Wahpeton Erotic

The Wahpeton are named for the country they lived in: Waȟpéthuŋwaŋ, usually rendered as "dwellers among the leaves," a name that points to the wooded lake belt of present-day Minnesota. They are one of the four Eastern Dakota, or Santee, bands, with the Mdewakanton, Wahpekute and Sisseton, and so belong to the Seven Council Fires that outsiders call the Sioux. They are closest to the Sisseton, so close that for more than a century the two names have traveled as a pair: on treaties, on tribal rolls and in the name of a modern tribal government. Ojibwe expansion in the eighteenth century pushed the Eastern Dakota south and west, and the Wahpeton settled along the Minnesota River, with their best-known villages around Lac qui Parle. Their year followed the Eastern Dakota round of deer hunts, fishing, wild rice, maple sugaring and small corn gardens, a woodland life at the edge of the prairie. They speak Dakota, a Siouan language, in the eastern dialect shared with the other Santee bands. Lakota speakers farther west can follow it, though the sound differences are plain to any ear.

Lac qui Parle is also where Presbyterian missionaries settled in 1835 and, working beside the fur trader Joseph Renville, began putting Dakota into writing. Hymns translated in that era are still sung in Dakota in reservation churches. Christianity took deep root, but kinship obligations, naming customs and ceremonies such as the sweat lodge never went away. The turning point came in 1862. Treaties in 1851 and 1858 had already squeezed the Sisseton and Wahpeton onto a narrow strip along the upper Minnesota River. When war broke out that August over late annuity payments and hunger, many Wahpeton refused to join it, and some sheltered captives or guided settlers to safety. It spared them little. Congress annulled the Dakota treaties, and families were driven west into Dakota Territory and north into British territory. That scattering drew the present map. An 1867 treaty created the Lake Traverse Reservation, which straddles the line between South Dakota and North Dakota and is governed today by the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. The same treaty set aside the reservation at Spirit Lake in North Dakota, shared with Sisseton and Yanktonai. In Canada, Wahpeton descendants live on Dakota reserves in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, among them the Wahpeton Dakota Nation near Prince Albert. Canadian Dakota were long regarded as refugees from the United States and are not party to the numbered treaties. Others made their way back to Minnesota, where the Upper Sioux Community sits near the old agency grounds.