Post by Dietmar on Jan 5, 2011 6:54:06 GMT -5
Our member Ephriam Dickson´s new book "The Sitting Bull Surrender Census" will be out in January 2011!
Here is some info from the publisher South Dakota Historical Society Press:
The Sitting Bull Surrender Census
by Ephriam D. Dickson III
Cloth
300 pages
8.5 x 11 inches
ISBN: 9780982274972
www.sdshspress.com/index.php?&id=220&action=912
sdshspress.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/some-thoughts-from-ephriam-d-dickson-iii/
I´m looking forward to this one!
Here is some info from the publisher South Dakota Historical Society Press:
The Sitting Bull Surrender Census
by Ephriam D. Dickson III
Cloth
300 pages
8.5 x 11 inches
ISBN: 9780982274972
www.sdshspress.com/index.php?&id=220&action=912
Available January 2011
Following Sitting Bull's surrender to the United States Army in 1881, the Indian Division of the United States Census Office conducted a full and detailed census of the Sioux Indians at Standing Rock Indian Agency in central Dakota Territory.
This census is the most complete and accurate account of Sitting Bull's followers and, until Ephriam Dickson III compiled this important work, the information contained within its pages had been hidden in archives beyond the reach of most researchers. Dickson's book provides researchers and historians with an unrivalled resource with which to assess and analyze this group of American Indians.
In The Sitting Bull Surrender Census, Dickson has taken one of the total thirty-three different lists of Lakota families, with support from oral histories, and provided insight into the composition of community or tiyospaye at Standing Rock, as Lakotas shifted from their traditional buffalo-hunting ways to their new sedentary life on the reservation.
The Sitting Bull Surrender Census preserves the earliest detailed enumeration of every Lakota man, woman, and child at the agency at a critical juncture in Lakota history, just as the last of the non-treaty bands under Sitting Bull returned from Canada and joined their relatives at Standing Rock. Viewed within the context of Standing Rock's rich documentary sources, Sitting Bull Surrender Census offers a remarkable snapshot of Lakota families and communities.
sdshspress.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/some-thoughts-from-ephriam-d-dickson-iii/
Some Thoughts from Ephriam D. Dickson III
The SDSHS Press recently chatted with Ephriam D. Dickson III, who is the author and editor of the forthcoming Sitting Bull Surrender Census: The Lakotas at Standing Rock, 1881. We asked him to give us a little insight into what it was like to work on this extensive project. Here are his thoughts:
Research at the National Archives is like a treasure hunt. Combing through boxes of old records, you can occasionally stumble across a new document, a forgotten source that offers new insights about the past. I have certainly felt that excitement working on the Sitting Bull Surrender Census. As a historian interested in American-Lakota relations, I was ecstatic when I first found this stack of brittle pages. The earliest known complete census from any Lakota reservation, the document listed Sitting Bull and over a thousand other families of Hunkpapa, Sihasapa, Sans Arc, Oglala, Brule, and Yanktonai from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in 1881, even recording how many buffalo they had hunted during the past year, and how many horses and dogs each family owned. Now as the Sitting Bull Surrender Censusfinally comes to print, I am especially excited that this important new source will be available to Lakota scholars and to the public.
As often happens, each new discovery raises new questions. The Sitting Bull Surrender Census was the result of a pioneering effort by the U.S. Census Bureau to enumerate for the first time every Indian within the continental United States. For many years, historians believed that this census effort largely failed, resulting in just a small handful of documents. But while researching the background of the census, I found an old ledger book at the National Archives buried within the records of the Census Bureau showing that enumerations were completed for nearly every reservation in the U.S. While some of these may have been lost in an 1897 fire at the census office, this book offers hope that more of these census records still survive, buried somewhere in similar archival boxes waiting to be discovered. The hunt continues!
I´m looking forward to this one!
