Continuity and Change of Lakota Hunting and Gathering Practices

The overarching theme of this book is the contrast of historical and contemporary forms of hunting and gathering among Lakota people currently living in village-communities on reservations in North and South Dakota (USA), thus showing how subsistence practices were and are culturally and ontologically situated in so-called Plains-Indian societies. While the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation is at the center of analysis, examples from other Lakota reservations as well as Plains Cree reserves in Alberta (Canada) are brought up for transnational and cross-tribal comparisons among Plains peoples, yet regionally limited to the Northern Great Plains. The author convincingly reveals that although social organization, economic relevance of hunting and animals predominantly hunted by the Lakota have changed throughout history in processes of adaption responding to larger infrastructural shifts in their immediate environments, specific aspects of the practices and the hunting-related worldview, which was strongly shaped by the nomadic way of life of these peoples on the Northern Plains during the 19th century, have persisted and still ideationally permeate many spheres of social life today.