The Oceti Sakowin and the River They Named
Near Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Before any settler arrived, before any mill or fort or railroad, the people who shaped this landscape were the Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires, the nation Europeans would come to call the Sioux. The Big Sioux River that gives this city its reason for being runs through the heart of territory the Lakota and Dakota peoples occupied for generations before contact. They knew the falls. They knew the quartzite. They knew the river's moods in spring flood and summer low.
The name Sioux itself comes from an Ojibwe word, filtered through French: the Anishinaabe called their neighbors Nadouessioux, a term that the French shortened and that English speakers adopted. The Dakota and Lakota people called themselves by variations of a word meaning friend or ally. The name the city carries today is, in a real sense, a French mispronunciation of an Ojibwe term for someone else's people.
The Oceti Sakowin encompassed seven distinct bands organized into three language groups: the eastern Dakota, the middle group often called the Nakota, and the western Lakota. The Dakota bands who used this river valley knew the Big Sioux by their own name for it. They hunted bison on the surrounding plains, fished the river, and maintained trade networks extending hundreds of miles in each direction.
By the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux in eighteen fifty-one, the Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakota ceded roughly twenty-one million acres across Minnesota, Iowa, and what is now South Dakota. The treaty came with promised annuities that were largely diverted to traders, and within a decade the arrangements that were supposed to replace the land had mostly collapsed. The eighteen sixty-two conflict in Minnesota, which reached into this territory and drove the first settlers out of Sioux Falls, grew directly from those broken commitments.
The falls the city is built around have a longer story than the city knows how to tell.
