The Oceti Sakowin, Seven Council Fires

Before the word South Dakota existed, before the territory lines were drawn, this land belonged to the Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires. That is the name the people gave themselves, and it is the name that matters. English speakers compressed them into one word: Sioux, a French corruption of a term used by their Ojibwe neighbors, a term that may have meant little snakes or enemy. The Oceti Sakowin rejected the label. They were seven distinct nations bound by kinship and shared law: the Mdewakanton, Wahpekute, Sisseton, and Wahpeton together formed the Dakota; the Yankton and Yanktonai, often called the Nakota, formed the middle group; and the seven western bands, the Oglala, Sicangu, Hunkpapa, Miniconjou, Sihasapa, Oohenumpa, and Itazipco, formed the Lakota. Together they occupied a vast territory stretching from what is now Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains.

The Lakota moved west onto the northern Great Plains in the sixteen hundreds, acquiring horses by about seventeen hundred and becoming among the most skilled equestrian cultures the continent had ever seen. By the early eighteen hundreds they were the dominant power across much of the northern Plains. They followed the bison, not as wanderers but as a civilization organized around that relationship, with ceremony, trade networks, and a political structure sophisticated enough to negotiate on equal terms with European empires and, for a time, the young United States.

They are still here. The Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Lower Brule, and Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate reservations lie within South Dakota today. The population of enrolled Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota tribal members in the state numbers in the tens of thousands. The Oceti Sakowin are not a chapter from history. They are the oldest continuous presence on this landscape.