Sioux

The Sioux, or Ochethi Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires, are the Dakota and Lakota peoples of the northern Great Plains, one of the great equestrian nations of Native America. Before the 17th century the eastern Santee Dakota lived around Lake Superior in present-day Minnesota and Wisconsin, gathering wild rice and fishing by canoe; war with the Ojibwe through the 18th century pushed them west onto the prairies, where the Yankton, Yanktonai and western Lakota (Teton) took up the horse and the bison hunt. By the 1850s the Lakota were the power of the Northern Plains, defeating Custer's 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn in 1876 before the wars closed at Wounded Knee in 1890. The sun dance, the akicita warrior societies, winter counts painted on hide, and the defence of the Black Hills and the Pipestone Quarry anchor a culture that never surrendered its treaty claims: the 1980 Supreme Court award in United States v. Sioux Nation, the Wounded Knee incident and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests all continue the same two-century argument over stolen land.