The Lakota and Dakota in North Dakota

The Lakota and Dakota are the same people at different distances. The seven council fires of the Oceti Sakowin, the Great Sioux Nation, stretch from the woodland lakes of Minnesota in the east to the Powder River country of Wyoming in the west, and the bands that occupied what is now North Dakota were among the most numerous and powerful. The Standing Rock Reservation, which crosses the state line between North Dakota and South Dakota, is home to the Hunkpapa Lakota, the band that produced Sitting Bull, along with other Lakota and Dakota bands.

The Spirit Lake Tribe, on the former Devil's Lake Reservation in east-central North Dakota, are Dakota, specifically Wahpeton and Sisseton, who had been removed from Minnesota after the eighteen sixty-two Dakota War and settled on what was then called Devil's Lake. The geography matters because the two groups, Lakota and Dakota, speak related but different dialects of the same Siouan language family and have distinct histories, ceremonies, and tribal governments. Both nations were affected by the systematic allotment policy of the Dawes Act in eighteen eighty-seven, which divided communal reservation land into individual parcels and opened the remainder to white settlement.

The Standing Rock Reservation lost roughly half its land base to allotment and surplus land sales in the decades after eighteen eighty-seven. The Spirit Lake Reservation lost even more, proportionally. What remained was often the least productive land.

The two reservations today govern themselves as sovereign nations, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Spirit Lake Nation, with their own councils, courts, and agencies. The history of broken treaties and land loss is documented, contested in court, and still unfinished.