Sans Arc Erotic

The Sans Arc are one of the seven bands of the Lakota, and the only one most readers know by a French phrase. Their own name is Itazipco, also written Itazipcola, and it means without bows. Traders on the upper Missouri translated it word for word, and the translation outlived the original in print. Accounts of where the name came from differ, and nobody should pretend otherwise. Their country is the northern Plains between the Missouri River and the Black Hills, along the Grand, Moreau and Cheyenne rivers, in what is now South Dakota. They speak Lakota, the western dialect of the Sioux language and part of the Siouan family, close enough to the Dakota dialects that speakers can follow one another and different enough that everyone notices. Band membership among the Lakota was never administrative. It ran through families, camp circles and the tiospaye, the extended kin group that decided who camped with whom, and it still tracks families more honestly than it tracks enrollment rolls.

Horses arrived in the eighteenth century and turned a people already moving west out of the woodlands into buffalo hunters with reach. The Sans Arc were party to the Fort Laramie treaties of 1851 and 1868, and they were in the camp on the Little Bighorn in 1876, by which point the treaties had already failed. Spotted Eagle led the band's holdouts and was among the last to come in. Afterward most Sans Arc families were assigned to the Cheyenne River agency, where they remain: the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe is built from four bands, Minneconjou, Sans Arc, Two Kettles and Sihasapa, sharing one government. The federal ban on the Sun Dance in 1883 pushed the ceremony out of sight rather than out of practice; it was kept quietly for decades and was not clearly protected in law until 1978. Episcopal and Catholic missions took hold on the reservation, and plenty of families keep both, a Sunday service and a sweat lodge, without treating that as a contradiction. The hardest modern blow was not a battle. In the 1950s the Oahe Dam flooded the Missouri bottomlands, taking the timber, the shelter, the winter grazing and the best ground on the reservation, and pushing whole communities up onto open prairie. What holds is the language work, the ceremonies, and the winter counts, the painted year by year calendars in which a band remembered itself one image at a time.