Being Dakota

A unique collection detailing the customs, traditions, and folklore of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota at the turn of the twentieth century, with descriptions of tribal organization, ceremonies that marked the individual's passage from birth to death, and material culture

A unique collection detailing the customs, traditions, and folklore of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota at the turn of the twentieth century, with descriptions of tribal organization, ceremonies that marked the individual's passage from birth to death, and material culture

Every heart deserves a voice. From the jungles of Cambodia and a chance encounter with a local medicine woman comes Be(loved), poet Dakota Adan’s debut collection of poems, tracing the epic question of what it means to be loved. Hailed as “an essential book for those seeking self-love,” this heartfelt anthology lends voice to the heartbreak and healing of our soul’s quest to reunite with whom we always hoped we could be—ourselves.

“A deeply spiritual, deeply moving book” about life on the Great Plains, by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Cloister Walk (The New York Times Book Review). “With humor and lyrical grace,” Kathleen Norris meditates on a place in the American landscape that is at once desolate and sublime, harsh and forgiving, steeped in history and myth (San Francisco Chronicle). A combination of reporting and reflection, Dakota reminds us that wherever we go, we chart our own spiritual geography.

2021 Scholarly Writing Award in the Saskatchewan Book Awards This book presents two of the most important traditions of the Dakota people, the Red Road and the Holy Dance, as told by Samuel Mniyo and Robert Goodvoice, two Dakota men from the Wahpeton Dakota Nation near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada. Their accounts of these central spiritual traditions and other aspects of Dakota life and history go back seven generations and help to illuminate the worldview of the Dakota people for the younger generation of Dakotas, also called the Santee Sioux. "The Good Red Road," an important symbolic concept in the Holy Dance, means the good way of living or the path of goodness. The Holy Dance (also called the Medicine Dance) is a Dakota ceremony of earlier generations. Although it is no longer practiced, it too was a central part of the tradition and likely the most important ceremonial organization of the Dakotas. While some people believe that the Holy Dance is sacred and that the information regarding its subjects should be allowed to die with the last believers, Mniyo believed that these spiritual ceremonies played a key role in maintaining connections with the spirit world and were important aspects of shaping the identity of the Dakota people. In The Red Road and Other Narratives of the Dakota Sioux, Daniel Beveridge brings together Mniyo and Goodvoice's narratives and biographies, as well as songs of the Holy Dance and the pictographic notebooks of James Black (Jim Sapa), to make this volume indispensable for scholars and members of the Dakota community.

The area's extreme remoteness, great size, and sparse population have shaped the North Dakota character from the beginning of settlement a century ago. Theirs was not an easy land to master; and of those who tried, it demanded strength, endurance, and few illusions, but it had rewards. Today, as world shortages of food and fuel raise new possibilities--and new problems--North Dakotans face the future with the cautious optimism they learned long ago in sod houses and cold winters on the far northern edge of their country.