The Traditional World of the Lakotas
Black Elk was born into a volatile, trying time in
Lakota history. Their older way of life was coming increasingly under fire by
outsiders as white settlers and traders pressed relentlessly westward, invading
the Lakotas' homeland. Some of their older practices and ways of thinking and
speaking about the world changed or fell into disuse for a number of reasons:
diseases taking their toll on the older population; confinement to
reservations; boarding schools; and the imposition of foreign religious
beliefs, economic, social, and political systems, and the English language.
That so many of the older customs and beliefs survive and are practiced and
remembered today--sometimes adapted and revitalized for the challenges of a new
century testifies to the durability and vitality of Lakota culture. The books
listed here offer a glimpse of their way of life and the major events shaping
their world before reservation times, as remembered or witnessed by Lakotas or
pieced together by researchers. Some of the biographies and autobiographies of Lakotas and
Charles Allen, From Fort Laramie to
Wounded Knee: In the West That Was
Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun and Josephine Waggoner, With My Own
Eyes: A Lakota Woman Tells Her People's History
Raymond A. Bucko, The Lakota Ritual of
the Sweat Lodge: History and
Contemporary Practice
Eugene Buechel and Paul Manhart (comp.), Lakota Dictionary: Lakota-English,
English-Lakota, New Comprehensive Edition
William S. E. Coleman, Voices of Wounded
Knee
Ella Deloria, Speaking of Indians
Raymond DeMallie (ed.), The Sixth
Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to
John G. Neihardt
Francis Densmore, Teton Sioux Music
and Culture
Charles A. Eastman, Indian Heroes &
Great Chieftains
Charles A. Eastman, Old Indian Days
Charles A. Eastman, The Soul of an
Indian: An Interpretation
Kay Graber, Sister to the Sioux:
The Memoirs of Elaine Goodale Eastman,
1885-91
James O. Gump, The Dust Rose Like
Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and the
Sioux
Richard G. Hardorff (comp.), The Death of Crazy
Horse: A Tragic Episode in
Lakota History
Richard G. Hardorff (comp.), Lakota Recollections
of the Custer Fight: New
Sources of Indian-Military History
Edward Lazarus, Black Hills, White
Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United
States, 1775 to the Present
Thomas H. Lewis, The Medicine Men:
Oglala Sioux Ceremony and Healing
Marie L. McLaughlin, Myths and Legends of
the Sioux
James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance
Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890
William K. Powers, Oglala Religion
William K. Powers, Yuwipi: Vision &
Experience in Oglala Ritual
Catherine Price, The Oglala People,
1841-1879
Rex Alan Smith, Moon of Popping
Trees
Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, Grandpa was a Cowboy
and an Indian and Other
Stories
Luther Standing Bear, My People the Sioux
Luther Standing Bear, Stories of the Sioux
Herman Viola, It Is a Good Day to
Die: Indian Eyewitnesses Tell the Story of
the Little Bighorn
James R. Walker, Lakota Belief and
Ritual
James R. Walker, Lakota Myth
James R. Walker, Lakota Society
Zitkala-Ša, Dreams and Thunder:
Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera
Zitkala-Ša,
Old Indian
Legends
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