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Essay on Lakota Culture
The Lakota are a Native American tribe. They structure one of a group of seven tribes (the Great Sioux Nation) and speak Lakota, one of the three major dialects of the Sioux language. The Lakota are the westernmost of the three Sioux groups, occupying lands in both North and South Dakota. The seven branches or "sub-tribes" of the Lakota are Brulé, Oglala, Sans Arcs, Hunk papa, Miniconjou, Blackfoot and Two Kettles. Lakota culture is not independent of the forces of world economy, that they are inextricably woven into everyday life.
The Lakota are closely related to the western Dakota of Minnesota. After their adoption of the horse, in the early 18th Century, the Lakota became part of the Great Plains culture with their ultimate Algonkin-speaking allies, the Tsitsistas (Cheyenne), living in the northern Great Plains. Their society centered on the buffalo hunt with the horse. There were 20,000 Lakota in the mid-18th century. The number has now increased to about 70,000, of whom about 20,500 still speak their ancestral language. After 1720, the Lakota branch of the Seven Council Fires split into two elements, the Saone who moved to the Lake Traverse area on the South Dakota-North Dakota-Minnesota border, and the Oglala-Brulé who occupied the James River Valley. By about 1750, on the other hand, the Saone had moved to the east bank of the Missouri, followed 10 years later by the Oglala and Brulé (Sicangu).( Ortiz, S. (1998))
The large and commanding Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa villages had prevented the Lakota from crossing the Missouri for an extended period, but when smallpox and other diseases nearly destroyed these tribes, the way was open for the first Lakota to cross the Missouri into the drier, short-grass prairies of the High Plains......
