The history of engagement between American scholars and institutions and the Lakota community is a history of gradual, still-incomplete movement toward a more honest and respectful relationship.

The early anthropologists and historians who documented Lakota culture and history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did important work while also operating within frameworks of colonial authority that shaped what they asked, what they were told, and how they interpreted what they heard.

The mid-twentieth century saw the development of more collaborative approaches, including the use of Lakota interpreters and consultants, the incorporation of oral tradition as historical evidence, and the gradual recognition that Indigenous perspectives on their own history had standing that outside scholars’ interpretations did not automatically supersede.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen the further development of Indigenous scholarship — Lakota historians, Lakota scholars, people from within the community writing their own history in their own terms.