Nakota

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It's a good question, Adrian.

[laughs] You know, all my relations is a pretty popular topic throughout Indian country, popularized by, uh, Lakota, Nakota, Dakota relatives.

Uh, but all throughout In- Indian country, our primary identity is inextricably connected to our relationships, whether it be our relationships to land, if we're defining ourselves as the people of the blue-green water, or the people of the tall pine trees, or the people that live within the four sacred mountains, or, for us here, the people of the clear saltwater, the people of the tide.

That relationship to land and water is our primary way of identifying ourselves.

The Lakota were a distinct group of peoples sharing similar customs and language that migrated northwest from the central Mississippi Valley.

The Lakota were part of a broader confederation of peoples called the Aseti Sakowin, or Seven Council Fires, a group of seven peoples who spoke one of three dialects of the Siouan language family, Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota.

This loose confederation conferred strength as opposed to weakness, as it allowed each part of the confederation to call upon the support of the other peoples whilst avoiding civil strife.

As the Osseti Sakowin, also known as Sioux, migrated and expanded their sphere of influence, they swept other peoples aside, sometimes taking them as slaves.

The Sioux were not a single people, but a large family of nations, and the Lakota but one tribe.

They spread out across a huge area, but as they did, so the ties of kinship and common interest loosened.

The interest of Western Expanding Sioux, people like the Lakota, and those more firmly anchored in the East, such as the Dakota and Nakota, began to diverge.

The tension was worsened for the Western Expanding Lakota by their inability to secure a ready supply of firearms, which depended upon their often strained relationship with the French.

Kinship is really the foundation of Lakota thought philosophy, the core of our identity.

The word Lakota or Dakota or Nakota, it roughly translates as ally.

We see ourselves as an ally.

The foundational philosophy for how we approach our existence, you know, one of the words is we say wo lakota, talk about being an ally, lakota, and then when you put the prefix wo in front of it, in our language, it then makes it a verb.

And one thing that is

true

for all Lakota, Dakota, Nakota people is we know that we all have at least one shared purpose for existence, and that's to be a good relative.

So that's a universal truth for us.