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The Pursuit of Family
A History of Dakota and Lakota Family and Kinship on the Standing Rock Reservation, 1794–2022
Thomas Grillot (Author)
9781496247551
Paperback / softback, published 1 July 2026
396 pages, 5 illus., 10 photographs, 1 map, 5 tables, index
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.588 kg
"Thomas Grillot's powerful book, based on mining the archives and immersive ethnography, reveals how 'making family'—a concept he develops across dozens of families and more than two hundred years—was defined by Dakota people amid the forces of colonization."—Christian W. McMillen, author of Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory "Thomas Grillot demonstrates how Dakota and Lakota have constantly reorganized themselves to adapt to challenges from before the reservation to the present. While honoring and defending the lessons of their ancestors they have utilized varied combinations of individual and family agency to mitigate a wide array of internal and external pressures. . . . Provides a timely, deep, and unique view into Lakota and Dakota family dynamics."—William C. Meadows, author of The First Code Talkers: Native American Communicators in World War I
In The Pursuit of Family Thomas Grillot examines how Dakota and Lakota people on the Standing Rock Reservation have lived as families since the 1870s in what is now North Dakota and South Dakota. Grillot examines the collective and individual efforts that made survival possible on Standing Rock, one of the most understudied reservations despite being one of the best-known Native locations in the United States—Sitting Bull died there in 1890, and a protest camp organized there against the Dakota Access pipeline made international news in 2016. Yet this is a book not about famous people or events but about ordinary people confronted with a deceptively simple question: How can we be a family on the reservation? Integrating archival material, oral history, and fieldwork, Grillot tells the history of dozens of reservation-based Dakota and Lakota families from the beginning of the reservation era to today. The Pursuit of Family reveals how the Dakotas and Lakotas, tied by a common language and way of life, developed under the pressures of settler colonialism and shifted formations of kinship across time and space. It is a story of resistance, negotiation, and adaptation.
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Conclusion
Bibliography