The Seven Council Fires: Oceti Sakowin as a Living Nation

The word Sioux does not come from the Lakota language. It derives from an Ojibwe term, filtered through French, whose precise meaning is disputed. The Lakota word for themselves is Lakota, which means allied, or friends. The people the United States called the Sioux call themselves Oceti Sakowin: the Seven Council Fires.

The Seven Council Fires is the political and cultural entity composed of three major divisions, the Teton Lakota, the Santee Dakota, and the Yankton Nakota, which together comprise the seven council fires, each division with its own council and its own territory. Before European contact, the Oceti Sakowin governed through a consensus process that could assemble the councils of all seven nations for decisions affecting the whole. They were not a tribe in the colonial administrative sense. They were a confederacy.

The nations that make up the Oceti Sakowin today are federally recognized sovereign governments. Pine Ridge, Standing Rock, Rosebud, Cheyenne River, Lower Brule, Crow Creek, Yankton, and Flandreau all have their own constitutions, their own courts, their own police forces, their own economic enterprises, and their own active federal relationships. They are not historical. They are contemporary governments.

The name Oceti Sakowin was visible on the signs and banners at the Standing Rock water protection camp in twenty sixteen, where the largest gathering of these nations in more than a century assembled under the same political identity that had governed the Northern Plains for centuries before treaties were signed. That gathering was not a revival. It was a continuation.