Main Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power

Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power



Year: 2019
Publisher: Yale University Press
Pages: 543
ISBN 10: 0300248741
ISBN 13: 9780300248746
Series: The Lamar Series in Western History
File: PDF, 8.53 MB
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Lakota America

The Lamar Series in Western History includes scholarly books of general public interest
a wider understanding of the West’s significance in the political, social, and cultural life of
America. Comprising works of the highest quality, the series aims to increase the range and
vitality of Western American history, focusing on frontier places and people, Indian and
ethnic communities, the urban West and the environment, and the art and illustrated history of the American West.
Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, Past President of Yale
William J. Cronon, University of Wisconsin–­Madison
Philip J. Deloria, Harvard University
John Mack Faragher, Yale University
Jay Gitlin, Yale University
George A. Miles, Beinecke Library, Yale University
Martha A. Sandweiss, Princeton University
Virginia J. Scharff, University of New Mexico
Robert M. Utley, Former Chief Historian, National Park Service
George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration,
by Carlos K. Blanton
in the Early Twentieth Century, by John R. Bockstoce
by Kendra Taira Field
Farmworker Movement, by Lori A. Flores
Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hämäläinen
The American West: A New Interpretive History, Second Edition, by Robert V. Hine,
John Mack Faragher, and Jon T. Coleman
Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854–1946, by Katrina Jagodinsky
Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood, 1600–1870,
by Sami Lakomäki
1846–1873, by Benjamin Madley
Frontiers in the Gilded Age: Adventure, Capitalism, and Dispossession from Southern
Africa to the U.S.-­Mexican Borderlands, 1880–1917, by Andrew Offenburger
Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-­Century
Kentucky Frontier, by Honor Sachs
by Gregory D. Smithers
by David J. Weber and William deBuys





A New History of Indigenous Power

Pekka Hämäläinen

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund.
Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund.
Published with assistance from the John R. Bockstoce Endowment Fund.
Endpapers: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution;
front: Flame winter count, 1887, NAA INV 08633800;
back: Tracing of The Swan winter count, 1870, NAA INV 08633900.
Copyright © 2019 by Pekka Hämäläinen. All rights reserved.
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(U.S. office) or (U.K. office).
Set in Electra type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc., Durham, North Carolina.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966994
ISBN 978-­0 -­300-­21595-­3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1




A Note on Terminology


Introduction: Dark Matter of History
O n e A Place in the World
t w o Facing West




t h r e e The Imperial Cauldron
f o u r The Lakota Meridian


f i v e The Call of the White Buffalo Calf Woman
si x Empires


s e v e n War


e i g h t Shapeshifters



nin e Upside-­Down Soldiers


Epilogue: The Lakota Struggle for Indigenous Sovereignty
List of Abbreviations




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I owe many institutions and individuals thanks for their help and support in
writing this book. I have been extraordinarily fortunate to have Briony Truscott
manage the Nomadic Empires project and wish to express my deep gratitude to
her. Many friends and colleagues have read all or parts of the manuscript, spent
time talking with me about my project, and offered their expertise. I would like
to thank Rani Anderson, Sean Archer, Juliana Barr, Ned Blackhawk, LaDonna
Brave Bull Allard, Kingsley Bray, Bruce Brown Wolf, Jay Buckley, Marcel Bull
Bear, Jane Burbank, Richard Carwardine, Frederic Cooper, Julien Cooper,
Brian Delay, Philip Deloria, Jane Dinwoodie, Willy Dobak, Tawa Ducheneaux,
Marie Favereau, Alex Fire Thunder, Catharine Franklin, Gary Gerstle, Dakota
Wind Goodhouse, Steven Hahn, Tiffany Hale, Ryan Hall, Richard Iron Cloud,
Stella Iron Cloud, Mandy Izadi, Karl Jacoby, Goedarz Karimi, Ari Kelman, Tilda
Long Soldier, Ben Madley, Bryan Miller, Kathryn Olivarius, Brian One Feather,
Jeffrey Ostler, Sarah Pearsall, Laura Peers, Maya Petrovich, Marie Randall, Akim
Reinhardt, Irina Shingiray, Mark St. Pierre, Alan Taylor, Tim Vasko, Michael
Witgen, and John Wunder. I owe each of them a large debt of gratitude. I would
also like to thank friends in the Oxford History Department and the Rothermere
American Institute, especially Aileen Mooney and Jane Rawson, for all the help
along the way.
I have presented parts of this book in seminars at the University of Cambridge,
New York University, and the University of Oxford and wish to thank the participants for their comments and advice.
Elliott West and Richard White read the full manuscript for Yale University
Press and gave exceptional feedback. I deeply appreciate their help. They and the
other readers saved me from many mistakes. Those that remain are mine alone.
For their vital help I wish to thank the archivists and librarians at the Bodleian



Library; the Library of Congress; the National Archives; the Missouri Historical
Society; the Missouri History Museum, Library and Research Center; the Nebraska State Historical Society; the Newbery Library; the Oglala Lakota College; and the State Archives of the South Dakota Historical Society. I also wish
to extend grateful thanks to Mark Holman at the Sitting Bull College Library;
Michael Moore of the Sitting Bull College faculty; Jennifer Martel at the Sitting
Bull College Visitor Center; and Nicolas Texier at Service Historique de la Défense.
Lindsay Marshall offered efficient research assistance in Oklahoma, and I owe
her a debt of gratitude. Morgane Muscat provided invaluable help with French
colonial documents. Adina Berk at Yale University Press guided the manuscript
into production with keen insight. I am very grateful to Eliza Childs for superb
copyediting and for making the final stretch of the manuscript preparation so rewarding and enjoyable. It was a great pleasure to work with Bill Nelson again on
the maps.
My dear friends Chris Rogers, Sam Truett, and David Wishart have helped me
over the years in more ways than they know. And, as always, there is Veera Supinen who makes everything better.
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European
Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme
(FP7/2007–2013) / ERC grant agreement n0.615040.

A Note on Terminology

I use the word “Sioux” in this book as a cover term for seven related and allied
people or oyátes: the Lakotas, Yanktons, Yanktonais, Mdewakantons, Sissetons,
Wahpetons, and Wahpekutes, who together formed the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the
Seven Council Fires. Sioux is a French corruption of Ojibwe word “Nadouessioux” which means “snake” and thus enemy. Here I use Sioux when describing
events or action that involve more than one or all peoples or oyátes; the alternative would have been to list each group in every instance. Although problematic, “Sioux” remains the most common English term used by Lakotas and
non-­Natives alike, and many modern Lakota oyátes identify themselves as Sioux
tribes. “Dakota” is a cover term for the four eastern people, the Mdewakantons,
Sissetons, Wahpetons, and Wahpekutes.
The spelling of Lakota words follows New Lakota Dictionary, edited and
compiled by Jan Ullrich (2008; 2nd ed., Lakota Language Consortium, 2011).
I have used Lakota names for the seven Lakota tribes or oyátes unless a French
or English name is dominant in the literature: Hunkpapas (“head of camp circle
entrance”), Minneconjous (“plant by water”), Oglalas (“scatter one’s own”),
Sans Arcs (“without bows”), Sicangus (“burned thighs,” hence the French term
Brulés), Sihasapas (“Blackfeet”), and Two Kettles (“two boilings”). As for other
Native nations, I have used their preferred spellings of their names: Odawas
rather than Ottawas; Mesquakies rather than Foxes; Wyandots rather than
Hurons; and Ho-­Chunks rather than Winnebagos.


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Lakota America

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Dark Matter of History

Montana. It was a collision between two radically different expanding powers
that had conquered their way into the West, and its outcome was spectacular.
Lakotas and their Cheyenne allies killed more than two hundred soldiers of the
Seventh U.S. Cavalry, destroying five of its twelve companies. Remembered as
Custer’s Last Stand, the fight remains one of the most famous, intensely studied,
and passionately debated battles in history.1
While the fight itself was not transformative—after all, the railroad was coming
and the buffalo were almost gone—its ironies and symbolic resonances are unparalleled and, it seems, boundless: the worst defeat the United States suffered
in the late nineteenth-­century Indian wars and on the cusp of its centennial;
a ferocious, flamboyant Indian fighter meeting his fate at the hands of Indians
who disposed of him routinely and effectively; a single death that has refused to
die as a metaphor, signifying, for different ages, heroism, ignorance, arrogance,
and, perhaps most pointedly, savagery—first the Indians’, later Custer’s own.
The Battle of the Little Bighorn was a moment when American history accelerated and turned violently. A perfect victory demanded a perfect retribution, and
it sent the Indians into a spiraling decline and sealed the United States’ continental hegemony. Within a year, Custer’s Last Stand had spawned a reckoning
that broke the power of the Lakotas and their allies in the northern plains.2
The Battle of the Little Bighorn fixed the Lakotas, embodied by Sitting Bull
and Crazy Horse, in historical memory and made them an object of enduring
fascination. A historical sequence that saw an Indigenous power deliver a hu1



miliating blow to a rising industrial behemoth, only to soon suffer a devastating
defeat by the U.S. military, continues to mesmerize because its meanings resonate so broadly—from America’s imperial hubris to the moral complexities of
the Vietnam War, from the present-­day struggles between nation-­states and non-­
state actors to the confounding unpredictability of history itself. Dee Brown’s
acclaimed work, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, remains the most read book
on Native Americans in part because it captured those meanings so evocatively.3
The Battle of the Little Bighorn has both elevated and diminished the Lakotas
in the American mind. Like the Battles of Yorktown and Gettysburg, it is a cultural touchstone around which American identity and self-­understanding revolves. But unlike the American Revolution or the Civil War, the Lakota story
lacks a comprehensive study. There are hundreds of superb works on different
aspects of Lakota history from social organization to religious life to the shifting
relations with the United States, but most of them take the Little Bighorn as
a guiding coordinate, tracing the immediate events—essentially the military
buildup—leading up to it. Through a quick rear-­view look, Lakotas enter the
scene fully formed as fierce horse-­mounted hunter-­warriors who give Lewis and
Clark pause with their haughty confidence, a premonition of the carnage on the
Little Bighorn three generations later. The Lakotas of our imagination are props
that bookend America’s westward expansion, present at its promise-­filled inception and at its morally ambivalent finale.4
For Lakotas the clash with the United States, culminating in the horror of
the Wounded Knee Massacre, was a shattering experience, but it did not define
them as a people or their place in history. This book detaches their story from
the mainstream historical coordinates, which have reduced them to a foil of the
American condition. Here the Lakotas emerge not as quintessential villains or
victims, but as central and enduring protagonists who contended with a range
of colonial powers since the seventeenth century, variously diverting, foiling,
and boosting their ambitions. They emerge as superbly flexible people who
went through a series of geneses from pedestrian foragers to sedentary farmers
to equestrian hunters to nomadic pastoralists, each a precarious attempt to carve
out a safe place in a world where European newcomers had become a permanent presence. They come to life as fiercely proud people who easily embraced
outsiders, turning their domain into a vibrant ethnic jumble. Perhaps most strikingly, they emerge as supreme warriors who routinely eschewed violence, relying
on diplomacy, persuasion, and sheer charm to secure what they needed—only
to revert to naked force if necessary. When the overconfident Custer rode into
the Bighorn Valley on that June day, they had already faced a thousand imperial
challenges. They knew exactly what to do with him.




new technologies of killing. That crisis set off what may be the most improbable expansion in American history. Lakotas left their ancient homelands and reinvented themselves as horse people in the continental grasslands that stretched
America, an expansive, constantly transmuting Indigenous regime that pulled
It was an expansion that, in many ways, should not have been possible. Lakotas
collided with numerous Native nations and maneuvered among four colonial
empires, surviving endless crises. Yet they never numbered more than fifteen
thousand people. They were not more warlike or necessarily better fighters than
any of their Indian neighbors. They were creative and formidable diplomats, but
so too were their Native and non-­Native rivals. They had skillful leaders, but so
did their adversaries. They believed that they had special access to otherworldly
powers, but so did others. French, Spanish, British, and American colonists repeatedly underestimated their strategic proficiency, allowing them surprising
openings, but in that the Lakota experience was more typical than exceptional.
And yet it was Lakotas who humiliated the world’s most powerful nation in battle
again and again, hindering its westward expansion for decades. The Lakotas and
their story, in short, are puzzling.
In this book I attempt to unravel that puzzle. All societies possess more or less
the same human potential for innovation, change, self-­preservation, and aggression. The key to Lakotas’ success, at the most elemental level, is that they did




something slightly different and unexpected with their potential. This book is, in
its essence, about that something.

The central challenge in writing about the Lakotas is to make them unfamiliar again. Their mythical place in popular consciousness as the vanquishers
of Custer and as the masters of the western plains has made their rise seem preordained. Even in the best histories, the Lakota expansion from the edge of the
Great Lakes across America’s heartland seems an inexorable march, driven by
nearly limitless resources in the distance—buffalo, grass, space—and backed
by an early access to guns and horses. Westward expansion was a foregone conclusion. Again, Custer’s Last Stand as an attention-­absorbing climax distorts,
bending the Lakota history toward the there-­and-­then and tricking us to accept
one moment of apparent invincibility as a template for an entire history. Teleology, a sense that things were destined to unfold a certain way, has rendered
the story of the Lakota ascendancy too simple and easy. It has abstracted it from
human experience, sanitized it of uncertainty, and drained it of meaning.5
This book steps outside of those teleological currents by resisting the urge to
drive the story to its assumed culmination. Alive to the ever-­present possibility
that events could have turned out differently, it seeks to restore a sense of contingency to the story. The book’s very composition is geared to that end. It replaces
the traditional story arc of beginning, climax, and resolution with a more unpredictable narrative structure that is full of triumphs, twists, reversals, victories,
lulls, and low points, big and small. If the book’s Lakotas—haughty and imperial
at one moment, fearful and vulnerable the next, prudent and accommodating
the third—seem strange and unfamiliar, this portrayal has succeeded.
The Lakotas of this book may also seem unfamiliar in another, more elemental way. The Lakotas have become the embodiment of the horse-­mounted
Plains Indians, but here they spend most of their time in river valleys. Our understanding of the Lakotas has been distorted by what might be called the romance
of the open plains. The continental grasslands, it suggests, exerted an irresistible
pull on the newly equestrian Indians, who were drawn to their enormous bison
herds, promise of unhindered movement, and potential for material and spiritual
uplift. Such stories do capture an essential truth. The grasslands and their animal
bounty did pull in Lakotas, whose foundation myths and values revolve around
the bison and the hunt. But Lakotas’ greatest political and military ambitions
always focused on the few river valleys that cut across the seemingly boundless
grasslands. Indeed, the most formative chapter in their history, lasting for three
generations, took place not in the plains but on the banks of the great Missouri.




The mobile, horse-­powered hunting way of life in the grasslands was a late development, a culmination of long history that has largely gone unnoticed.

This book recovers the untold story of the Lakotas from the sixteenth into
the twenty-­first century, and it also recovers the story of the North American interior, the immense swath of land stretching from the Great Lakes to the Rocky
Mountains and from the Canadian Shield to the edges of the American South.
The interior has long been a blind spot in American historical consciousness.
In most histories of early America, the story centers on the continent’s outer
rim, where Europeans built colonial outposts and rooted themselves in the New
World. That is where, supposedly, all the pivotal imperial rivalries over North
America took place, France vying for supremacy with England on the eastern
seaboard; Spaniards, Comanches, Mexicans, and Americans jostling for position
in the Southwest; and Russians pushing down the Pacific Coast in search of pelts
and challenging Spain’s claims to California. The interior world was a sideshow,
too marginal to stir potent imperial passions, too vast and vicious for proper colonies. It was Thomas Jefferson’s imagined Louisiana whose settlement would take
a thousand generations.
Jefferson’s myopia will no longer do. The great interior, the setting of this book,
shifting constellation of expansions, conquests, retreats, and collapses. Here, for
generations, Lakotas were key players within a larger coalition of seven Sioux
nations, clashing or allying with nearly all the other contestants at one time or
another. The Sioux confederation was formidable, but it was also dangerously
isolated, separated by numerous Native rivals from the colonial frontiers where
power-­giving novelties—guns, powder, iron—flowed inland. Becoming central
people, drawing Europeans and their goods to them, became an all-­important
quest for Lakotas and their allies. It was the most paradoxical of expansions,
Indians cajoling European empires to come to them in a desperate effort to prevail over Native rivals. It took roughly a hundred years, but by the mid-­eighteenth
century the Sioux had succeeded. Their homelands between the Great Lakes
and the Missouri Valley were a geopolitical hot spot where the most promising of
the European imperial projects, New France, made its bid for continental hegemony with the Sioux nations on its side.6
It was then and there that Lakotas began to detach from the Sioux confederation, launching an expansion of their own that saw them becoming the dominant people in the great interior. It was a massive gamble. Drawn by bison and



horses in the West, they were pulling away from the major continental trade
corridors, entering a strange new world in the western plains that was on the
verge of transforming from a backwater into an imperial crossroads. As Lakotas
shifted westward, an array of competing empires rushed in, seeking to control
the deep interior and its rivers, wealth of furs, and thousands of potential Native
allies, only to realize that the interior was not theirs for the taking. The Spanish,
French, British, and American Empires did not simply clash in the heart of the
continent; they converged on the expanding Lakota realm. How Lakotas harnessed that imperial cauldron to serve their interests—how they learned to cut
the newcomers to size—is one of the great untold stories in American history. By
the time Lewis and Clark plunged—quite innocently so—into the cauldron in
1804, Lakotas were ascendant people who saw themselves as the rightful rulers
of the North American interior. Like the French, British, and Spaniards before
them, Americans had to readjust their imperial ambitions around Lakota ones.7
The great paradox of Lakota history is that by helping prevent the realization
of other Wests—French, British, Spanish—Lakotas inadvertently paved the way
for an American West and, eventually, their own downfall. Yet, as the pages that
follow will show, for half a century after the Louisiana Purchase Lakota and U.S.
interests converged rather than collided. The two nations pushed westward in
tandem as military allies and trading partners. Lakotas transformed themselves
into formidable equestrian people capable of shaping human fates on a vast scale,
and Americans were their firm allies, one of the many peoples who had realized
where power lay. How this happened, how two expansionist people managed to
coexist in the same space, each feeling safe and certain of its supremacy, is a historical conundrum that needs an explanation.8
It also requires a new way of looking at Indian-­white relations, empires, and
space. North American historical writing has a long tradition in the study of
cross-­cultural relations and has spawned a number of models—the frontier,
the borderland, the middle ground—that help explain how different societies
and cultures have clashed and coexisted in the past. A set of assumptions, some
clearly articulated, others more vaguely sensed, runs through this scholarship:
that a collision of two expanding powers must result in either a retreat or a
borderland where power and authority are perpetually contested; that empires
are mutually repelling organisms that can overlap only at their far-­flung edges;
and that mutual weakness, inability to dictate terms to others, is the necessary ingredient for enduring coexistence between Indians and colonists.9
The history of the Lakota-­U.S. relations challenges all those assumptions.
Lakotas and Americans expanded simultaneously into the West, often claiming
the same tracts of land and water. Their regimes overlapped and interpenetrated
rather than brushed against one another, and yet they managed to coexist for two




generations, well into the 1850s. How and why this happened was an outcome of
many factors, but one was crucial: neither Lakotas nor Americans compromised
their core convictions about themselves and the world. Convinced of the essential rightness of their respective beliefs and principles, they created a yawning
mental crevasse where two expansionist powers could fit. They valued, desired,
sought, and fought for different things and often talked past one another, which,
ironically, made them compatible. It was only when nature itself failed to sustain
both that coexistence became impossible.
The rise and might of the Lakotas, symbolized by the Lakota-­U.S. wars of the
1860s and 1870s, was thus much more than some anomaly in a history that was
rolling irresistibly toward U.S. hegemony. Expansion—territorial, commercial,
and cultural—had transformed the Lakotas into an imperial power in the midst
of another. Seen against this background, the Great Sioux Wars and the Battle
of the Little Bighorn take on drastically new meanings. Lakotas were fighting for
survival, to protect the bison and their sovereignty, but they were also fighting to
keep alive a broader vision of America where coexistence through right thoughts
and acts might be possible. By 1876 that vision had guided them for two centuries, pushing them into successful alliances with France, Britain, Spain, the
United States, and numerous Native societies, keeping them powerful and safe.
It was all but unthinkable to Lakotas that this America had run its course.

It is only in the last few decades that Native Americans have entered history as
full-­fledged protagonists. Earlier, for centuries, Native people lingered in the recesses of the American imagination as a kind of dark matter of history. Scholars
tended to look right through them into peoples and things that seemed to matter
more, that seemed to move history: conquistadors, monarchs, founding fathers;
settler empires, nation-­states, global capitalist markets. The Indians were a hazy
frontier backdrop, the necessary “other” whose menacing presence heightened
the colonial drama of forging a new people in a new world. While persisting in
popular consciousness as America’s foundation myth, those stories now seem
hopelessly outdated, relics of another time and of different sensibilities. Today,
Native Americans occupy the center stage as powerful historical actors who
thwart colonial intrusions, reverse expected power dynamics, force newcomers
to adapt to their way of doing things, and profoundly shape the creation of a distinctly American identity.10
The scholarly pendulum has swung abruptly—perhaps too abruptly. If Native Americans were for a long time stunted as historical agents, today it is the
colonists and settlers who seem to be in danger of becoming caricatured, their
motives and ambitions simplified, their complexity flattened. With the Indians



commanding the center stage, the whites often appear as a monolithic mass hell-­
bent on conquest or as weak, hapless pawns in intricate Indigenous politics they
could neither understand nor control. I have been guilty of such simplifying myself, and I have aimed for a more balanced exposition in this book. I have tried to
keep all the protagonists—Lakotas and their kin; the many Native peoples they
had dealings with; and the French, Spanish, British, and American colonists who
came to them—in the frame as rounded historical figures. This has meant taking
the ideals, anxieties, and ambitions of the colonists seriously, tracing how they
clashed and intertwined with Native ones, and how Lakotas and European newcomers created lasting shared worlds even when they misunderstood, hated, and
killed one another.
Yet this book is decidedly a history of the Lakotas, written from sources that
seek to convey their perspective, often in their own words. Its overarching ambition is to understand how they saw the world and shaped American history. An
extraordinary archive makes this possible to an unusual degree. Lakota communities traced the passage of time by drawing on a buffalo hide a pictograph of one
memorable event for each year. Lakotas call these calendars waníyetu iyáwapi.
Waníyetu means “to be winter” and iyáwapi “to count.” At once a record of the
past and an act of remembering, of giving meaning to the past, winter counts
are a unique source that allow us to capture the astounding variety and raw immediacy of Lakota experiences. Often emotionally charged, they show not only
what happened but also how Lakotas felt about events and outcomes. They allow
us to see Lakotas as dynamic and often contradictory people—formidable and
full of bravado at one moment, in the grip of despair the next, then absorbed
with internal politics and social drama. They draw attention to the mundane
and reveal the sublime. Perhaps most important, as a body of historical record,
winter counts capture what fascinated Lakotas and what mattered to them most.
They uncover how Lakotas shaped their histories through selective narration and
how their understanding of the past and themselves changed over time. They
most emphatically do not adhere to Euro-­American accounts of major historical
events and developments. They open an alternative, counterhegemonic window
into the American past, allowing us to observe Native motives and meanings directly, without a foreign filter. Lakota America makes the fullest use yet of this
Indigenous archive in writing Lakota history.11
The great pitfall of Native American history is a tendency to homogenize its
protagonists, to portray Indians as staunch traditionalists averse to new things
and ideas or as pragmatists resigned to the incongruities of the modern world.
I do not want to essentialize the Lakotas, nor do I want to make them consistent. This book takes its cue from Iktómi, an ambiguous shapeshifting spider-­



1. Lone Dog winter count. Winter counts were originally drawn on buffalo hides and
later on cloth, muslin, and paper. Using ink and various pigments, the keepers of winter
counts drew pictographs sequentially in spirals or rows, often covering more than a
century in a single hide. Several times a year the keepers unrolled the calendars and
retold the events, reinforcing the people’s historical memory; the winter counts were
essentially mnemonic devices for collective remembering. The pictographs of this
winter count were drawn in a spiral on buffalo hide. Courtesy of National Museum
of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (01/0617). Photo by NMAI Services.

trickster culture hero who embodies what is perhaps the defining characteristic
of the Lakota people: their stunning ability and willingness to change. Like Iktómi, Lakotas were—and are—shapeshifters with a palpable capacity to adapt
to changing conditions around them and yet remain Lakotas. Recurring metamorphosis, fragmenting and coalescing into smaller and larger units, enabled
Lakotas to mobilize power on multiple registers and in various capacities: not
only as bands and tribes but also as a nation and as leaders of large Indigenous
alliances. By the time Lakotas came in close contact with the U.S. government
in the early 1850s, they were in the midst of what was perhaps the most remarkable—and least known—of their self-­reinventions. By 1876 that transfiguration
was complete and reached its symbolic culmination in the Battle of the Little




Bighorn. Custer failed to see that change and led his men to certain death. He
was not brought down by a mere alliance of Indians. He was brought down by
the Lakota empire.12

When I started researching and writing this book, I knew to expect certain
things about Lakotas and their history. Some of my assumptions turned out to
be correct, more or less, but much of the writing was an exercise of recalibrating
expectations. I knew Lakotas were highly adaptable people—all Indians had to
be to survive settler colonialism—but their capacity to reimagine their place in
the world over and over again took me by surprise. I knew they were powerful,
but I could not foresee finding them shaping American history on almost a continental scale, expanding not only westward but also deep into the south and far to
the north. I knew they were superior fighters but was astounded how often they
forced things by restraining action. I knew that they were great orators, but I did
not know just how searing—and historically significant—their use of irony could
be when facing colonial agents. But the most elemental surprise was their sheer
ubiquity. Lakotas and their kin were Native Americans who received eight-­gun
salutes in Quebec, inspired fear from the Mississippi Valley to the Continental
Divide, ranged from the deserts of Utah to the Canadian plains, commanded the
attention of the great global fur-­trading conglomerates, and agreed to be feted in
imperial centers in Montreal, St. Louis, New York, and Washington, D.C. That
their most famous leader would tour the East to enormous crowds was less surprising than it was predictable.
The story begins not in the open plains of the West but in the Eastern Woodlands around the Great Lakes where the main protagonists are not the Lakotas
but the Dakotas, their close kin. In the seventeenth century the Dakotas were the
most powerful members of the Sioux confederation, and they held the center
stage in Sioux politics for generations. But gradually, as the Lakotas transformed
into an equestrian power and turned westward, they emerged from behind the
Dakotas as the foremost Sioux division. A people reborn on horseback, they
peeled off from other Sioux tribes, shedding old assumptions of the possible. But
they also carried into the West a deep understanding of European newcomers,
accumulated over a century of living on the fringes of French and British colonies in the East. Lakotas knew what Europeans were, what colonialism was, how
empires operated, and how thin the line separating violence from conciliation
would have to be. That knowledge was their greatest asset as they pushed into
new worlds beyond the horizon.




A Place in the World

In the summer of 1695 two Indian emissaries embarked on a nearly one-­
thousand-­mile journey from the western Great Lakes to Montreal. One was
Zhingobiins, a Sauteur chief, and the other Tiyoskate, a war leader of the Mantanton band of the Mdewakanton Sioux. Five French traders guided their fleet
of some dozen canoes. The two emissaries had a common purpose, for they
were carrying an offer of peace and alliance to the French, but their journeys
east could hardly have been more different. Zhingobiins was traveling through
Sauteur lands and among allies, and many of the Indians and French traders
and priests he met along the way were friends and kin. Tiyoskate, however, was
entering a war zone. His people had been fighting the Great Lakes Indians for decades, and only the presence of Zhingobiins and the French now kept him alive.
He may well have been the first Sioux to travel east neither to kill nor as a slave.1
When the convoy arrived in the island city in mid-­July, Tiyoskate stepped into
a new world. Along the shoreline sat massive vessels with towering poles draped
in ropes and sheets, and the island itself was a jumble of sharp angles, soaring
vertical walls, and the amplified sounds of confined spaces. A stench of excrement, animal entrails, and rot hung everywhere. The city was also teeming with
Indians. At the behest of the governor of New France, Louis de Buade, comte
de Frontenac, hundreds of Native envoys had gathered there, desperate to put
an end to violence that was ruining their homelands. To maintain order in his
crammed city, Frontenac had brought in much of the French colonial army, and
an honor guard of seven hundred regulars, militia, and Natives received Tiyoskate and Zhingobiins in front of the council chamber where they were to meet
the governor. The soldiers carried what Tiyoskate’s people needed most: guns.2
When the council began, the person whose voice was heard most was Pierre-­
Charles Le Sueur, an explorer-­trader and Frontenac’s favorite. He was one of


A Place in the World

the Frenchmen who had escorted Zhingobiins and Tiyoskate to Montreal and,
fluent in several Native languages, now served as a translator. Zhingobiins spoke
first, asking the governor to sanction a war against the Mesquakie people who
had killed many Sioux. Sioux now wanted to raise their dead by taking the war to
Mesquakies with Sauteurs’ help. Sioux “came to cry with us,” he said. “Father, let
us have revenge.” Next to speak was Ginooczhe, an Odawa leader, who urged the
governor to embrace the Sioux, “a bellicose Nation” that would make for a formidable ally. Odawas, he said, had already accepted Sioux as their allies and kin,
ending years of deadly warfare. He urged the governor to do the same.3
It was Tiyoskate’s turn. The young warrior spread two beaver robes at Frontenac’s feet and began to weep. After crying bitterly, pleading the governor to have
pity on him, he dried his eyes and spoke. “All the Nations have a Father who
gives them his protection and has iron,” he said, “but I am a bastard searching
for a Father.” He laid twenty-­two arrows on the robes, naming “a Village of his
Nation” with each, and asked the governor to send his traders to all of them. He
begged the governor, “the master of iron,” to accept him as one of his children
and bring his guns and iron weapons to his people. “Take courage, great Captain,” he said. “Reject me not, despise me not, though I appear miserable in his
eyes,” he pleaded. “All the nations that are present here know that I am rich and
the little they offer you is taken on my lands.” What he meant was a wealth of
beaver pelts, the raison d’être of the French fur trade, two samples of which lay at
the governor’s feet. It was common knowledge that Sioux lands were the richest
sources of thick winter pelts in the West.4
A veteran frontier administrator, Frontenac understood Tiyoskate’s plea and
its performative nature. Like so many before him, this Indian wanted his pity
because pity evoked compassion and created obligations. Pity promoted, indeed
demanded, a relationship. In begging the governor to be his father, the Indian
was asking him to arm and thereby protect his people and, if necessary, to go to
war for them. The young chief wanted Frontenac to be the father of the Sioux
but on Sioux terms. He was asking him to be generous with his iron, but he also
wanted him to be gentle and compassionate. Tiyoskate expected him to give
guns and iron, not orders. Word of the governor’s benevolence, he said, “compelled me to abandon my body to come request for his protection.” For that the
Indian expected the same from him: to abandon his body, to think and act like
Sioux, and to transform himself into a kin of the Sioux. Frontenac was to give
himself and become one with them.5
Like his predecessors, Frontenac was Onontio—Great Mountain—and a
father to France’s Indian allies, who were his children. Both a title and a social
role, Onontio mediated quarrels among his children and cared for their needs.

A Place in the World


In return he expected loyalty. True children of Onontio traded only with the
French and went to war against the enemies of the French. When Frontenac
embraced Tiyoskate and his people as his children, he did so “on condition that
he would listen only his father’s voice.” Once more Tiyoskate wept, now clasping
the governor’s legs, and said, “Take pity on me; I know well that I am incapable
of speaking to you, being still but a child.” But things would change, he continued. With the French on their side, Sioux would grow stronger, and Frontenac would soon see what they “could do when they had the protection of such
a good father who will send them Frenchmen to bring them iron of which they
are only starting to have knowledge.” Sioux would grow from children into allies
and they would learn to speak properly to their father. They would be equals.6
Tiyoskate did not live to see it through. Cross-­
cultural diplomacy in
seventeenth-­century North America was an intensely physical affair that involved handshakes, embraces, kisses, and tears. It may have been in one such encounter in Montreal that Tiyoskate contracted an alien pathogen. The pathogen
developed into an illness that killed him after a month’s struggle. No one carried
his bones home; they remained in Montreal. His hope would have been that the
French would dig them up once in a while, hold them, think of good thoughts,
and then put them back, but it is unlikely that anyone asked about his last wishes.7
Iron Frontier

The threats and frustrations that brought Tiyoskate to Montreal in 1695 had
eaten away at his people for half a century. The Sioux homeland, a fertile realm
of forests, marshes, and lush grasslands around the upper Mississippi River watershed, had become a dangerous place. Sioux knew exactly the reason why: wašíčus,
people with other-­than-­human abilities, had appeared, wielding extraordinary
powers. Long before Sioux would meet these people, they had learned about
their power, which manifested itself in various forms: in fire-­spitting sticks whose
tiny projectiles killed from distances greater than a bowshot; in consciousness-­
altering liquid that eased spiritual transcendence; in diseases that consumed entire villages; in the softness of their fabrics, which gently hugged human bodies
and dried remarkably fast; in the hardness of their iron that could slice through
flesh and bone with astounding ease.8
The wašíčus arriving with guns and iron were formidable, but they were also
curiously generous with their wondrous novelties. A few well-­worn beaver pelts
could produce an iron knife, an ax, or a kettle: European traders preferred used
pelts that had lost their coarse outer hair but retained the thick, soft underfur. The
French colonists who pushed up the St. Lawrence Valley in the early seventeenth
century had forged an alliance with the powerful Wyandot nation, granting them


A Place in the World

privileged access to their wares in exchange for beaver skins. Wyandots became
middlemen who carried French goods from Montreal into the Great Lakes in
the west—a region the French knew as pays d’en haut, or “upper country”—and
brought back pelts procured from many Native groups. By the 1630s a sprawling
trading network, anchored in Montreal and run by Wyandots, stretched deep
into the interior, all the way to western Lake Superior.9
The quest for French iron drew the Sioux into war. Their main enemies were
the Crees, powerful hunter-­gatherers who ranged across a vast belt between
Hudson Bay and the Great Lakes. Cree bands occupied the forests on the
northern shores of Lake Superior, where they were within reach of the castor-­
rich Sioux country to the west and the burgeoning French-­Wyandot fur trade to
the east. When Crees made contact with Wyandot traders, Sioux immediately
felt the repercussions. Cree war parties seeking beaver started to appear, fighting
with iron axes and knives. The Sioux borderlands to the northwest became a war
zone where bands gathered together for defense. “Their Villages are larger, and
in a better state of defense,” a French Jesuit reported in 1641, “owing to their continual wars” with Crees.10
Sioux were on the receiving end of violence because their border with Crees
had become a technological frontier. Crees now had iron weapons; Sioux were isolated and ironless. Their age-­old alliance with the Siouan-­speaking Assiniboines
with whom they shared an ancestral connection had unraveled—either over a
woman or bison meat, according to oral traditions—and they had no ties to the
French. When Jesuit missionaries met with a large Native assembly—­probably
Anishinaabemowin-­speaking Sauteur Indians—at the rapids between Lakes Superior and Huron in 1641, they learned “of a certain Nation, the Nadouessis,”
who lived “eighteenth days’ journey further away” and “have never known Europeans and have never heard of GOD.” Sauteurs, aspiring trapper-­traders, seem
to have depicted the Sioux as peripheral and uncouth to discourage French overtures to them. It worked. French colonists came to know them as Nadouessioux,
a corruption of an Anishinaabe term na·towe·ssiwak, which means someone
who speaks a foreign language. The Sioux had entered French consciousness as
people beyond the pale.11
The Sioux were distanced from the French not only mentally. Nearly half a
continent separated them from New France, and between them and the French
traders lay dozens of Native nations, all of them inside the gun and iron frontier
and all of them familiar with the European newcomers and their strange ideas
and habits. All of these odds were stacked against the Sioux in ways they did not
know. Each of those nations would have to be won over, pushed aside, or otherwise neutralized for the Sioux to find a secure place in the world. They were at
once one of the most isolated and boxed-­in people in North America.

A Place in the World


Oč héthi Šakówiŋ

The Sioux may have been isolated, but they were not defenseless. Crees and
Sauteurs fought with iron, but they were widely scattered and loosely organized.
Sioux fought with stone, bone, and sinew, but they were numerous and united.
Their numbers were estimated around thirty thousand at mid-­seventeenth century, and their many villages possessed a strong sense of common identity as the
Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the Seven Council Fires.12
The Očhéthi Šakówiŋ was an alliance of seven oyátes, or “people,” who understood themselves as relatives and were bound to one another and the universe by
a pervasive life-­giving essence, wakȟáŋ. The oyátes spoke different dialects and
occupied distinct sections of their shared realm, having moved northwestward
from their ancestral lands in the central Mississippi Valley over several centuries
and in several stages. They were part of a larger movement of Siouan-­speaking
peoples who variously competed and cooperated with one another, gradually
assuming distinct identities as they jostled for position. The great Siouan exodus
was triggered by a warmer and wetter climate cycle that began in the ninth century, rendering the lands in the previously colder north and drier west more appealing. The collapse of the Mississippian mound-­building cultures and their
great center in Cahokia from the twelfth century onward gave a further impetus
to the already itinerant Siouans. For centuries commercial gravity had pulled
people toward Cahokia and the Mississippi Valley; as that pull faded, people scattered, seeking new attachments.13
The ancestral Sioux shifted slowly northwestward until they reached the pine-­
oak forests that were spreading to the west from the Great Lakes under the wet
conditions. The Mdewakantons, Sissetons, Wahpekutes, and Wahpetons—­
collectively known as the Dakotas—laid down roots first, settling in the marshy
woodlands between Leech Lake and the St. Croix River. Converging around
Mde Wakan (Mille Lacs), their sacred lake, these four oyátes became the eastern
face of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ. The Yanktons and Yanktonais pushed farther, eventually clustering their villages around the upper Mississippi Valley. The Lakotas—
or the Teton oyáte, a derivation from thítȟųŋwaŋ, “prairie village”—pushed farthest, settling on the lands toward the Minnesota Valley.
This was North America’s ecological hinge, a transition zone where Eastern
Woodlands and western grasslands met and overlapped, offering an unusual
opulence of plant and animal life. Migratory animals—deer, elk, and especially
bison—thrived there, shifting nimbly between habitats, inviting people to do the
same. Lakotas did and became the most mobile of the Seven Council Fires.
Their range extended ever deeper into the West during the cool and moist Little
Ice Age when both grasses and bison proliferated. The herds were many and
often numbered in the thousands, each animal yielding at least 650 pounds of


A Place in the World

2. The Očhéthi Šakówiŋ in the mid-­seventeenth century. Map by Bill Nelson.

food, pulling Lakotas in. Lakota traditions depict the West as both frightening
and irresistible, a place where extraordinary people lived and where Iktómi
wanted them to go. Their winter counts re­cord great western gatherings from the
fifteenth century onward. One of those spiritually charged meeting places was
Pipestone Quarry more than two hundred miles west of the Mississippi Valley,
where malleable reddish catlinite—ideal for making sacred pipes—was readily
available. Great communal bison hunts, possibly in the West, appear in Lakota
winter counts in the early sixteenth century.14
The Očhéthi Šakówiŋ was not a formal state or a confederacy. It had no overarching governing structure or leaders who could speak for all members of the
alliance. It was instead a manifestation of deep voluntary attachments that bound
the seven fires together, the sacred number seven echoing the ancient unity of
Sioux as a people. The Očhéthi Šakówiŋ was constructed from the bottom up,
with language and kinship as its main cohesive. Its three major divisions—the
Dakotas, Yankton-­Yanktonais, and Lakotas—spoke different dialects, but all
could understand one another, and the seven oyátes saw themselves as “real

A Place in the World


people” who were distinguished from strangers and tȟókas, enemies. Yet Sioux
kinship was not exclusivist. For them belonging was a matter of behavior rather
than blood: anybody capable of proper sentiments, words, and deeds could become a relative, takúye. From this mindset arose a confederation that was at once
durable and exquisitely supple.15
Sioux’s primary social setting was thióšpaye, a local band that stayed together
year-­round, forming a camp circle that could include more than twenty households, the round shape a manifestation of spiritual unity and cosmological order.
The people with whom they shared a village were their first and best shield
against the hostile world beyond, but they were also their main rivals for status
and power. They were likely to marry someone in their village and village life
defined their identity. Each oyáte consisted of several thióšpayes and each commanded a distinct territory, but the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ was not fixed in space. It
was a human kaleidoscope where individuals, families, and bands moved around
constantly, arranging themselves into different constellations as circumstances
demanded; in the late seventeenth century their villages were known to range
from a few families to hundreds of people. Instead of fragmenting the Očhéthi
Šakówiŋ, the constant movement stitched it tighter together by creating a thick
lattice of kinship ties that transcended local and regional identities. Sioux traced
descent through both maternal and paternal lines, which maximized their
potential to forge connections. Most Sioux had relatives spread across many thióšpayes and oyátes. They could travel anywhere within their realm and always be
among kin.16
Ties of kinship, wótakuye, held the Sioux together, but so did the fear and aversion of outsiders who denounced Sioux mores and remained tȟókas. Sioux went
to war for complex reasons—to protect their lands, to exact revenge, to secure
hunting and trading privileges, to enhance their power and prestige by taking
slaves, to preempt threats—and the threshold for a military campaign was low.
Any Sioux could initiate one by visiting villages and inviting warriors to a feast
and a dance, which turned war into a collective sacred endeavor. As they came
together, warriors sang songs that anticipated the submission and metaphorical
absorption of the enemy: “I am going to War, I will revenge the Death of such a
Kinsman, I will slay, I will burn, I will bring away Slaves, I will eat Men.” Sioux
called the feast šunkahlowanpi, “ceremonial song of the dog.” The fate of the
slaves was also decided collectively by elders who listened to the warriors’ accounts. Women who had lost fathers in battle received slaves and had the right
to decide whether they lived or died. Men who had distinguished themselves in
battle received captives to marry, to build up their households, and to bolster
their masculine status.17
Certain of their fighting prowess and ability to “eat” strangers—to subjugate


A Place in the World

and neutralize them like they would domesticate dogs—the interconnected
oyátes of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ could mobilize massive numbers of warriors
against their enemies. Known by their neighbors as “very strong,” Sioux kept
Crees and Sauteurs at bay. By the mid-­seventeenth century the violence seems
to have abated to an on-­and-­off-­again borderland skirmish that sustained a neutral zone between the three powers. Although the competition for furs and iron
had made their place in the world uncertain, Sioux remained powerful and relatively safe.18
What kept them safe, in the end, was the land itself. The seven fires commanded a vast domain stretching southeastward from Mde Wakan, “the center
of the world,” and tracing the Mississippi—Ȟaȟáwakpa, “River of the Falls”—
near the Wisconsin River confluence where it curved northwestward, bulging
out toward the northern latitudes where prairie meets forest. The Mississippi
and Minnesota bracketed their core territory, a roughly sixty-­thousand-­square-­
mile mix of pine and broadleaf forests, marshes, parklands, and prairie. It was a
superbly fertile domain that almost invariably impressed newcomers. In the fall
countless lakeside stands of “marsh rye”—wild rice—seemed to yield abundant
crops “without any Culture or Sowing,” although women probably molded the
soil to get larger harvests. Women dried the rice and later boiled it into a broth
that sustained their villages through winters. In the spring and summer large
schools of fish moved up the rivers, surrendering impressive catches, and Mde
Wakan teemed with muskellunge, a large predatory fish. Spring was also the time
to tap maple trees for juice, which Sioux boiled into syrup. In the summer there
were wild oats, berries, plums, nuts, wild turnips, and mdo, a potato-­like plant.
Deer, elk, ducks, and geese flourished in the forests and around the lakes, and
west of the Minnesota began the prairie of towering tall-­grasses where massive
herds of bison could be found in the summer and early fall.19
So bountiful was their domain that Sioux could feed a growing population
essentially through wild foods and game alone. Sioux women did grow small
crops of corn, but their lands were near the northern limit of corn cultivation
and the harvests were unreliable. Farming was a supplementary resource that
helped maintain a diet that many modern nutritionists would consider almost
ideal: moderate or high in protein, moderate in complex carbohydrates, and low
in saturated fat. They probably received enough iron and vitamin B-­12, not too
much cholesterol or sodium, and sufficient amounts of the essential omega-­3
and omega-­6 fatty acids.20
The Sioux are often thought of as quintessential people of the plains and the
hunt, but that was a later development. In the seventeenth century they were
consummate generalists who exploited multiple habitats, moving among wood-

A Place in the World


3. Guarding the Corn Fields, engraving by James Smillie after Captain Seth Eastman,
1853. From planting to harvesting, horticulture was women’s task. For centuries,
Dakota and Lakota women protected their families and communities against the
periodic shortages of carbohydrates, the major downside of a hunting way of life,
by raising small crops and by gathering berries, fruit, and root vegetables.
Courtesy of Getty Images. Photo by Science & Society Picture Library.

lands, parklands, grasslands, and marshlands in a carefully attuned annual cycle.
Indeed, theirs was very much a watery world. Women harvested wild rice from
birchbark canoes by pulling the stalks down over the side and gently beating
the grain into their canoes with sticks. Men performed many of their duties—
policing borders, visiting allies, moving trade goods—with light and fast canoes.
Bands traveled to communal ceremonies, political gatherings, and war in fleets.
One early observer portrayed them a “wandring nation” that commanded “a vaste
countrey. In winter they live in ye land for the hunting sake, and in summer by
the watter for fishing.”21
By 1650 a modicum of stability had settled in the Sioux realm, which had
been rocked by French markets, enemy trappers, and iron weapons. A new hybrid world of Indians, colonists, and commerce had expanded deep into the
West, butting against Sioux borders and then faltering there. But, unbeknownst
to Sioux, that distant new world in the East had already imploded, ripped apart


A Place in the World

by disease, death, and unprecedented violence. The ensuing chaos engulfed the
Northeast and then washed over the Great Lakes. The turmoil reached the Sioux
in the late 1650s and nearly broke them.
Never Have I Seen Anything Like This

In the fall of 1638 a delegation of Jesuit missionaries met with Wyandots in
the Great Lakes. Looking like “men who already feel the terrors of death,” the
Indians spoke in sighs, which only seemed “to incite them to vomit more bitterly
upon us the venom which they concealed within.” An old chief addressed the
priests: “I am obliged to speak here, since all the other Captains are dead. Now
before I follow them to the grave I must free my mind; and perhaps it will be for
the good of the country, which is going to ruin. Every day it is worse than before;
this cruel malady has now over-­run all the cabins of our village, and has made
such ravages in our own family that, lo, we are reduced to two persons, and I do
not yet know whether we shall escape the fury of this Demon. I have seen maladies in the country before, but never have I seen anything like this.”22
The malady was an extraordinarily virulent smallpox outbreak that had begun
in Massachusetts in 1633. The death toll was staggering: more than 80 percent
of New England Indians perished within a year. John Winthrop, a leading Massachusetts colonist, saw a divine intervention in that. “I am still as full of Companye and business as before,” he wrote to a fellow Puritan in England, “but for
the Natives in these parts, Gods hand hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles
space, the greatest parte of them are swept awaye by the small poxe, which still
continues among them: So as God hathe hereby cleered our title to this place.”
From New England, Native traders and warriors—the continent’s most mobile
people—transported the pox in all directions, carrying the multiplying virus in
their seemingly sound bodies while it incubated—a window of ten to seventeen
days, on average. Fast-­moving parties could cover vast distances before expiring,
and soon the zone of death extended from the Atlantic Coast to the Appalachians and from the Chesapeake Bay to the St. Lawrence Valley.23
The pandemic killed European settlers and their African slaves everywhere
it went, but in relatively modest numbers: long exposure to smallpox and other
viral diseases had fortified their ancestors’ immune systems against crowd illnesses, which had gradually evolved into childhood diseases. For Native Americans, however, viral diseases were a lethal novelty. No one had acquired immunity against them, a vulnerability that was greatly magnified by the colonists who
destroyed Indian crops and food caches to generate disastrous bouts of famine.
Their immune systems were also more homogenous than those of Europeans,
which rendered them more vulnerable to infections: once adapted to their rela-

A Place in the World


tively uniform immunological responses, pathogens could jump bodies with
relative ease, spreading and killing much faster than in more heterogeneous
Entire villages could be inflicted within days and entire regions within weeks.
The St. Lawrence–­Great Lakes trade corridor became a disease corridor, channeling the pox far downriver in the east, to Lake Huron in the west, to Hudson
Bay in the north, and to the Chesapeake Bay in the south. About half of the
Natives in that vast expanse died. The death toll was equally devastating among
the Haudenosaunee, the Five Nations of the Iroquois League, whose lands
around Lake Ontario and along the upper Hudson River were surrounded by
English, Dutch, and French outposts. About half of them, ten thousand people,
had perished by the time the pox had run its course in 1641. Shattered worlds
emerged everywhere in the pandemic’s wake. Unburied bodies remained rotting on the ground, ghastly reminders of broken families and lineages. Starvation
sapped villages that had lost too many hunters or farmers. Native converts turned
against their missionaries, who seemed curiously invulnerable to the malady,
killing them in rage. Despair and sorrow gripped entire communities, spawning
apathy or, increasingly, violence to ease the pain.25
Mourning Wars

Death demanded war, and nowhere as potently as among the Five Iroquois
Nations. With the loss of half of their population, their world had suddenly become a deadly and menacing place. Iroquoia’s central location in the midst of
several Indigenous and colonial realms, once an advantage, turned into a liability: how could a confederacy that had lost half of its fighting power hold on
to its extensive territory in a fiercely competitive milieu where multiple peoples
jostled for power? Rather than turning inward, trying to cling to what they had,
the Iroquois exploded outward. They had lost too many people and now needed
new ones. They went to war to make Iroquois out of others.
The result was warfare more ferocious than anyone could remember. Iroquois
war parties pushed north and west, raiding across a widening zone in months-­
long summer campaigns. A massive invasion broke the Wyandot world of villages, “the people of each scattering where they could.” The Iroquois pursued
the refugees to the interior, chasing them into the western Great Lakes. Once
again people fled, and once again the Iroquois followed, now targeting virtually
anyone they ran into. Several nations crumbled as political entities, and scores
of Mascoutens, Kickapoos, Potawatomis, Odawas, and others abandoned their
villages, retreating in the face of the most concentrated projection of power in
seventeenth-­century North America. A swelling diaspora carried fugitives deep


A Place in the World

4. The Iroquois war zone and the middle ground in the 1650s. Map by Bill Nelson.

into the forests of the western Great Lakes, where distance gave them a measure
of safety. In the mid-­1650s the Iroquois dispersed the remaining Eries and then
moved the war to the south against the Shawnees. An enormous swath of land
between the Ohio Valley and the northern Great Lakes became virtually empty
of people. It had become an Iroquois shatter zone.26
Iroquois war parties carried thousands of war prisoners into Iroquoia, where
clan matrons slated them for slavery, adoption, or execution. Many, mostly
women, became slaves who labored as farmers, household workers, and mothers.
Many, almost invariably men, were “requickened” to cover dead kin. They were
adopted into Iroquois clans and assumed the social role and name of the deceased, thereby repairing fractured lineages as newly born Iroquois. Some male
captives were adopted and then killed to atone for slain relatives. Their bodies
were cut up and boiled in a kettle. Whole villages joined in feasts where they
consumed the corporal and spiritual power of their enemies, preserving it for
new purposes.27
The Iroquois never invaded the lands of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, and if they ever
captured or killed any Sioux, there is no record of it. Yet the Iroquois wars profoundly changed the history of the seven fires. The thousands of Indians who fled
“the fury of the Iroquois” to the western Great Lakes were refugees, traumatized
and desperate people in a foreign land that seemed “the very end of the world.”

A Place in the World


But soon they forged a new order out of the fragments of the old and made the
strange lands their own. This entrenchment spelled trouble for the Sioux. An
entire Indigenous world, alien and menacing, had materialized on their borders,
alive with otherworldly powers. These newcomers not only had iron. They had
The Politics of Pity

The thousands of refugees who fled the Iroquois to the western Great Lakes
had not entered empty lands. The lands belonged to Odawas, Ojibwes, Sauteurs,
and others whose mobile villages dotted the area, clustering around strategic
lakeshore locations at the Straits of Mackinac and Sault Ste. Marie. At first there
was violence, but the unremitting Iroquois pressure drove people to seek safety
in numbers. Resident Indians opened their villages to emigrants, who made their
new homes points of resistance against the Iroquois. Intermarriage expanded
and thickened long-­standing kinship lineages, nindoodemag, which fostered cooperation across political and clan boundaries. Feasting, gifting, dancing, and
sharing the sacred calumet pipe, they created a space of transcendence where
they could connect with unearthly powers and reimagine the newcomers as
allies. Carefully, through a thousand ceremonies, they ushered the foreigners
into their homeland, Anishinaabewaki, which encompassed most of the lands
around the Great Lakes.29
Most refugees pushed deeper into the interior, seeking sanctuary west of Lake
Michigan. There they merged with the resident Indians who had no choice but
to weather the emigrant surge. Local villages bulged into dynamic mixed villages, and new loyalties began to cohere. A measure of stability fell over this
refugee world that stretched, in a triangular shape, from the upper Illinois River
to both ends of Lake Superior. The greatest concentration of villages was in the
middle, around Green Bay, where some ten thousand Indians resided, desperate
for normalcy, belonging, and trade.30
The refugee triangle became a magnet for far-­ranging independent French
traders who lived in the West and, in the eyes of their countrymen along the St.
Lawrence Valley, seemed to have gone native. The budding interior fur trade had
ground to a near halt during the Iroquois wars, leaving New France without robes
and revenue. A restart became possible in 1654, when the Iroquois agreed to a
peace with the French. Craving guns and iron, Wyandots immediately guided
more than one hundred Indians, mostly Odawas, to Trois-­Rivières in the upper
St. Lawrence Valley. Médard Chouart Des Groseilliers, a veteran trader who had
lost his livelihood with the collapse of the fur trade, joined the Odawas on their
journey back west. Two years later he returned to Trois-­Rivières with fifty fur-­


A Place in the World

laden canoes, which spoke of immense western riches: beaver populations had
boomed during a trapping hiatus, and the interior rivers and lakes were teeming
with castor. Although the Iroquois wars soon flared up again, the inland trade
persisted. Odawas emerged as a key broker regime, running a burgeoning traffic
that connected the American interior to Atlantic markets.31
Managing such a prodigious, multiethnic trade network was a daunting logistical undertaking, but it posed an even greater cultural challenge. Answers to
that challenge spawned an extraordinary small new world in the heart of the
continent. As the refugee villages morphed into trade centers, the French and
the Indians had to find ways to coexist despite the yawning cultural gap that
separated them. Neither possessed the power to dictate to the other, and so they
were forced to accommodate one another. Through trial and error, they learned
how to listen, how to pull back, and how to reconcile inevitable disputes over
authority, trade protocols, crimes, punishments, and sex. They learned not to
impose their own customs, but to rather appeal to what they thought were the
meanings and practices of the other, practices that often seemed absurd and outright repellent. Often they misunderstood one another and frequently chose to
misread one another, but out of those distortions emerged new meanings on
which a fragile shared world, a middle ground, could be built.
The compromises took many forms. Hard bargaining over goods blended into
gift giving in which fictive kin shared possessions. Much of the trade in skins and
furs was conducted by Indian women whom the French simultaneously sought
as sexual partners and sometimes married à la façon du pays, “according to the
custom of the country.” Murderers of French traders were condemned to death
only to be pardoned and then “raised” with slaves or “covered” with presents.
Indians appealed to their distant father in Montreal to look after their needs,
and Onontio pretended to command his dutiful children through kindness and
generosity. The Great Lakes middle ground was an artifice, a mutual fiction between people who hardly tolerated one another, but it survived because both
sides needed it to survive. Word by word, concession by concession, the French
and the Indians forged an alliance that stabilized the refugee triangle, allowing
trade to flourish. Soon Jesuit missionaries followed. Suffused with utopian fantasies of “La Nouvelle Jérusalem” in the wilderness, they began building missions.32
The French-­Indian alliance in the Great Lakes underwrote a dramatic expansion of the fur trade, which then thrust a gunpowder revolution into the Sioux
world. Fleets of French traders and Odawa middlemen carried guns into the
rich castor lands in the western Great Lakes, where greatest profits awaited. Sauteurs, Wyandots, Odawas, and other Lakes people acquired enough guns to con-

A Place in the World


tain Iroquois war parties from the east. But they also carried their guns against
the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ in the west. They needed more pelts to fuel the fur trade
and more game to feed their crowded villages, and the largest concentrations of
both could be found in the lands of the Sioux. Wyandots, a French trader noted,
“so rash as to imagine that the Scioux were incapable of resisting them without
iron weapons and firearms,” joined forces with Odawas to drive out to “secure a
greater territory in which to seek their living.” The refugee triangle began to bulge
westward, turning the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ’s eastern border into a battlefront.33
It was the kind of warfare Sioux had never seen. Trapped on the wrong side
of the technological frontier, they had been cut off from a revolution that had
multiplied their enemies’ killing power. Sioux still relied on the energy of their
own bodies to wage war. Stone points and bows had long ago amplified their
capacity to inflict damage, but Sioux warriors were still constrained by the limits
of human strength: the force of an ax stroke or the reach of an arrow ultimately
depended on their own ability to generate power. Their enemies, however, now
commanded unimaginable power that had been harnessed from the natural
world and condensed into an explosive substance. Packed behind a bullet, gunpowder’s sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter produced a chemical reaction that sent a
piece of hot lead at speed faster than an eye could see. Gunpowder provided more
than an amplification of human power; it opened a way to tap into the immense
energy stored in the earth’s mineral wealth. The muzzle-­loading smoothbore
flintlocks the enemies of the Sioux carried into battle were more than weapons;
they channeled wašíčuŋ, mysterious and incomprehensible sacred power.
The eastern border of the Sioux became a terrifying place where they fought
from a position of daunting material and psychological disadvantage, facing steel
with flesh. They confronted enemies that could kill from distances far greater
than their own weapons could reach and suffered wounds their healers could not
mend. Sauteurs became a “terror unto them,” waging “a cruell warre” with instruments they “never have seene.” Sioux tried desperately to secure guns. They
captured a party of Odawas, whom they called spirits because they had iron.
They returned these spirits home and sent emissaries to Odawa villages. They
wept over everyone they met, beseeching them to “have pity on them, and to
share with them that iron, which they regarded as a divinity.” But the Odawas
became contemptuous, dismissing them as “people far inferior to themselves,
and as incapable even of waging war.” They fired their guns, which “so terrified
the Scioux that they imagined it was the thunder or the lightning, of which the
Outaoüas had made themselves masters in order to exterminate whomsoever
they would.”34
The performance affirmed the inequity between the Odawas and the Sioux


A Place in the World

and announced on which side power lay. Odawas and their allies wielded extraordinary powers and had no intention of surrendering their advantage. Sioux
“loaded them with endearing terms, and showed the utmost submissiveness,”
but this “humiliating attitude” only deepened Odawas’ revulsion. Perhaps the
struggles over hunting rights cut too deep or perhaps the Sioux did not quite
know the proper rituals of war and diplomacy of the Lakes world. Unlike their
neighbors, Sioux did not burn their captives, considering it indecent “for men to
be so cruell,” and their custom of ceremonial weeping was not common in the
Lakes. Or perhaps there were simply too many of them. Whatever the reason,
Sioux remained outsiders. Odawas, Wyandots, and others would shun alliances
with them and keep driving into their hunting lands.35
The expanding refugee triangle was just one of many hostile fronts converging
around the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ. Looking east from their core region around Mde
Wakan, Sioux faced enemies across an arc extending from the Leech Lake all
the way south to the Des Moines Valley—a massive war zone where they fought
some dozen nations, vying for hunting rights, trade, and predominance. Then,
disastrously, Crees and Sauteurs joined forces against them. The new allies, a
terse French report noted, sent “companys of souldiers to warre against that great
nation” to capture its deep reserves of prime castor. Neither Crees nor Sauteurs
had kinship ties with Sioux, and both considered them an alien people who
could be killed and whose possessions could be taken. The enmity with Sauteurs was particularly damaging. Ranging across the length of Lake Superior’s
southern shore, Sauteurs could exert strong control over the western flow of guns
and other trade goods—and stop it from reaching the Sioux.36
Gunless and ironless, Sioux had to retreat. To avoid clashes with their many
enemies, they increasingly hunted on the western side of the Mississippi, but this
drew them in conflict with the Iowas, Siouan-­speaking hunters and farmers who
lived to the south of the seven fires and hunted bison in the grasslands west of
them. On all sides the Sioux domain began to cave in. Cree warriors pushed into
Mde Wakan, threatening Sioux fisheries and rice fields. Sauteur war parties invaded Sioux hunting grounds through the western tip of Lake Superior, a natural
gateway into the contested beaver-­trapping grounds. A group of Odawas settled
on Prairie Island on the Mississippi and began to raise corn on Sioux lands. The
power dynamics had become horribly stacked against the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ.37
Yet the seven fires possessed a singular advantage: they were more numerous
than any of their enemies, boasting a population that, by some estimates, was
thirty times larger than that of the geopolitically privileged Sauteurs. Their isolation rendered them vulnerable, but it also protected them from contagious
crowd diseases: there is no record of epidemic outbreaks in the Sioux country

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5. The Sioux war zone in the mid-­seventeenth century. Map by Bill Nelson.

in the seventeenth century. Sheer numbers allowed Sioux to hold on. Their
enemies could kill them, infringe on their lands, and steal their peltry, but they
could not conquer or undo them. Sioux could bring thousands of warriors on a
battlefield to keep out enemy war parties whose numbers rarely exceeded a few
Numbers also made them impossible to ignore. The French traders who followed the refugee Indians west spoke of Onontio’s love for his children, pledged
to take care of their needs, and armed them against Sioux. But all the while
French officers kept gazing past them at the seven fires, which had taken an un-


A Place in the World

yielding hold of their imagination. La Nouvelle France was a small colony surrounded by much larger British ones and the formidable Iroquois, but how great
might New France be with thirty thousand Sioux on its side?
The French seemed to have found in Sioux the key that could unlock the continent and its immense wealth for them. Yet they struggled to implement consistent policies to win the Sioux over. Having originated as an eclectic religious and
commercial venture, New France did not seem to be able to decide the shape
and character it should assume. Even after the king took the colony under his
direct control in the 1660s, the French did not seem to be able to decide whether
to center the Indian trade in Montreal through Native middlemen, to concentrate it in fixed posts in the interior, or to allow coureurs de bois (runners of the
woods), wide-­ranging independent traders, to carry goods into distant Indian villages.39
The result was a constantly shifting and chronically unstable commercial and
geopolitical landscape that remained Sioux’s greatest challenge for nearly a century. They met it with a policy that was resolute in terms of ends—securing guns,
iron, Onontio’s love, and safety—and extraordinarily supple in terms of means.
But first they needed to find openings.
Dead or Alive You Have the Power over Us

In the spring of 1660 a band of Mdewakanton Sioux walked for several days to
visit Sauteurs, carrying the bones of their ancestors. They had been summoned
five months earlier to a village by Ottawa Lake south of Lake Superior where a
great gathering would take place. As they now made their way east, these Sioux
entered a world of strangers and enemies who for years had tried to destroy them.
But if the bones of their dead would join the bones of departed Sauteurs, the past
could be buried and the violence would end. The bones could remake the world
in a ceremony the Indians knew as the Feast of the Dead.40
The peace process had been set in motion a year earlier by hunger and bloodshed. Pierre-­Esprit Radisson, a French adventurer-­trader who was wintering
among Sauteurs, wrote how his hosts, caught between the Iroquois to the east
and the Sioux to the west, had become the “very Image of death.” He also wrote
about a massive battle between Sioux and allied Sauteurs and Crees. Many had
died on both sides and a Sauteur chief had lost an “eye by an arrow.” But with his
remaining eye the chief had seen what had to be done. “His courage being abject,” he had announced that “he himselfe should be ambassador & conclud the
peace.” He had traveled to Mille Lacs to reach out to Sioux. But the “wound was
yett fresh,” and Sioux had recoiled. Sauteurs returned home, but within a year
they made a new effort by calling the Sioux and Crees to a feast.41

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Now the moment was at hand. When the Sioux ambassadors reached the
Sauteur village, they met Radisson who was once again visiting Sauteurs, now
with his brother-­in-­law, Médard Chouart Des Groseilliers, who had been instrumental in opening the Great Lakes trade. The ambassadors seized the opportunity to forge ties with the French. Their wives—each had two—offered the
Frenchmen gifts of wild rice and Indian corn. They then greased the Frenchmen’s feet, undressed them, and clothed them with buffalo robes and white
beaver skins. “After this they weeped uppon our heads untill we weare wetted by
their tears,” Radisson marveled. The ceremony culminated in the smoking of the
calumet, which put an end to hostilities and created bonds of affinity and obligation. The ambassadors perfumed the clothes and armor of the Frenchmen, who
in turn threw “tobbacco” into a fire, causing a violent explosion—the Sioux’s first
experience of gunpowder. Almost all of this took place in silence. The ceremony
resumed the next day, now in words and through an interpreter. The Indians sat
down, but Radisson and Des Groseilliers made a “more elevated” place for themselves to “appeare in more state.” The Frenchmen accepted the calumet and told
the envoys that they had taken them in their protection.42
French protection was precisely what the Sioux wanted if it translated into
trade, guns, and iron. They had made themselves small and pitiful to invoke generosity. They stripped and dressed the strangers so that they could be born again
as allies. This initial meeting between the Sioux and the Frenchmen was followed
by eight days of feasting, which then transformed into a grand council. Thirty
young Sioux men, armed with nothing but bows and arrows, their faces painted
with many colors and their ears pierced in five places, entered the council house.
They were warriors and they spoke of war, explaining how they had brought their
wives with them “to take their advice, ffor they had a minde to goe against ye
Christinos (Crees), who were ready for them.”43
The fact that wives made themselves visible announced Sioux’s commitment
to end the violence that was consuming their world: women’s presence in public
meetings conveyed peaceful intentions and helped create a common ground.
The next day, with great gravity and modesty, Sioux elders entered the council
lodge, carrying calumets and dressed in long buffalo robes that reached the
ground. While the ambassadors handed out gifts of beaver and buffalo skins,
their spokesman made “a speech of thanksgiving,” declaring that they had come
to make a sacrifice to the French. He implored the French to visit them and
bring their merchandise to keep them alive. An old man placed a calumet at
the Frenchmen’s feet, covered them with his robe, and spoke: “Yee are masters
over us; dead or alive you have the power over us, and may dispose of us as your


A Place in the World

Radisson and Des Groseilliers imagined themselves as life-­givers who alone
had the capacity to unite the fractured Indigenous world with their goods and
love. “We weare come from the other side of ye’ great salted lake,” they told
the assembled Indians, “not to kill them but to make ym live; acknowledging
you for our brethren and children, whom we will love henceforth as our owne.”
Because the fur trade required stability, they exhorted the Indians to commit
to “an universall peace all over the earth” and urged the Sioux to embrace the
Crees, whom the Frenchmen had already adopted. Sioux should “lead them to
ye dance of Union, wch was to be celebrated at y death’s feast and banquett of
kindred.” If Sioux continued their war with Crees, Radisson and Des Groseilliers
warned, they would not see them in their villages. The Sioux ambassadors, apparently, said nothing. Radisson then traveled three days to a Cree encampment
and brought back a delegation.45
The Cree emissaries melted into a large audience of Sauteurs, Sioux, Odawas,
and others who had gathered to witness the culmination of the peace council
in the Feast of the Dead. Women danced to music, young men competed at
climbing up a greased pole, and everyone took part in a feast. Gift exchanges
of “most exquisite things, to shew what his country afforads,” ensued; the
Frenchmen received three hundred beaver robes. Informal marriages were concluded “according to their countrey coustoms,” turning strangers into relatives.
Finally the time came for the main participants to unite the bones. Sauteurs unearthed ancestral remains and bestowed them on Sioux who reciprocated. Enemies held the bones of their enemies and reburied them in a common grave,
thus resurrecting as relatives. More than a thousand people watched as “two redoubted nations” did “what they never before had”: they became one.46
All this Radisson and Des Groseilliers observed with growing delight. “This
feast ended,” Radisson wrote, and all headed home “well satisfied.” The two adventurers thought they had pacified the interior and refitted it to the needs of the
fur trade, but in truth they had played a role far smaller and more ambiguous. For
all their humility and submissiveness, the Sioux ambassadors had arranged ceremonies and exchanges to forge a new reality where the Sauteurs could become
allies, the French could become protectors, and trade could flow freely into their
villages. What the Sioux needed was a thorough geopolitical realignment of the
American interior. They needed the essential elements of power—the wašíčuŋ
of New France, the gun frontier, even the Sauteurs—to shift west.47
The Iroquois of This Country

The Sioux vision for the West complemented French designs for the interior.
Where Sioux wanted merchandise and peace to flow west, the French wanted
furs and loyalty to flow east. Sioux, superior hunters whom Radisson called the

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“Nation of the beefe,” were the key to French designs. The animal-­rich Sioux
country promised to become what Mexico and Peru had been for Spain—
a source of easily extractable wealth—but the French knew that it was too big
and too distant to be claimed with missions and forts, the basic tools of French
imperialism. Instead of bringing the French Empire among the seven fires, the
agents had to bring the seven fires into the French Empire. And so, as the Feast
of the Dead ended, Radisson and Des Groseilliers headed west with a party of
Sauteurs to deliver the Sioux into the fold.48
During the council with Sauteurs, Sioux emissaries had boasted to Radisson
and Des Groseilliers about the many attractions of their country. Working hard
to enhance their reputation, they promised the Frenchmen would find smooth
roads and bridges across rivers “for not to wett our feete.” More pointedly, they
assured that the lodges of their wives and daughters would always be open to
them—a promise of intermarriages that would cement an alliance by turning the
French into kin. When the pair arrived after “seaven small Journeys,” they were
not disappointed. They were taken to the Mde Wakan area, the spiritual and political center of the Sioux world, where they found themselves in a town of skin
“cabbans.” They were told that “there weare 7,000 men. This we believed.” They
also seemed to believe that there were mines of copper, pewter, and lead, as well
as mountains covered with “a kind of Stone that is transparent and tender, and
like to that of Venice.” Radisson learned how the Sioux “retire in winter towards
the woods of the North, where they kill a quantity of Castors.” He believed their
pelts were the best “in the whole world.” Cree lands, he concluded, were richer
in castor, but Sioux castor was “far better.” Radisson and Des Groseilliers stayed
for six weeks and left “loaden wth booty.”49
Things changed rapidly after this. The refugee triangle had long been the primary destination of French traders, but now commercial gravity shifted north
and west around a Sauteur-­Sioux axis. A small, resource-­rich peninsula at the
southwestern corner of Lake Superior the French knew as La Pointe du Chequamegon became the focal point of the interior trade. Chequamegon belonged to
Sauteurs and their villages became a cosmopolitan neutral zone, a “Babylon” of
“libertinism,” where guns, food, and captives exchanged hands, where customs
and ceremonies blended, and where new kin were made. Jesuits built a mission,
Saint-­Esprit, for the swelling Native population. “More than fifty Villages can be
counted,” the priests rejoiced, “which comprise divers peoples, either nomadic
or stationary, who depend in some sort on this Mission.”50
Sioux, too, benefited from the rise of the Sauteurs. With the bones of their
ancestors now resting near Chequamegon, they were welcome at the region’s
thriving fairs where they found ready markets for their coveted castor. At long last
guns and iron became available. And just as they had explained to Radisson and


A Place in the World

6. A Man & Woman of the Naudowessie. From Jonathan Carver,
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Des Groseilliers, trade brought peace. To their southeast the formidable Illinois
raided slaves across a widening zone while simultaneously fighting a two-­front
war against the Sioux and Iroquois. Desperate to carry their slaves through Sioux
territory to the Lake Superior gun markets, Illinois approached the seven fires
and made peace with them “in order to facilitate their coming to La Pointe.”51
Sioux had won a tenuous access to an enormously complex world, and they
had to quickly learn how to navigate it. Careful not to alarm their new allies, they
visited the Chequamegon fairs “only in small numbers, and as if on an Embassy.”
Like the Iroquois, they had to tread cautiously on the margins of the shared
Indian and French world that was coalescing in the western Great Lakes. Jesuits
dubbed them as “the Iroquois of this country, beyond la Pointe”; the Feast of the
Dead may have joined them to Sauteurs, but they remained foreigners to most
Lakes Indians. “They speak a language that is utterly foreign, the Savages here
not understanding it at all,” the Jesuits observed, and their “manners and customs are quite extraordinary.” To the Jesuits whose sensibilities had been molded
in decades of proselytizing among more sedentary Indians, the Sioux seemed
unworldly and vulgar. Their calumet-­centered ceremonies seemed pathetically
simple and their hospitality verged on the insulting: “when any stranger arrives,”
complained Father Jacques Marquette, “they feed him with a wooden fork, as
one would a child.”52

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Their acts of generosity and kindness misinterpreted and their pleas for pity
ignored, Sioux remained outsiders. They had made a concerted effort to be accepted and included, and it had failed. The carefully fashioned realm of good
thoughts fractured and violence flowed into the cracks. By the late 1660s Sioux
were once again at war with most of their neighbors who held them “in extreme
fear.” The access point to the eastern markets through Chequamegon closed up,
and they turned inward. “They have the wild oats,” Marquette wrote, and “keep
their world inviolate.” Sensing a growing detachment, Marquette sent them gifts
and a “message that they must show due recognition to the Frenchman wherever
they met him, and must not kill him or the Savages accompanying him.” Their
response gave him a pause. Sioux refused to visit Chequamegon and rejected the
gifts. “I could wish that all the Nations had as much love for God as these people
have fear of the French,” the dejected priest complained. “Christianity would
soon be flourishing.” Another missionary wrote of a “King of the great nation
of the Nadouessiouek,” who “reigns over a vast country beyond the Vermilion
Sea.” There was no such king, of course. As the Sioux became increasingly aloof,
imagination started to replace facts.53
French assertions of Sioux detachment may have been exaggerated—there
was so much in the interior world the French could not see or know—but it did
not matter. Perceptions bled into policies and the seven fires were once more
deemed strangers. When they were paired with the Iroquois, who were tearing
down New France, they had already lost their quest for centrality. Occasional
traders would visit them, but iron and guns would concentrate elsewhere, consigning them to the receiving end of the Native arms race. Odawas entrenched
themselves on the Straits of Mackinac between Lakes Huron and Michigan—a key gateway to the west—where they were ideally positioned to dominate the reviving fur trade. Five hundred miles and thousands of merchandise-­
hungry Indians separated the Sioux from the straits, leaving them isolated and
They Have Eaten Me to the Bone

In around 1670 Sioux captured a Wyandot hunting party from Chequamegon
that had entered their lands. One Sioux chief was so incensed by this that he
nearly attacked the young men who had seized the Wyandots. The chief had recently “sung the calumet” to Sinagos, a brutal slaver and war chief of Odawas
who were close allies of Wyandots, and he was desperate to protect this lifeline
for his village. He decided to personally deliver the Wyandot captives home and
set out with three warriors and a woman. When approaching Chequamegon,
however, the Wyandots fled. At the village they said they had escaped certain
death in Sioux hands. The Sioux ambassadors continued to Chequamegon re-


A Place in the World

gardless and were cordially received by Sinagos. But the Wyandots convinced
Sinagos to hand the Sioux over to them. They boiled and ate them.55
Things fell apart after this. Sioux retaliated by killing Wyandots and Odawas,
who responded by killing Sioux. The Sioux-­Sauteur alliance dissolved into
chaos, and the lands between Lake Superior and Mde Wakan became a battleground. The French tried to mediate, but the bloodshed escalated through kinship networks as grieving men sought to revenge slain relatives. Enmities congealed into hatreds and violence swept over the length of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ’s
eastern border where “a general League” had formed “against a common foe.”
Mesquakies, whose lands west of Green Bay butted against the Sioux domain,
were “fully resolved not to treat” the Sioux “more humanely than they are treated
by them.”56
Yet the border held. Enemy war parties raided along the Mississippi, turning
it into a battlefront, but few risked pushing into the Sioux country beyond the
river. Some thirty large Dakota, Yankton, Yanktonai, and Lakota villages dotted
the vast realm, each protected by boggy marshes and each ready to pull together
and “give prompt aid wherever it is needed.” They “made themselves feared by
all their neighbors,” using the bow and arrow “with such skill and readiness as to
fill the air with shafts in an instant.” Now “exceedingly numerous,” Sioux seized
the initiative and carried the war to their enemies, striking deep into the Great
Lakes. The result was a massive diaspora. If in the 1650s the Iroquois had been
a hammer that pounded westward fleeing refugees against an anvil that were
the Sioux, in the 1670s the positions were reversed: Sioux now delivered the
blows while Iroquois remained passive. The western Great Lakes began to empty
as people either fled or wasted away. The peninsula linking Lakes Superior,
Michigan, and Huron became a new refugee center for people who had been
twice dispossessed in a single generation. The Jesuits abandoned Chequamegon
and moved east to Sault Ste. Marie. There they rejoiced how the fear of the Sioux
pushed the refugees “almost in one spot,” making it easier for the priests to find
them and “show Them The Road to heaven.” More concerned with survival in
this world, the refugees embraced the Jesuits and their god as life-­givers who
could help them destroy the Sioux. A Sauteur chief, his body coated with scars
from years of fighting the Iroquois and Sioux, thanked the Jesuits for “praying for
us to Jesus, The God of war.”57
In 1672 the Lakes Indians mobilized French resources against the Sioux.
Odawas visited Montreal and brought back only muskets and powder, “intending
to march against the Scioux, build a fort in their country, and wage war against
them during the entire winter.” When Sinagos moved Odawas toward the Sioux
country across the refugee zone, handing out gifts, his party kindled kinship
obligations in village after village, becoming a mobile rallying point for shared

A Place in the World


vengeance, “a body of over a thousand men, all having guns or other powerful
weapons of defense.” Sinagos’s army managed to surprise small villages, but
Sioux quickly regrouped and “slew them in great numbers, for their terror was so
overwhelming that in their flight they had thrown away their weapons.” Nearly
all of them perished “by fighting, by hunger, or by the rigor of the climate.” Demoralized, the coalition collapsed into infighting: “the disorder among them was
so great that they ate one another.”58
Sioux captured Sinagos and decided to make a statement. “Unwilling to burn”
the prominent chief, “they made him go to a repast, and, cutting pieces of flesh
from his thighs and all other parts of his body, broiled these and gave them to
him to eat—informing Sinagos that, as he had eaten so much human flesh and
shown himself so greedy for it, he might now satiate himself upon it by eating his
own.” Then they sent one of Sinagos’s slaves back home so that “he might faithfully report what he had seen and the justice that had been administered.”59
If this was an attempt to intimidate Odawas or to communicate restraint,
it did not work: Lakes Indians remained resolute to destroy and consume the
Sioux. In the midst of the bloodshed, Mascoutens and Illinois invited Father
Claude-­Jean Allouez to what “seemed to be a feast for fighting.” “You have heard
of the peoples called Nadouessi,” the master of the feast told the Jesuits. “They
have eaten me to the bone, and have not left me a single member of my family
alive. I must taste of their flesh, as they have tasted of that of my kinsfolk. I am
ready to set out against them in war, but I despair of success therein unless you,
who are the masters of life and of death, are favorable toward me in this undertaking.” Allouez heard the pleas but flinched at mass violence. The Jesuits, he explained to his distraught audience, were “but the weak servants of the great God
of Armies.” It took a threat from another European empire to prompt the French
into action.60
Ten Thousand Onontios

In 1670 dreadful news reached New France: King Charles II of England
had chartered a new fur-­trading enterprise and granted it a monopoly over all
lands whose rivers drain into Hudson Bay, an area fifteen times the size of England. Making matters worse, Radisson and Des Groseilliers, the pioneer trader-­
explorers, had grown disillusioned with the prospects of th