Category: Lakota

Native Foods

It struck me first in the wake of the Vietnam War, when hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai, and Cambodian refugees arrived in America—and began opening restaurants. Even then I thought back to small Mexican restaurants in 1950s Southern California, and the ubiquitous pizza places and Italian restaurants that I ate in in the 60s and 70s from Oceanside, California to Washington D.C., and west to Oregon. I thought then and think now that food can bring people together with less rancor and more joy than any other thing or idea I can imagine. Read The Article

So the President lied?

Which president, which time?

President Ulysses S. Grant

Indian trails of tears are littered with Presidential lies. We could pick almost any one, but why not take the hero of the Civil War and the man on the $50 bill. He had some interesting dealings with the Nez Perce, so I am somewhat familiar with President Grant’s “Peace Policy” and stated attempts to do better by Indians than had his predecessors.

The Nez Perce had signed a treaty with the nation in 1855 that left them much of their traditional homeland, including the Wallowa Country. In 1863, gold was found on that reservation in Idaho, so the government negotiated a new treaty, centered in Lapwai, Idaho, which reduced the size of the reservation by about 90 percent. Old Joseph and the chiefs of several other Nez Perce bands did not sign, and Joseph went back to the Wallowas, where no gold had been discovered, and where he was briefly left Read The Article

Lakota and Dakota—unfortunate “canaries” in Indian America


Alvin Josephy once noted that when the American Government wanted to show off our country to the world, it used images of Plains Indians, splendid in feathered headdresses and riding horses. It matched the image of Indians carried by most non-Indian Americans—omitting the hundreds of tribes and cultures of farming, hunting, gathering, and fishing Indians that the Europeans encountered on arrival. And putting them on European horses.
Sadly and ironically, these iconic Indians were Lakota, or Dakota, known collectively as Sioux—and, historically, some of the most hounded and abused tribal people in America!
In the early days of the Civil War, the Dakota—four major bands of Siouxian Indians—were squeezed onto smaller and smaller reservations along the Minnesota River, and promised commodities and annuity payments by solemn treaty in exchange for the hunting, farming, and gathering grounds taken from them by white settlers. Federal Indian agents and a Minnesota governor skimmed and stole
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