The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee

The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee. By Jeffrey Ostler. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-60590-3. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Index. Pp. xviii, 387. #21.99.

Unhappy with answers given by earlier historians for the reasons behind the deadly assault by U.S. troops on the Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890, University of Oregon historian Jeffrey Ostler has attempted to place the event in historical context by reexamining the relationship between the Sioux and the United States government during the nineteenth century. His study departs from traditional ethnohistory and the new Indian and military history and uses the concept of what he sees as United States colonialism as a tool to analyze the relationship between the tribe and the government. Ostler...