Little Crow
Spokesman for the Sioux
1st Edition
Published on 24. July 2009
259 pages
978-0-87351-679-2 (ISBN)
Description
Government officials and missionaries wanted all Sioux men to become self-sufficient farmers, wear pants, and cut their hair. The Indians, confronted by a land-hungry white population and a loss of hunting grounds, sought to exchange title to their homeland for annuities of cash and food, schools and teachers, and farms and agricultural knowledge. By 1862 the Sioux realized that their extensive kinship network and religion were in jeopardy and that the government would not fulfill its promises.
With their way of life endangered, the Sioux turned to Little Crow to lead them in a war for self-preservation, a war that Little Crow had tried to avoid during most of his adult life. Within a year, the Sioux had been evicted from Minnesota, Little Crow was dead, and a way of life had vanished. Through his life-his biography-the complex interrelationship of Indian and white can be studied and, in some measure, understood.
More details
Person
Gary Clayton Anderson is professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, author of Kinsmen of Another Kind: Dakota-White Relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1650-1862, and co-editor with Alan R. Woolworth of Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862.
