The spring 2024 issue of South Dakota History, the quarterly journal of the South Dakota State Historical Society, features articles on American Indian prehistory in South Dakota and the Midwest.
In "The Annual Great Sioux Rendezvous on the James River," the Reverend Dr. Roger David Aus makes a compelling case for Otuhu Oju (or Oak Grove, a segment of the James River near the modern-day Rondell Crossing) as the most probable location of the Great Sioux Rendezvous, held each year in late May from the late 1700s to about 1850. This yearly gathering allowed the various tribes of the Oceti Sakowin to trade, gather in council, celebrate, and play games, and for young people to court each other for marriage.
Next, in "Dakota Resources: Early Agriculture on the Northern Plains: The Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village Site," L. Adrien Hannus, retired Director of the Archeology Laboratory at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, highlights the history and significance of the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village, the only interpreted archaeological dig site in South Dakota which is open to the public. The Mitchell village, inhabited more than 1,000 years ago, provides important insight into pre-contact Indigenous lifeways on the northern Great Plains.
Finally, in "Historical Musings: Finding the Pre-History of the Midwest: A Note on American Indian Scholarship," noted Midwest historian Jon K. Lauck examines the consequences of the Iroquois Confederacy's onslaught in the seventeenth century. Beginning with the oft-forgotten Beaver Wars, the Iroquois sent tidal waves across the Midwest, killing and displacing tens of thousands of Indigenous people. As such, Lauck contests that "the periodic claim that the Midwest was founded upon the genocidal invasion of ancient American Indian homelands is neither a fair nor accurate analysis of the historical record."