Notes on the Ethnogeography of the Yankton Dakota

Abstract

The study of man’s relationship to his natural environment is of increasing interest at the present time. This concern with the environment has fostered interest in cultures with simpler technologies and their uses of their environments. Because they lacked the technological advantages of later European and American invaders, such cultures usually represented a much closer response to the opportunities of the land on which they lived. The cultural ecology of one such group of American Indians, the Yankton Dakota, is examined using archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic information. Place names still used by Yankton informants often provide valuable information regarding use of their traditional historic domain.