Sioux Tribe Quotes

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The four pillars of Sioux leadership—acknowledged by the tribe to this day—are bravery, fortitude, generosity, and wisdom.
Bob Drury (The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend)
Despite all of the time he spent in Big Heart's, Wilson had never come to understand the social lives of Indians. He did not know that, in the Indian world, there is not much social difference between a rich Indian and a poor one. Generally speaking, Indian is Indian. A few who gain wealth and power as lawyers, businessmen, artists, or doctors may marry white people and keep only white friends, but generally Indians of different classes interact freely with one another. Most unemployed or working poor, some with good jobs and steady incomes, but all mixing together. Wilson also did not realize how tribal distinctions were much more important than economic ones. The rich and poor Spokanes may hang out together, but that doesn't necessarily mean the Spokanes are friendly with the Lakota or Navajo or any other tribe. The Sioux still distrust the Crow because they served as scouts for Custer. Hardly anybody likes the Pawnee. Most important, though, Wilson did not understand that the white people who pretend to be Indian are gently teased, ignored, plainly ridiculed, or beaten, depending on their degree of whiteness.
Sherman Alexie (Indian Killer)
The tribe, led by one of its greatest chiefs, James Bigheart—who spoke seven languages, among them Sioux, French, English, and Latin, and who had taken to wearing a suit—
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
He’d been unique, a member of a vanishing race, a vanishing tribe, an individual in an ancient society. Now he was one of thousands with mixed blood, not unique anymore, not even Lakota. He was part Moroccan, part Berber if he believed the senator. The illegitimate son of a senator, how was that for a shocker? And if it hadn’t been for a renegade gambling syndicate trying to get a casino on Sioux land that they could siphon off profits from, he’d have gone the rest of his life without ever knowing the truth. His mother had kept her secret for thirty-six years. His whole life.
Diana Palmer (Paper Rose (Hutton & Co. #2))
We gathered up the kids and sat up on the hill. We had no time to get our chickens and no time to get our horses out of the corral. The water came in and smacked against the corral and broke the horses' legs. The drowned, and the chickens drowned. We sat on the hill and we cried. These are the stories we tell about the river," said [Ladona] Brave Bull Allard. The granddaughter of Chief Brave Bull, she told her story at a Missouri River symposium in Bismark, North Dakota, in the fall of 2003. Before The Flood, her Standing Rock Sioux Tribe lived in a Garden of Eden, where nature provided all their needs. "In the summer, we would plant huge gardens because the land was fertile," she recalled. We had all our potatoes and squash. We canned all the berries that grew along the river. Now we don't have the plants and the medicine they used to make.
Bill Lambrecht (Big Muddy Blues: True Tales and Twisted Politics Along Lewis and Clark's Missouri River)
In roughly that same time period, while General George Armstrong Custer achieved world fame in failure and catastrophe, Mackenzie would become obscure in victory. But it was Mackenzie, not Custer, who would teach the rest of the army how to fight Indians. As he moved his men across the broken, stream-crossed country, past immense herds of buffalo and prairie-dog towns that stretched to the horizon, Colonel Mackenzie did not have a clear idea of what he was doing, where precisely he was going, or how to fight Plains Indians in their homelands. Neither did he have the faintest idea that he would be the one largely responsible for defeating the last of the hostile Indians. He was new to this sort of Indian fighting, and would make many mistakes in the coming weeks. He would learn from them. For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retribution. He had been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Great Plains fastness because, six years after the end of the Civil War, the western frontier was an open and bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a place where anarchy and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war, unchallenged by foreign foes in North America for the first time in its history, the Union now found itself unable to deal with the handful of remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to retreat meekly onto reservations where they quickly learned the meaning of abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Great Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now by a mixture of vengeance and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.
S.C. Gwynne (Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History)
The Pawnees did most of the killing at Summit Springs, and they killed without mercy. The Cheyennes expected as much. “I do not belittle the Pawnees for their killing of women or children because as far back as any of us could remember the Cheyenne and Sioux slaughtered every male, female, and child they could run across of the Pawnee tribe,” said a Dog Soldier survivor. “Each tribe hated the other with a deadly passion and savage hearts [that] know only total war.” Sherman and Sheridan’s notion of total war paled beside that of the Plains Indians.
Peter Cozzens (The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West)
Our People were imprisoned within the most difficult of the Indian languages, so difficult indeed that no other tribe except one related branch, the Gros Ventres, ever learned to speak it. It stood by itself, a language spoken by only 3300 people in the world: that was the total number of Our People. The enemy tribes were not much larger: the Ute had 3600; the Comanche, 3500; the Pawnee, about 6000. The great Cheyenne, who would be famous in history, had only 3500. The Dakota, known also as the Sioux, had many branches, and they totaled perhaps 11,000.
James A. Michener (Centennial)
The Sioux position, conveyed by White Face, is that the land needs to be returned; it needs to become tribal land again. White Face showed me what used to be several ancient sacred sites “where the Great Spirits dwell” and she wants those sites restored, so Sioux people can once again commune with the spirits. I reminded White Face that before the Sioux, there were Cheyenne Indians and other tribes on that land. So if America stole the land from the Sioux, didn’t the Sioux steal the land from the Cheyenne and other tribes? If the land is returned to the Sioux, shouldn’t the Sioux turn around and give it back to those who had it before? White Face looked flustered.
Dinesh D'Souza (America: Imagine a World Without Her)
The Dakota 38 refers to thirty-eight Dakota men who were executed by hanging, under orders from President Abraham Lincoln. To date, this is the largest “legal” mass execution in US history. The hanging took place on December 26, 1862—the day after Christmas. This was the same week that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. --- These amended and broken treaties are often referred to as the Minnesota Treaties. The word Minnesota comes from mni, which means water; and sota, which means turbid. Synonyms for turbid include muddy, unclear, cloudy, confused, and smoky. Everything is in the language we use. -- Without money, store credit, or rights to hunt beyond their ten-mile tract of land, Dakota people began to starve. The Dakota people were starving. The Dakota people starved. In the preceding sentence, the word “starved” does not need italics for emphasis. -- Dakota warriors organized, struck out, and killed settlers and traders. This revolt is called the Sioux Uprising. Eventually, the US Cavalry came to Mnisota to confront the Uprising. More than one thousand Dakota people were sent to prison. As already mentioned,“Real” poems do not “really” require words. --- I am a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship, I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.
Layli Long Soldier (Whereas)
Third, the Sioux did not delegate real power to an individual, be he a head of an akicita society, tribal chief, or simply a brave individual. As Lowie puts it, “in normal times the chief was not a supreme executive, but a peacemaker and an orator.” Chiefs—all chiefs—were titular, “and any power exercised within the tribe was exercised by the total body of responsible men who had qualified for social eminence by their war record and their generosity.”33 Whites could never understand this point, incidentally; because they could not conceive of a society without a solid hierarchy, the whites insisted that the Indians had to have chiefs who would be a final authority and able to speak for the entire tribe. Later, much difficulty grew out of this basic white misunderstanding of Indian government.
Stephen E. Ambrose (Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors)
But the hawk knew the landscape; there were vast areas of it he avoided due to a scarcity of prey. Land that was overhunted—that land was the Great Sioux Reservation, bordered by the rugged Black Hills on the west, the Missouri River on the east. There, even scrawny squirrels and half-dead rabbits were precious. The smudges there were tepees, made out of fading buffalo hide, clustered together in groups, the groups too close to those from other tribes, but forced, due to the government, to live together. Misery hung over this landscape like a cloud, even on the sunniest day. So he kept to the south, swooping closer to the ground, and finally the peaceful-seeming landscape gave up some secrets. A fence post here, a clump of bushes there, an upturned wagon, haystacks. As his eyes adjusted, however, other secrets were discovered. What seemed like a line of small haystacks were, upon closer inspection as the hawk zeroed in, cows. Unmoving cows, statues; some on their sides, others standing, all frozen where they were. The hawk turned, uninterested, to investigate more dark shapes emerging from the blinding white; horses, their legs collapsed under them, eyes closed forever.
Melanie Benjamin (The Children's Blizzard)
This beast that puffed smoke and spat fire and shrieked like a devil of an alien tribe; that split the silence as hideously as the long track split the once smooth plain; that was made of iron and wood; this thing of the white man’s, coming from out of the distance where the Great Spirit lifted the dawn, meant the end of the hunting-grounds and the doom of the Indian. Blood had flowed; many warriors lay in their last sleep under the trees; but the iron monster that belched fire had gone only to return again. Those white men were many as the needles of the pines. They fought and died, but always others came. The chief was old and wise, taught by sage and star and mountain and wind and the loneliness of the prairie-land. He recognized a superior race, but not a nobler one. White men would glut the treasures of water and earth. The Indian had been born to hunt his meat, to repel his red foes, to watch the clouds and serve his gods. But these white men would come like a great flight of grasshoppers to cover the length and breadth of the prairie-land. The buffalo would roll away, like a dust-cloud, in the distance, and never return. No meat for the Indian — no grass for his mustang — no place for his home. The Sioux must fight till he died or be driven back into waste places where grief and hardship would end him. Red and dusky, the sun was setting beyond the desert. The old chief swept aloft his arm, and then in his acceptance of the inevitable bitterness he stood in magnificent austerity, somber as death, seeing in this railroad train creeping, fading into the ruddy sunset, a symbol of the destiny of the Indian — vanishing — vanishing — vanishing —
Zane Grey (The U. P. Trail)
Somehow, when his duties had consisted of killing hostile Sioux and Cheyenne, Zane had been able to justify the situation. Those groups were warring against the wagon trains and refusing to follow government instructions. Many tribes saw the whites as an impossible threat, refusing to even try to get along. But the Blackfoot had been friendly. For the most part. Mountain
Tracie Peterson (The Coming Storm(Heirs of Montana, #2))
The use of the peace pipe was held sacred by the Indians. Usually it was used in ceremonies of religious, political, or social nature. The decorations on the pipe’s bowl and stem, and even the method of holding or passing the pipe on to the next person, held great ceremonial significance. The pipe was never laid on the ground. To smoke it was a signal that the smoker gave his pledge of honor. It was also believed that the smoke made one think clearly and endowed him with great wisdom. In a treaty ceremony, the pipe usually was passed around to everyone, even before the speeches were made and the problems discussed. Some pipes were made out of wood, clay, or bone. But the most popular and the most treasured were those made of the soft catlinite mined in the pipestone quarries of Minnesota. These red stone quarries were considered sacred by the Dakotas (Sioux), and were traditionally neutral ground for all tribes. Indians traveled many miles to get this pipestone, and it was a medium of barter between various tribes. The stone was so soft that it could be cut and worked into designs with a knife when freshly quarried. Some pipes were inlaid with lead. It is said that some of the Indian raids on small western town newspapers were made by the Indians to get type lead with which to inlay their pipes.
W. Ben Hunt (Indian Crafts & Lore)
By the time Columbus discovered America, the Indians were already using beads for decoration. Beads were made from shells, bones, claws, stones, and minerals. The Algonquin and Iroquois tribes of the eastern coast made beads from clam, conch, periwinkle, and other seashells. These beads were used as a medium of exchange by the early Dutch and English colonists. They were called “wampum,” a contraction of the Algonquin “wampumpeak” or “wamponeage,” meaning string of shell beads. The purple beads had twice the value of the white ones. The explorer, followed by the trader, missionary and settler, soon discovered that he had a very good trade item in glass beads brought from Europe. The early beads that were used were about 1/8 inch in diameter, nearly twice as large as beads in the mid-1800’s. They were called pony beads and were quite irregular in shape and size. The colors most commonly used were sky-blue, white, and black. Other less widely used colors were deep bluff, light red, dark red, and dark blue. The small, round seed beads, as they are called, are the most generally used for sewed beadwork. They come in a variety of colors. Those most commonly used by the Indians are red, orange, yellow, light blue, dark blue, green, lavender, and black. The missionaries’ floral embroidered vestments influenced the Woodland tribes of the Great Lakes to apply beads in flower designs. Many other tribes, however, are now using flower designs. There are four main design styles used in the modern period. Three of the styles are largely restricted to particular tribes. The fourth style is common to all groups. It is very simple in pattern. The motifs generally used are solid triangles, hourglasses, crosses, and oblongs. This style is usually used in narrow strips on leggings, robes, or blankets. Sioux beadwork usually is quite open with a solid background in a light color. White is used almost exclusively, although medium or light blue is sometimes seen. The design colors are dominated by red and blue with yellow and green used sparingly. The lazy stitch is used as an application. The Crow and Shoshoni usually beaded on red trade or blanket cloth, using the cloth itself for a background. White was rarely used, except as a thin line outlining other design elements. The most common colors used for designs are pale lavender, pale blue, green, and yellow. On rare occasions, dark blue was used. Red beads were not used very often because they blended with the background color of the cloth and could not be seen. The applique stitch was used. Blackfoot beadwork can be identified by the myriad of little squares or oblongs massed together to make up a larger unit of design such as triangles, squares, diamonds, terraces, and crosses. The large figure is usually of one color and the little units edging it of many colors. The background color is usually white, although other light colors such as light blue and green have been used. The smallness of the pattern in Blackfoot designs would indicate this style is quite modern, as pony trading beads would be too large to work into these designs. Beadwork made in this style seems to imitate the designs of the woven quill work of some of the northwestern tribes with whom the Blackfoot came in contact.
W. Ben Hunt (Indian Crafts & Lore)
The women of the Plains tribes made their clothing of soft, tanned elk skin. Their principal garment was a simple, sleeveless dress made from two hides. The style of the garment followed the natural shape of the skins with little change from tribe to tribe. These dresses usually hung loose from the shoulders. Belts were sometimes worn to draw them in at the waist. Cowrie and other shells were used for decorations by the Crow, Sioux, and Blackfoot tribes. The shells were obtained by barter. Elk and buffalo teeth, leather thongs, bead and quill work, and tin cones were also used. Originally, Indian women wore their hair straight or in braids.
W. Ben Hunt (Indian Crafts & Lore)
and he adopted her into his Hunkpapa Sioux tribe, giving her the name "Watanya cicilia," which means "Little Sure Shot." At the time, Annie was only twenty-four years old.
Robert A. Carter (Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend)
Grand Teton literally translates as Big Tits National Park. The area was named either by French-Canadian explorers or a Native American Sioux tribe (depending on which version of events you believe) because of the peaks’ resemblance to a pair of breasts. If the National Park Service renamed it Big Tits National Park they would undoubtedly see a dramatic rise in visitor numbers, but it might perhaps leave a few tourists feeling short-changed.
George Mahood (Not Tonight, Josephine: A Road Trip Through Small-Town America)
Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe) is a historian and author of Our History Is the Future, Standing with Standing Rock, and Red Nation Rising
Patty Krawec (Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future)
When the construction was announced to continue as planned, the tribe and their allies came together. People from across two hundred tribes and beyond to other communities came together to try and protect their water, their lives. They were met with forces from the National Guard and seventy-five other law enforcement agencies across the country. These forces used concussion grenades and automatic rifles against civilians. They spent hours shooting them with water cannons in subfreezing temperatures to try and make them give in.
Leah Myers (Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity)
The agency was started by the tribe’s economic development corporation, in an effort to diversify from its gambling casino called “WinnaVegas.” You read this right: Plains Indians publishing Arabic brochures for Nebraskans who are importing machinery from Koreans to be customized by a South Sioux City company for customers in Kuwait.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century)
there would have been no warfare. One of the great Indian warriors of history was Red Cloud of the Oglala Dakota Sioux tribe, who had a reputation for daring and ferocity. In June of 1866, Sherman called Red Cloud and several other Lakota Sioux leaders to Fort Laramie to discuss a new treaty to permit a new road to be built through Sioux territory. Even before an agreement had been reached, however, a battalion
Robert A. Carter (Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend)
The pipeline was designed to pass about a mile north of the Standing Rock Sioux tribal nation. The Energy Transfer Partners engineers planned to run the 30-inch-diameter steel pipe 90 to 110 feet under the Missouri River.31 This land was ceded to the Sioux under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which, like some four hundred treaties the U.S. government signed with Native American communities, was promptly violated by Washington.32 The Missouri River provides the tribe’s drinking water. The area is rich in farmland, ancient burial grounds, and artifacts.
Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)