Being Dakota: Tales and Traditions of the Sisseton and Wahpeton by Amos E. Oneroad

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a few members of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota community in northeastern South Dakota, while living in the white world, quietly worked to preserve the customs and stories of their ancestors in the face of federal government suppression and the opposition of organized religion.

Paperback

214 pages

ISBN: 9780873515306

About the authors: Amos E. Oneroad moved into two worlds. Educated in traditional Dakota ways, he also earned a divinity degree from Columbia University and become a Presbyterian minister. In 1914 he began working with Alanson B. Skinner, a student of anthropology whom he met in New York City. Oneroad collected and preserved stories and traditions of the Sisseton-Wahpeton people, including custom material culture, and ceremonies that marked the individual's passage from birth to death; Skinner planned to edit and publish the work. But Skinner's untimely death in 1925 thwarted their plans, and the manuscript languished for seventy-five years in a California library. 

Image description: The cover features a photograph of two individual s; the man on the left is wearing a hat and a jacket, the one on the right has braided hair and is wearing traditional clothing. The title and a quote are printed at the top of the cover; the subtitle and authors' names are printed in a black banner at the bottom of the cover.