The Lakh?o´ta are among the best-known Native American peoples.In popular culture and even many scholarly works, they were once lumped together with others and called the Sioux.This book tells the full story of Lakh?o´ta culture and society, from their origins to the twenty-first century, drawing on Lakh?o´ta voices and perspectives. In Lakh?o´ta culture, “listening” is a cardinal virtue, connoting respect, and here authors Rani-Henrik Andersson and David C.Posthumus listen to the Lakh?o´ta, both past and present.The history of Lakh?o´ta culture unfolds in this narrative as the people lived it. Fittingly, Lakhota: An Indigenous History opens with an origin story, that of White Buffalo Calf Woman (Ptesanwin) and her gift of the sacred pipe to the Lakh?o´ta people.Drawing on winter counts, oral traditions and histories, and Lakh?o´ta letters and speeches, the narrative proceeds through such periods and events as early Lakh?o´ta-European trading, the creation of the Great Sioux Reservation, Christian missionization, the Plains Indian Wars, the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee (1890), the Indian New Deal, and self-determination, as well as recent challenges like the #NoDAPL movement and management of Covid-19 on reservations.This book centers Lakh?o´ta experience, as when it shifts the focus of the Battle of Little Bighorn from Custer to fifteen-year-old Black Elk, or puts American Horse at the heart of the negotiations with the Crook Commission, or explains the Lakh?o´ta agenda in negotiating the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1851. The picture that emerges—of continuity and change in Lakh?o´ta culture from its distant beginnings to issues in our day—is as sweeping and intimate, and as deeply complex, as the lived history it encompasses.