Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. In this first complete account of the Lakota Indians Pekka Hämäläinen traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty‑first century. He explores the Lakotas’ roots as marginal hunter‑gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America’s great commercial artery, and then—in what was America’s first sweeping westward expansion—as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. Deeply researched and engagingly written, this history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.

Introduction: Dark Matter of History -- Chapter l: A Place in the World -- Chapter ll: Facing West -- Chapter lll: The Imperial Cauldron -- Chapter llll: The Lakota Meridian -- Chapter v: The Call of the White Buffalo Calf Women -- Chapter vi: Empires -- Chapter vii: War -- Chapter viii: Shapeshifters -- Chapter ix: Upside-Down Soldiers -- Epilogue: The Lakota Struggle for Indigenous Sovereignty.