Ostler Jeffrey. The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground

Penguin Books, 2010. — 256 p.The Lakota Indians made their home in the majestic Black Hills mountain range during the last millennium, drawing on the hills' endless bounty for physical and spiritual sustenance. Yet the arrival of white settlers brought the Lakotas into inexorable conflict with the changing world, at a time when their tribe would produce some of the most famous Native Americans in history, including Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse. Jeffrey Ostler's powerful history of the Lakotas' struggle captures the heart of a people whose deep relationship with their homeland would compel them to fight for it against overwhelming odds, on battlefields as varied as the Little Bighorn and the chambers of U.S. Supreme Court.Jeffrey Ostler is Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee.