Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2005
Abstract
Colonialism becomes the lens through which Jeffrey Ostler both analyzes and interprets the history of the Plains Sioux. His account begins in 1803 when the United States claimed sovereignty over Sioux lands through the Louisiana Purchase and extends through the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890), which Ostler interprets as an anticolonial response to the reservation system. Expansion of geographic boundaries and economic interests led the United States to claim dominion over the tribes in the West, and this, in turn, led to conflict, conquest, and eventual control over the tribal nations. In examining this dynamic of contact and conquest, Ostler concentrates on the Plains Sioux, tribes that actively contested both the process and the policies of colonialism in efforts to maintain their own cultural integrity. In large and small ways, the Sioux adapted and re-created familiar cultural patterns under new conditions, and this becomes the important focus of the book-insertion of the Sioux into their own histories. He develops a Sioux perspective through sources such as eyewitness accounts, versions of events written in the Lakota language, examination of the cultural meaning of Lakota words, reinterpretation and reexamination of military records, diaries of various participants, and so on.
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 25:3 (Summer 2005). Copyright © 2005 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.