November is Native American Heritage Month, or as it is commonly referred to, American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month.

The month is a time to celebrate rich and diverse cultures, traditions, and histories and to acknowledge the important contributions of Native people. Heritage Month is also an opportune time to educate the general public about tribes, to raise a general awareness about the unique challenges Native people have faced both historically and, in the present, and the ways in which tribal citizens have worked to conquer these challenges.

Our very own assistant athletic director of communications Tatiana Stands comes from the Sioux tribe located in Pine Ridge, SD.

The Sioux are a confederacy of several tribes that speak three different dialects, the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota. The Lakota, also called the Teton Sioux, are comprised of seven tribal bands and are the largest and most western of the three groups, occupying lands in both North and South Dakota. The Dakota, or Santee Sioux, live mostly in Minnesota and Nebraska, while the smallest of the three, the Nakota, primarily reside in South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana.

Since the early nineteenth century, the Great Sioux Nation has consisted of three subgroups: the Eastern Dakota (made up of the Santee and Sisseton), the Western Dakota (the Yankton and Yanktonai), and the Lakota (the Teton or Teton Sioux). These Sioux tribes of today were once part of one of the largest American indigenous groups north of Mexico, second in numbers only to the Algonquian people. In the pre-Columbian era (the time in the Americas from prehistory until significant European influence occurred), the Siouan peoples occupied an immense geographical area of the North American continent, from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Scholars have been able to connect this disparate and widespread grouping of peoples through language.