected in the legal documents analyzed. It also shows that the change in perspective and law itself does not necessarily guarantee sovereignty to tribal nations. Thus, the article takes a legal an-thropological approach to the issue of their subjectivity and legal status.

The article discusses the life and work of Wakinyan Wanbli, artist and educator who uses art to promote cultural understanding and social justice, and mentions work of the artist influenced by Lakota heritage. Topics include effort of Wanbli to educate young people about importance of preserving Indigenous culture and tradition, 50th anniversary of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), and Lionel Bordeaux who served as the president of Sinte Gleska University (SGU). Scott, T. (2023). "We Are the Land: Reflections on KXL Resistance at Rootz Camp." Rethinking Marxism 35(1): 25p. This essay reflects on the efforts of a group of Lakota land and water protectors to resist the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, within the larger context of the Indigenous sovereignty, land-back, and climate-justice movements across North America. These protectors articulate their struggles by speaking to what Leanne Simpson and others have referred to as a politics of Indigenous "radical resurgence" and by fighting violent and ongoing dispossession through attempts to reject a politics of recognition or sanction from the U.S. settler-colonialist state, an approach that embodies possibility through radical Indigenous thought and practice. The essay documents this antecapitalist epistemology by describing acts of resistance at Rootz Camp over a several-month period. The essay illustrates how such efforts go beyond simply resisting or existing outside of capitalism but rather seek to vision and build an alternative.