20 Brutal Truths About Lakota Warrior Training That Hollywood Erased

Thanks for watching. If this brought back a memory or taught you something Hollywood never would, subscribe and share it with someone who needs to hear the truth about the real American frontier. The Lakota Warrior Training Hollywood Never Showed You: Twenty Brutal Lessons from Cradle to Battlefield On a summer Sunday in 1876, a young Lakota woman was digging wild turnips beside the Little Bighorn River. Within hours, she was riding against the Seventh Cavalry. How does a person go from the turnip field to the battlefield in a single afternoon? The answer lies in a training system that began before Lakota children could walk and asked as much of girls as it did of boys. In this documentary we count down twenty hard truths about how Lakota warriors were made. They range from the first lesson taught in the cradleboard to the honors, ordeals, and sacrifices that shaped every life in the camp. Along the way you will meet the women who taught, endured, and fought, and learn why their part in this story nearly disappeared from the record. This video is built on the work of Lakota narrators and the scholars who listened to them. Much of what we know comes from elders who spoke to a reservation physician at Pine Ridge between 1896 and 1914. Black Elk recounted his life through his son to the poet John Neihardt. A museum anthropologist documented the Oglala warrior societies in 1912. Later Lakota scholars, including the anthropologist Beatrice Medicine, reexamined that record and recovered the roles women held within it. We also draw on Lakota winter counts, painted hide calendars that recorded one event per year, and on first-person accounts collected decades after the battles. Throughout, we separate what the record documents from what oral tradition holds, and we note where historians still disagree. The result is a picture of a whole society organized around readiness, where training was a way of life rather than a single rite. Sources and further reading: Raymond J. DeMallie, ed. The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt. University of Nebraska Press, 1984. James R. Walker. Lakota Society. Edited by Raymond J. DeMallie. University of Nebraska Press, 1982. James R. Walker. The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. 16, Part 2, 1917. Clark Wissler. Societies and Ceremonial Associations in the Oglala Division of the Teton-Dakota. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. 11, Part 1, 1912. Beatrice Medicine. "Warrior Women: Sex Role Alternatives for Plains Indian Women." In The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women, edited by Patricia Albers and Beatrice Medicine. University Press of America, 1983. Marla N. Powers. Oglala Women: Myth, Ritual, and Reality. University of Chicago Press, 1986. Richard G. Hardorff, ed. Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight: New Sources of Indian-Military History. Arthur H. Clark Company, 1991. Josephine Waggoner. Witness: A Húŋkpapȟa Historian's Strong-Heart Song of the Lakotas. Edited by Emily Levine. University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Candace S. Greene and Russell Thornton, eds. The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian. Smithsonian Institution and University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Luther Standing Bear. Land of the Spotted Eagle. Houghton Mifflin, 1933. This channel exists to educate and inform. Our goal is to widen your knowledge of frontier and Native American history with carefully researched, valuable content grounded in primary sources and serious scholarship. Every script is written by a human writer, and all visuals and storyboards are brainstormed and developed internally by our team.