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...

"This volume brings together an invaluable collection of vivid eyewitness accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862 and its aftermath. Of greatest interest is the fact that all the narratives assembled here come from Dakota mixed-bloods and full-bloods. Speaking from a variety of viewpoints and enmeshed in complex webs of allegiances to Indian, white, and mixed-blood kin, these witnesses testify not only to the terrible casualties they all suffered, but also to the ways in which the events of 1862 tore at the social, cultural, and psychic fabrics of their familial and community lives. This...

In August 1862 the Dakota or Eastern Sioux, frustrated at being defrauded by the United States government and at losing their land and livelihood, resorted to armed conflict against the white settlers of southern Minnesota. Gary Clayton Anderson is the first historian to use an ethnohistorical approach to explain why, after more than two centuries of friendly interaction, the bonds of peace between the Dakota and whites suddenly broke apart.

In Kinsmen of Another Kind, Anderson shows how the Dakota concept of kinship affected the tribe's complex relationships with the whites. The...

In 1834 Samuel W. Pond and his brother Gideon built a cabin near Cloud Man's village of the Dakota Indians on the shore of Lake Calhoun--now present-day Minneapolis--intending to preach Christianity to the Indians. The brothers were to spend nearly twenty years learning the Dakota language and observing how the Indians lived.

In the 1860s and 1870s, after the Dakota had fought a disastrous war with the whites who had taken their land, Samuel Pond recorded his recollections of the Indians "to show what manner of people the Dakotas were . . . while they still retained the customs of...