title: Sioux

text: The traditional social structure of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ strongly relied on kinship ties that extend beyond human interaction and includes the natural and supernatural worlds. Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ ("all are related") represents a spiritual belief of how human beings should ideally act and relate to other humans, the natural world, the spiritual world, and to the cosmos. The thiyóšpaye represents the political and economic structure of traditional society.


title: Sioux

text: Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the different Očhéthi Šakówiŋ villages (oyáte, "tribe/nation") consisted of many thiyóšpaye ("camp circles"), which were large extended families united by kinship (thiwáhe, "immediate family"). Thiyóšpaye varied in size, were led by a leader appointed by an elder council and were nicknamed after a prominent member or memorable event associated with the band. Dakota ethnographer Ella Cara Deloria noted the kinship ties were all-important, they dictated and demanded all phrases of traditional life:


title: Sioux

text: During the fur trade era, the thiyóšpaye refused to trade only for economic reasons. Instead the production and trade of goods was regulated by rules of kinship bonds. Personal relationships were pivotal for success: in order for European-Americans to trade with the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, social bonds had to be created. The most successful fur traders would marry into the kinship society, which also raised the status of the family of the woman through access to European goods. Outsiders are also adopted into the kinship through the religious Huŋkalowaŋpi ceremony. Early European explorers and missionaries who lived among the Dakota were sometimes adopted into the thiyóšpaye (known as "huŋka relatives"), such as Louis Hennepin who noted, "this help’d me to gain credit among these people". During the later reservation era, districts were often settled by clusters of families from the same thiyóšpaye.


title: Sioux

text: The traditional social system extended beyond human interaction into the supernatural realms. It is believed that Wakȟáŋ Tháŋka ("Great Spirit/Great Mystery") created the universe and embodies everything in the universe as one. The preeminent symbol of Sioux religion is the Čhaŋgléska Wakȟaŋ ("sacred hoop"), which visually represents the concept that everything in the universe is intertwined. The creation stories of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ describe how the various spirits were formed from Wakȟáŋ Tháŋka. Black Elk describes the relationships with Wakȟáŋ Tháŋka as:


title: Sioux

text: It is believed prayer is the act of invoking relationships with one's ancestors or spiritual world; the Lakota word for prayer, wočhékiye, means "to call on for aid," "to pray," and "to claim relationship with". Their primary cultural prophet is Ptesáŋwiŋ, White Buffalo Calf Woman, who came as an intermediary between Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka and humankind to teach them how to be good relatives by introducing the Seven Sacred Rites and the čhaŋnúŋpa (sacred pipe). The seven ceremonies are Inípi (purification lodge), Haŋbléčheyapi (crying for vision), Wiwáŋyaŋg Wačhípi (Sun Dance), Huŋkalowaŋpi (making of relatives), Išnáthi Awíčhalowaŋpi (female puberty ceremony), Tȟápa Waŋkáyeyapi (throwing of the ball) and Wanáǧi Yuhápi (soul keeping). Each part of the čhaŋnúŋpa (stem, bowl, tobacco, breath, and smoke) is symbolic of the relationships of the natural world, the elements, humans and the spiritual beings that maintain the cycle of the universe.


title: Sioux

text: Dreams can also be a means of establishing relationships with spirits and are of utmost importance to the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ. One can gain supernatural powers through dreams; it is believed that dreaming of the Wakíŋyaŋ (thunder beings) would make someone involuntarily a Heyókȟa, a sacred clown. Black Elk, a famous Heyókȟa said: "Only those who have had visions of the thunder beings of the west can act as heyokas. They have sacred power and they share some of this with all the people, but they do it through funny actions".


title: Sioux

text: The thiyóšpaye of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ would assemble each summer to hold council, renew kinships, decide tribal matters, and participate in the Sun Dance. The seven divisions would select four leaders known as Wičháša Yatápika from among the leaders of each division. Being one of the four leaders was considered the highest honor for a leader; however, the annual gathering meant the majority of tribal administration was cared for by the usual leaders of each division. The last meeting of the Seven Council Fires was in 1850. The historical political organization was based on individual participation and the cooperation of many to sustain the tribe's way of life. Leaders were chosen based upon noble birth and demonstrations of chiefly virtues, such as bravery, fortitude, generosity, and wisdom.


title: Sioux

text: Within the Sioux tribes, there were defined gender roles. The men in the village were tasked as the hunters, traveling outside the village. The women within the village were in charge of making clothing and similar articles while also taking care of, and owning, the house. However, even with these roles, both men and women held power in decision-making tasks and sexual preferences were flexible and allowed. The term wíŋtke would refer to men who partook in traditional feminine duties while the term witkówiŋ ("crazy woman") was used for women who rejected their roles as either mother or wife to be a prostitute.


title: Sioux

text: It is a common belief amongst Siouan communities that the spirit of the deceased travels to an afterlife. In traditional beliefs, this spiritual journey was believed to start once funeral proceedings were complete and spanned over a course of four days. Mourning family and friends would take part in that four-day wake in order to accompany the spirit to its resting place. In the past, bodies were not embalmed and put up on a burial scaffold for one year before a ground burial. A platform to rest the body was put up on trees or, alternately, placed on four upright poles to elevate the body from the ground. The bodies would be securely wrapped in blankets and cloths, along with many of the deceased personal belongings and were always placed with their head pointed towards the south. Mourning individuals would speak to the body and offer food as if it were still alive. This practice, along with the Ghost Dance helped individuals mourn and connect the spirits of the deceased with those who were alive. The only time a body was buried in the ground right after their death was if the individual was murdered: the deceased would be placed in the ground with their heads towards the south, while faced down along with a piece of fat in their mouth.


title: Sioux

text: According to Pat Janis, director of the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s Burial Assistance Program, funeral practices of communities today are often a mix of traditions and contemporary Christian practices. While tree burials and scaffold burials are not practiced anymore, it is also now rare to see families observe a four-day wake period. Instead, the families opt for one- or two-day wake periods which include a funeral feast for all the community. Added to the contemporary funeral practices, it is common to see prayers conducted by a medicine man along with traditional songs often sung with a drum. One member of the family is also required to be present next to the body at all times until the burial. Gifts are placed within the casket to aid with the journey into the afterworld, which is still believed to take up to four days after death.


title: Sioux

text: The ancestral Sioux most likely lived in the Central Mississippi Valley region and later in Minnesota, for at least two or three thousand years. The ancestors of the Sioux arrived in the northwoods of central Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin from the Central Mississippi River shortly before 800 AD. Archaeologists refer to them as the Woodland Blackduck-Kathio-Clam River Continuum. Around 1300 AD, they adopted the characteristics of a northern tribal society and became known as the Seven Council Fires.


title: Sioux

text: The Dakota are first recorded to have resided at the source of the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes during the seventeenth century. They were dispersed west in 1659 due to warfare with the Iroquois. During the 1600s, the Lakota began their expansion westward into the Plains, taking with them the bulk of people of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ. By 1700 the Dakota were living in Wisconsin and Minnesota. As the Sioux nation began expanding with access to horses, the Dakota were put in a weakened position to defend the eastern border: new diseases (smallpox and malaria) and increased intertribal warfare between the migration of tribes fleeing the Iroquois into their territory of present-day Wisconsin, put a strain on their ability to maintain their territory. In the Mississippi valley, their population is believed to have declined by one-third between 1680 and 1805 due to those reasons.


title: Sioux

text: Late in the 17th century, the Dakota entered into an alliance with French merchants. The French were trying to gain advantage in the struggle for the North American fur trade against the English, who had recently established the Hudson's Bay Company. The Ojibwe, Potawatomi and Ottawa bands were among the first to trade with the French as they migrated into the Great Lakes region. Upon their arrival, Dakota were in an economic alliance with them until the Dakota were able to trade directly for European goods with the French. The first recorded encounter between the Sioux and the French occurred when Radisson and Groseilliers reached what is now Wisconsin during the winter of 1659–60. Later visiting French traders and missionaries included Claude-Jean Allouez, Daniel Greysolon Duluth, and Pierre-Charles Le Sueur who wintered with Dakota bands in early 1700.


title: Sioux

text: The Dakota began to resent the Ojibwe trading with the hereditary enemies of the Sioux, the Cree and Assiniboine. Tensions rose in the 1720s into a prolonged war in 1736. The Dakota lost their traditional lands around Leech Lake and Mille Lacs as they were forced south along the Mississippi River and St. Croix River Valley as a result of the battles. These intertribal conflicts also made it dangerous for European fur traders: whichever side they traded with, they were viewed as enemies from the other. For example, in 1736 a group of Sioux killed Jean Baptiste de La Vérendrye and twenty other men on an island in Lake of the Woods for such reasons. However, trade with the French continued until the French gave up North America in 1763. Europeans repeatedly tried to make truce between the warring tribes in order to protect their interests.


title: Sioux

text: One of the larger battles between the Dakota and Ojibwe took place in 1770 fought at the Dalles of the St. Croix. According to William Whipple Warren, a Métis historian, the fighting began when the Meskwaki (Fox) engaged the Ojibwe (their hereditary enemies) around St. Croix Falls. The Sioux were the former enemies of the Meskwaki and were enlisted to make a joint attack against the Ojibwe. The Meskwaki were first to engage with the large Ojibwe war party led by Waubojeeg: the Meskwaki allegedly boasted to the Dakota to hold back as they would make short work of their enemies. When the Dakota joined the battle, they had the upper hand until Sandy Lake Ojibwe reinforcements arrived. The Dakota were driven back and Warren states: "Many were driven over the rocks into the boiling floods below, there to find a watery grave. Others, in attempting to jump into their narrow wooden canoes, were capsized into the rapids". While Dakota and Ojibwe suffered heavy losses, the Meskwaki were left with the most dead and forced to join their relatives, the Sauk people. The victory for the Ojibwe secured control of the Upper St. Croix and created an informal boundary between the Dakota and Ojibwe around the mouth of the Snake River.


title: Sioux

text: As the Lakota entered the prairies, they adopted many of the customs of the neighboring Plains tribes, creating new cultural patterns based on the horse and fur trade. Meanwhile, the Dakota retained many of their Woodlands features. By 1803, the three divisions of the Sioux (Western/Eastern Dakota and Lakota) were established in their different environments and had developed their own distinctive lifeways. However, due to the prevalent cultural concept of thiyóšpaye (community), the three divisions maintained strong ties throughout the changing times to present day.


title: Sioux

text: In 1805, the Dakota signed their first treaty with the American government. Zebulon Pike negotiated for 100,000 acres of land at the confluence of the St. Croix River about what now is Hastings, Minnesota and the confluence of the Minnesota River and Mississippi River about what now is St Paul, Minnesota. The Americans wanted to establish military outposts and the Dakota wanted a new source of trading. An American military post was not established at the confluence of the St. Croix with the Mississippi, but Fort Snelling was established in 1819 along the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. In return, Dakota were promised the ability to "pass and repass, hunt, or make other uses of the said districts as they have formerly done".


title: Sioux

text: In an attempt to stop intertribal warfare and to better able to negotiate with tribes, the American government signed the 1825 Treaty of Prairie du Chien with the Dakota, Ojibwe, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox, Iowa, Potawatomi, and Ottawa tribes. In the 1830 Treaty of Prairie de Chien, the Western Dakota (Yankton, Yanktonai) ceded their lands along the Des Moines river to the American government. Living in what is now southeastern South Dakota, the leaders of the Western Dakota signed the Treaty of April 19, 1858, which created the Yankton Sioux Reservation. Pressured by the ongoing arrival of Europeans, Yankton chief Struck by the Ree told his people, "The white men are coming in like maggots. It is useless to resist them. They are many more than we are. We could not hope to stop them. Many of our brave warriors would be killed, our women and children left in sorrow, and still we would not stop them. We must accept it, get the best terms we can get and try to adopt their ways." Despite ceding their lands, the treaty allowed the Western Dakota to maintain their traditional role in the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ as the caretakers of the Pipestone Quarry, which is the cultural center of the Sioux people.


title: Sioux

text: With the creation of Minnesota Territory by the United States in 1849, the Eastern Dakota (Sisseton, Wahpeton, Mdewakanton, and Wahpekute) people were pressured to cede more of their land. The reservation period for them began in 1851 with the signing of the Treaty of Mendota and the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux. The Treaty of Mendota was signed near Pilot Knob on the south bank of the Minnesota River and within sight of Fort Snelling. The treaty stipulated that the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands were to receive US$1,410,000 in return for relocating to the Lower Sioux Agency on the Minnesota River near present-day Morton, Minnesota along with giving up their rights to a significant portion of southern Minnesota. In the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands of the Dakota ceded 21 million acres for $1,665,000, or about 7.5 cents an acre. However, the American government kept more than 80% of the funds with only the interest (5% for 50 years) being paid to the Dakota.


title: Sioux

text: The US set aside two reservations for the Sioux along the Minnesota River, each about wide and long. Later the government declared these were intended to be temporary, in an effort to force the Sioux out of Minnesota. The Upper Sioux Agency for the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands was established near Granite Falls, Minnesota, while the Lower Sioux Agency for the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands was established about thirty miles downstream near what developed as Redwood Falls, Minnesota. The Upper Sioux were not satisfied with their reservation because of low food supplies, but as it included several of their old villages, they agreed to stay. The Lower Sioux were displaced from their traditional woodlands and were dissatisfied with their new territory of mostly prairie.


title: Sioux

text: The US intended the treaties to encourage the Sioux to convert from their nomadic hunting lifestyle into more European-American settled farming, offering them compensation in the transition. By 1858, the Dakota only had a small strip of land along the Minnesota River, with no access to their traditional hunting grounds. They had to rely on treaty payments for their survival, which were often late. The forced change in lifestyle and the much lower than expected payments from the federal government caused economic suffering and increased social tensions within the tribes. By 1862, many Dakota were starving and tensions erupted in the Dakota War of 1862.


title: Sioux

text: By 1862, shortly after a failed crop the year before and a winter starvation, the federal payment was late. The local traders would not issue any more credit to the Dakota. One trader, Andrew Myrick, went so far as to say, "If they're hungry, let them eat grass."


title: Sioux

text: On August 16, 1862, the treaty payments to the eastern Dakota arrived in St. Paul, Minnesota, and were brought to Fort Ridgely the next day. However, they arrived too late to prevent the war. On August 17, 1862, the Dakota War began when a few Santee men murdered a white farmer and most of his family. They inspired further attacks on white settlements along the Minnesota River. On August 18, 1862, Little Crow of the Mdewakanton band led a group that attacked the Lower Sioux Agency (or Redwood Agency) and trading post located there. Later, settlers found Myrick among the dead with his mouth stuffed full of grass. Many of the upper Dakota (Sisseton and Wahpeton) wanted no part in the attacks with the majority of the 4,000 members of the Sisseton and Wahpeton opposed to the war. Thus their bands did not participate in the early killings. Historian Mary Wingerd has stated that it is "a complete myth that all the Dakota people went to war against the United States" and that it was rather "a faction that went on the offensive".


title: Sioux

text: Most of Little Crow's men surrendered shortly after the Battle of Wood Lake at Camp Release on September 26, 1862. Little Crow was forced to retreat sometime in September 1862. He stayed briefly in Canada but soon returned to the western Minnesota. He was killed on July 3, 1863, near Hutchinson, Minnesota while gathering raspberries with his teenage son. The pair had wandered onto the land of a settler Nathan Lamson, who shot at them to collect bounties. Once it was discovered that the body was of Little Crow, his skull and scalp were put on display by the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, Minnesota. The State held the trophies until 1971 when it returned the remains to Little Crow's grandson. For killing Little Crow the state increased the bounty to $500 when it paid Lamson.


title: Sioux

text: On November 5, 1862 a military tribunal found 303 mostly Mdewakanton tribesmen guilty of rape, murder and atrocities of hundreds of Minnesota settlers. They were sentenced to be hanged. The men had no attorneys or defense witnesses, and many were convicted in less than five minutes. President Abraham Lincoln commuted the death sentences of 284 of the warriors, while signing off on the hanging of 38 Santee men on December 26, 1862 in Mankato, Minnesota. It was the largest mass-execution in U.S. history, on US soil. The men remanded by order of President Lincoln were sent to a prison in Iowa, where more than half died.


title: Sioux

text: Afterwards, the US Congress annulled all treaty agreements with the eastern Dakota and expelled the eastern Dakota with the Forfeiture Act of February 16, 1863, meaning all lands held by the eastern Dakota, and all annuities due to them, were forfeited to the US government. During and after the hostilities, the majority of eastern Dakota fled Minnesota for the Dakota territory or Canada. Some settled in the James River Valley in a short-lived reservation before being forced to move to Crow Creek Reservation on the east bank of the Missouri river. There were as few as 50 eastern Dakota left in Minnesota by 1867. Many had fled to the Santee Sioux Reservation in Nebraska (created 1863), the Flandreau Reservation (created 1869 from members who left the Santee Reservation), the Lake Traverse and Spirit Lake Reservations (both created 1867). Those who fled to Canada throughout the 1870s now have descendants residing on nine small Dakota Reserves, five of which are located in Manitoba (Sioux Valley, Dakota Plain, Dakota Tipi, Birdtail Creek, and Canupawakpa Dakota) and the remaining four (Standing Buffalo, White Cap, Round Plain [Wahpeton], and Wood Mountain) in Saskatchewan. A few Dakota joined the Yanktonai and moved further west to join with the Lakota bands to continue their struggle against the United States military, later settling on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana.


title: Sioux

text: Prior to the 1650s, the Thítȟuŋwaŋ division of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ known as the Lakota was noted as being located east of the Red River, and living on the fringes of the prairies and woods of the prairies of southern Minnesota and the eastern Dakotas by at least 1680. According to Baptiste Good's winter count, the Lakota had horses by 1700. While the Dakota continued a subsistence cycle of corn, wild rice and hunting woodland animals, the Lakota increasing became reliant on bison for meat and its by-products (housing, clothing, tools) as they expanded their territory westward with the arrival of the horse. After their adoption of horse culture, Lakota society centered on the buffalo hunt on horseback.


title: Sioux

text: By the 19th century, the typical year of the Lakota was a communal buffalo hunt as early in spring as their horses had recovered from the rigors of the winter. In June and July, the scattered bands of the tribes gathered together into large encampments, which included ceremonies such as the Sun Dance. These gatherings afforded leaders to meet to make political decisions, plan movements, arbitrate disputes, and organize and launch raiding expeditions or war parties. In the fall, people would split up into smaller bands to facilitate hunting to procure meat for the long winter. Between the fall hunt and the onset of winter was a time when Lakota warriors could undertake raiding and warfare. With the coming of winter snows, the Lakota settled into winter camps, where activities of the season, ceremonies and dances as well as trying to ensure adequate winter feed for their horses.


title: Sioux

text: They began to dominate the prairies east of the Missouri river by the 1720s. At the same time, the Lakota branch split into two major sects, the Saône who moved to the Lake Traverse area on the South Dakota–North Dakota–Minnesota border, and the Oglála-Sičháŋǧu who occupied the James River valley. However, by about 1750 the Saône had moved to the east bank of the Missouri River, followed 10 years later by the Oglála and Brulé (Sičháŋǧu). By 1750, they had crossed the Missouri River and encountered Lewis and Clark in 1804. Initial United States contact with the Lakota during the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–1806 was marked by a standoff. Lakota bands refused to allow the explorers to continue upstream, and the expedition prepared for battle, which never came. In 1776, the Lakota defeated the Cheyenne for the Black Hills, who had earlier taken the region from the Kiowa. The Cheyenne then moved west to the Powder River country, and the Lakota made the Black Hills their home.


title: Sioux

text: As their territory expanded, so did the number of rival groups they encountered. They secured an alliance with the Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho by the 1820s as intertribal warfare on the plains increased amongst the tribes for access to the dwindling population of buffalo. The alliance fought the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara for control of the Missouri River in North Dakota. By the 1840s, their territory expanded to the Powder River country in Montana, in which they fought with the Crow. Their victories over these tribes during this time period were aided by the fact those tribes were decimated by European diseases. Most of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara were killed by smallpox and almost half the population of the Crow were killed due to smallpox, cholera and other diseases. In 1843, the southern Lakotas attacked Pawnee Chief Blue Coat's village near the Loup in Nebraska, killing many and burning half of the earth lodges, and 30 years later, the Lakota again inflicted a blow so severe on the Pawnee during the Massacre Canyon battle near Republican River. By the 1850s, the Lakota would be known as the most powerful tribe on the Plains.


title: Sioux

text: The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 was signed on September 17, 1851, between United States treaty commissioners and representatives of the Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Crow, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations. The treaty was an agreement between nine more or less independent parties. The treaty set forth traditional territorial claims of the tribes as among themselves. The United States acknowledged that all the land covered by the treaty was Indian territory and did not claim any part of it. The boundaries agreed to in the Fort Laramie treaty of 1851 would be used to settle a number of claims cases in the 20th century. The tribes guaranteed safe passage for settlers on the Oregon Trail and allowed roads and forts to be built in their territories in return for promises of an annuity in the amount of fifty thousand dollars for fifty years. The treaty should also "make an effective and lasting peace" among the eight tribes, each of them often at odds with a number of the others.


title: Sioux

text: The treaty was broken almost immediately after its inception by the Lakota and Cheyenne attacking the Crow over the next two years. In 1858, the failure of the United States to prevent the mass immigration of miners and settlers into Colorado during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, also did not help matters. They took over Indian lands in order to mine them, "against the protests of the Indians," and founded towns, started farms, and improved roads. Such immigrants competed with the tribes for game and water, straining limited resources and resulting in conflicts with the emigrants. The U.S. government did not enforce the treaty to keep out the immigrants.


title: Sioux

text: The situation escalated with the Grattan affair in 1854 when a detachment of U.S. soldiers illegally entered a Sioux encampment to arrest those accused of stealing a cow, and in the process sparked a battle in which Chief Conquering Bear was killed.


title: Sioux

text: Though intertribal fighting had existed before the arrival of white settlers, some of the post-treaty intertribal fighting can be attributed to mass killings of bison by white settlers and government agents. The U.S. Army did not enforce treaty regulations and allowed hunters onto Native land to slaughter buffalo, providing protection and sometimes ammunition. One hundred thousand buffalo were killed each year until they were on the verge of extinction, which threatened the tribes' subsistence. These mass killings affected all tribes thus the tribes were forced onto each other's hunting grounds, where fighting broke out.


title: Sioux

text: On July 20, 1867, an act of Congress created the Indian Peace Commission "to establish peace with certain hostile Indian tribes". The Indian Peace Commission was generally seen as a failure, and violence had reignited even before it was disbanded in October 1868. Two official reports were submitted to the federal government, ultimately recommending that the U.S. cease recognizing tribes as sovereign nations, refrain from making treaties with them, employ military force against those who refused to relocate to reservations, and move the Bureau of Indian Affairs from the Department of the Interior to the Department of War. The system of treaties eventually deteriorated to the point of collapse, and a decade of war followed the commission's work. It was the last major commission of its kind.


title: Sioux

text: From 1866–1868, the Lakota fought the United States Army in the Wyoming Territory and the Montana Territory in what is known as Red Cloud's War (also referred to as the Bozeman War). The war is named after Red Cloud, a prominent Lakota chief who led the war against the United States following encroachment into the area by the U.S. military. The Sioux victory in the war led to their temporarily preserving their control of the Powder River country. The war ended with the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868.


title: Sioux

text: The Treaty of Fort Laramie (also the Sioux Treaty of 1868) was an agreement between the United States and the Oglala, Miniconjou, and Brulé bands of Lakota people, Yanktonai Dakota and Arapaho Nation, following the failure of the first Fort Laramie treaty, signed in 1851. It established the Great Sioux Reservation including ownership of the Black Hills, and set aside additional lands as "unceded Indian territory" in areas of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and possibly Montana. It established that the US government would hold the authority to punish not only white settlers who committed crimes against the tribes but also tribe members who committed crimes and who were to be delivered to the government rather than face charges in tribal courts. It stipulated that the government would abandon forts along the Bozeman Trail, and included a number of provisions designed to encourage a transition to farming, and move the tribes "closer to the white man's way of life." The treaty protected specified rights of third parties not partaking in the negotiations, and effectively ended Red Cloud's War.


title: Sioux

text: The treaty overall, and in comparison with the 1851 agreement, represented a departure from earlier considerations of tribal customs, and demonstrated instead the government's "more heavy-handed position with regard to tribal nations, and ... desire to assimilate the Sioux into American property arrangements and social customs." According to one source, "animosities over the treaty arose almost immediately" when a group of Miniconjou were informed they were no longer welcome to trade at Fort Laramie, being south of their newly established territory. This was notwithstanding that the treaty did not make any stipulation that the tribes could not travel outside their land, only that they would not permanently occupy outside land. The only travel expressly forbidden by the treaty was that of white settlers onto the reservation.


title: Sioux

text: The government eventually broke the terms of the treaty following the Black Hills Gold Rush and an expedition into the area by George Armstrong Custer in 1874 and failed to prevent white settlers from moving onto tribal lands. Rising tensions eventually lead again to open conflict in the Great Sioux War of 1876. The 1868 treaty would be modified three times by the US Congress between 1876 and 1889, each time taking more land originally granted, including unilaterally seizing the Black Hills in 1877. The treaty formed the basis of the 1980 Supreme Court case, "United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians", in which the court ruled that tribal lands covered under the treaty had been taken illegally by the US government, and the tribe was owed compensation plus interest. As of 2018, this amounted to more than $1 billion. The Sioux have refused the payment, demanding instead the return of their land.


title: Sioux

text: The ongoing raids and battles on the northern Plains that lasted from 1850-1890 are collectively known as the Sioux Wars. Included are the Dakota War of 1862 (1862-1864), Red Cloud's War (1866-1868) and the Black Hills War which includes the Battle of the Little Bighorn(1876-1877); the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 is considered the end of the Sioux wars and the beginning of a new era for Dakota and Lakota people.


title: Sioux

text: The Great Sioux War of 1876, also known as the Black Hills War, was a series of battles and negotiations that occurred in 1876 and 1877 between the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and the United States. The cause of the war was the desire of the U.S. government to obtain ownership of the Black Hills. Gold had been discovered in the Black Hills and settlers began to encroach onto tribal lands, and the Sioux and Cheyenne refused to cede ownership to the United States. The earliest engagement was the Battle of Powder River, and the final battle was the Wolf Mountain. Included are the Battle of the Rosebud, Battle of Warbonnet Creek, Battle of Slim Buttes, Battle of Cedar Creek, and the Dull Knife Fight.


title: Sioux

text: Among the many battles and skirmishes of the war was the Battle of the Little Bighorn, often known as Custer's Last Stand, the most storied of the many encounters between the U.S. army and mounted Plains tribes. The Battle of the Little Bighorn, known to the Lakota as the Battle of the Greasy Grass and also commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was an armed engagement between combined forces of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. The battle, which resulted in the defeat of US forces, was the most significant action of the Great Sioux War of 1876. It took place on June 25–26, 1876, along the Little Bighorn River in the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana Territory.


title: Sioux

text: The fight was an overwhelming victory for the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho, who were led by several major war leaders, including Crazy Horse and Chief Gall, and had been inspired by the visions of Sitting Bull. The US 7th Cavalry, a force of 700 men, suffered a major defeat while under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. Five of the 7th Cavalry's twelve companies were annihilated and Custer was killed. The total US casualty count included 268 dead and 55 severely wounded (six died later from their wounds), including four Crow scouts and at least two Arikara scouts. The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument honors those who fought on both sides. That victory notwithstanding, the U.S. leveraged national resources to force the tribes to surrender, primarily by attacking and destroying their encampments and property. The Great Sioux War took place under the presidencies of Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes. The Agreement of 1877 (, enacted February 28, 1877) officially annexed Sioux land and permanently established Indian reservations.


title: Sioux

text: The Wounded Knee Massacre was the last major armed conflict between the Lakota and the United States. It was described as a massacre by General Nelson A. Miles in a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. On December 29, 1890, five hundred troops of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, supported by four Hotchkiss guns (a lightweight artillery piece capable of rapid fire), surrounded an encampment of the Lakota bands of the Miniconjou and Hunkpapa with orders to escort them to the railroad for transport to Omaha, Nebraska. By the time it was over, 25 troopers and more than 150 Lakota Sioux lay dead, including men, women, and children. It remains unknown which side was responsible for the first shot; some of the soldiers are believed to have been the victims of "friendly fire" because the shooting took place at point-blank range in chaotic conditions. Around 150 Lakota are believed to have fled the chaos, many of whom may have died from hypothermia.


title: Sioux

text: Following a three-day blizzard, the military hired civilians to bury the dead Lakota. The burial party found the deceased frozen; they were gathered up and placed in a mass grave on a hill overlooking the encampment from which some of the fire from the Hotchkiss guns originated. It was reported that four infants were found alive, wrapped in their deceased mothers' shawls. In all, 84 men, 44 women, and 18 children reportedly died on the field, while at least seven Lakota were mortally wounded.


title: Sioux

text: For this 1890 offensive, the American army awarded twenty Medals of Honor, its highest commendation. Contemporary Native American activists have urged the medals to be withdrawn, calling them "medals of dishonor". According to Lakota William Thunder Hawk, "The Medal of Honor is meant to reward soldiers who act heroically. But at Wounded Knee, they didn't show heroism; they showed cruelty". In 2001, the National Congress of American Indians passed two resolutions condemning the Medals of Honor awards and called on the U.S. government to rescind them.


title: Sioux

text: By the 1880s, the Dakota and Lakota tribes were fragmented onto reservations which would eventually diminish in size, losing hundreds of thousands of acres by the 1920s. In 1887, the United States Congress passed the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act), which began the assimilation of Dakota and Lakota people by forcing them to give up their traditional way of life. The Dawes Act ended traditional systems of land tenure, forcing tribes to adapt government-imposed systems of private property and to "assume a capitalist and proprietary relationship with property" that did not previously exist. In 1889, North Dakota and South Dakota were holding statehood conventions and demanded reduction of the Great Sioux Reservation, which was established by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Just months before those states were admitted to the Union in November 1889, Congress had passed an act which partitioned the Great Sioux Reservation into five smaller reservations. Tribal leaders such as John Grass, Gall, and Sitting Bull opposed the bill, which created the following five reservations:


title: Sioux

text: After the boundaries of these five reservations was established, the government opened up approximately 9 million acres (36,000 km²), one-half of the former Great Sioux Reservation, for public purchase for ranching and homesteading. Much of the area was not homesteaded until the 1910s, after the Enlarged Homestead Act increased allocations to for "semi-arid land".


title: Sioux

text: Besides the loss of land, the Dawes Act would also "outlawed Native American culture and established a code of Indian offenses regulating individual behavior according to Euro-American norms of conduct." Any violations of this code were to be "tried in a Court of Indian Offenses on each reservation." Included with the Dawes Act were "funds to instruct Native Americans in Euro-American patterns of thought and behavior through Indian Service schools" which forced many of the tribes into sending their children to boarding schools.


title: Sioux

text: Boarding schools were intended to "kill the Indian to save the man", which meant the destruction of Dakota and Lakota societies: children were taken away from their families, their traditional culture and kinship roles. They were dressed in Eurocentric clothing, given English names, had their hair cut and were forbidden to speak their languages. Their religions and ceremonies were also outlawed and forbidden. The goal was to teach academic studies in English, vocational skills suited to Euro-American society such as farming in order to replace traditional lifeways. These schools were overcrowded and had poor sanitary conditions, which led to infectious diseases and students running away or dying while at the schools. The schools achieved mixed outcomes of traumatic experiences for many while others such as Charles Eastman, Ella Cara Deloria, Luther Standing Bear and Zitkala-Sa were able to use the education to their advantage to help their people.


title: Sioux

text: The Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) sought to overturn many of the policies of the Dawes Act by reversing the traditional goal of cultural assimilation of the tribes into American society. The IRA "ended land allotment, prohibited non-consensual land seizure, recognized tribal governments, encouraged the writing of tribal constitutions, and empowered Native people to manage their own resources". Between 1934 and 1945, the tribes would vote on their government constitutions. The Yankton Sioux Tribe is the only tribe in South Dakota that did not comply with the IRA and chose to keep its traditional government, whose constitution was ratified in 1891. The Spirit Lake Tribe and Standing Rock Tribe would also vote against the IRA. Because their constitution are not written under the authority of the IRA, they had to established tribal corporations which are managed separately from the tribal government in order to apply for loans. In Minnesota, the IRA recognized the Dakota tribes as communities, allowing them to reestablish their reservations and to repurchase land lost during the Dakota War of 1862. The Lower Sioux and Prairie Island reservations formed constitutions in 1936, the Upper Sioux formed as a community in 1938 and wrote a constitution in 1995, and the Shakopee Mdewakanton officially formed an IRA government in 1969.


title: Sioux

text: Despite the IRA giving more land rights to the tribes, the federal government seized thousands of acres of land through the Flood Control Act of 1944 by creating the Oahe Dam. As a result of the dam's construction the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation lost bringing it down to today. Standing Rock Reservation lost leaving it with . Much of the land was taken by eminent domain claims made by the Bureau of Reclamation. Over and above the land loss, most of the reservations' prime agricultural land was included in the loss. Most of the land was unable to be harvested (to allow the trees to be cut down for wood) before the land was flooded over with water. One visitor to the reservations later asked why there were so few older Indians on the reservations and was told that "the old people had died of heartache" after the construction of the dam and the loss of the reservations' land. As of 2015, poverty remains a problem for the displaced populations in the Dakotas, who are still seeking compensation for the loss of the towns submerged under Lake Oahe, and the loss of their traditional ways of life.


title: Sioux

text: The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 encouraged many tribal members to leave their reservations for urban areas. Some tribes had a dramatic loss of population: the Yankton Sioux Tribe would fall to only 1,000 members living on the reservation in the 1950s; the Santee Sioux Reservation would lose 60 percent of its population (by 1962, only 2,999, mostly elderly people remained).


title: Sioux

text: Roosevelt's New Deal and Johnson's War on poverty would bring new schools, roads, health clinics and new housing to the reservations.


title: Sioux

text: Conflicting political values from "traditionalists" against the new form of government promoted through the Indian Reorganization Act would create long-lasting tensions on the reservations. The accusations of corruption by tribal leaders would lead to the Wounded Knee incident which began on February 27, 1973, when the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota was seized by followers of the American Indian Movement (AIM). The occupiers controlled the town for 71 days while various state and federal law enforcement agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Marshals Service laid siege.


title: Sioux

text: The members of AIM were protesting what they said was the local corrupt government, along with federal issues affecting Indian reservation communities, as well as the lack of justice from border counties. Native Americans from many other communities, primarily urban areas, mobilized to come and join the occupation. The FBI dispatched agents and US Marshals to cordon off the site. Later a higher-ranking DOJ representative took control of the government's response. Through the resulting siege that lasted for 71 days, twelve people were wounded, including an FBI agent left paralyzed. In April at least two people died of gunfire, after which the Oglala Lakota called an end to the occupation). Additionally, two other people, one of them an African American civil rights activist, Ray Robinson, went missing, and are believed to have been killed during the occupation, though their bodies have never been found. Afterward, 1200 American Indians were arrested. Wounded Knee drew international attention to the plight of American Indians and AIM leaders were tried in a Minnesota federal court. The court dismissed their case on the basis of governmental prosecutorial misconduct. However, Leonard Peltier was convicted of murdering two FBI agents in a June 26, 1975, shooting on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.


title: Sioux

text: After the Wounded Knee Incident, the Dakota and Lakota would continue to push for their tribal rights and self-determination.


title: Sioux

text: The Sioux never accepted the legitimacy of the forced deprivation of their Black Hills reservation. Throughout the 1920s–1950s, they would push their Black Hills land claim into federal court. After 60 years of litigation in the Court of Claims, the Indian Claims Commission, the U.S. Congress, the Supreme Court heard the case in 1980 and ruled that the federal government had illegally taken the Black Hills and awarded more than $100 million in reparations to the tribes. Stating that the land was never for sale, the tribes have refused to accept the money which is now over one billion dollars.


title: Sioux

text: After the Wounded Knee Incident in 1973, the International Indian Treaty Council was formed to support grassroots Indigenous struggles for human rights, self-determination and environmental justice through information dissemination, networking, coalition building, advocacy and technical assistance. This would influence the creation of the Republic of Lakotah in 2007. The Lakota Freedom Delegation, a group of controversial Native American activists, declared on December 19, 2007, the Lakota were withdrawing from all treaties signed with the United States to regain sovereignty over their nation. One of the activists, Russell Means, claimed that the action is legal and cites natural, international and US law. The group considers Lakota to be a sovereign nation, although as yet the state is generally unrecognized. The proposed borders reclaim thousands of square kilometres of North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska and Montana. Not all leaders of the Lakota Tribal Governments support or recognize the declaration.


title: Sioux

text: Throughout the decades, thousands of Native American children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools with a primary objective of assimilating Native American children and youth into Euro-American culture, while at the same time providing a basic education in Euro-American subject matters. Many children lost knowledge of their culture and languages, as well as faced physical and sexual abuse at these schools. In 1978, the government tried to put an end to these boarding schools (and placement into foster families) with the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which says except in the rarest circumstances, Native American children must be placed with their relatives or tribes. It also says states must do everything it can to keep native families together.


title: Sioux

text: In 2011, the Lakota made national news when NPR's investigative series called "Lost Children, Shattered Families" aired. It exposed what many critics consider to be the "kidnapping" of Lakota children from their homes by the state of South Dakota's Department of Social Services. The NPR investigation found South Dakota has the most cases which fail to abide by the ICWA. In South Dakota, Native American children make up less than 15 percent of the child population, yet they make up more than half of the children in foster care. The state receives thousands of dollars from the federal government for every child it takes from a family, and in some cases, the state gets even more money if the child is Native American.


title: Sioux

text: Lakota activists Madonna Thunder Hawk and Chase Iron Eyes worked with the Lakota People's Law Project as they sought to end what they claimed were unlawful seizures of Native American Lakota children in South Dakota and to stop the state practice of placing these children in non-Native homes. They are currently working to redirect federal funding away from the state of South Dakota's Department of Social Systems to a new tribal foster care programs. In 2015, in response to the investigative reports by NPR, the Lakota People's Law Project as well as the coalition of all nine Lakota/Dakota reservations in South Dakota, the Bureau of Indian Affairs updated the ICWA guidelines to give more strength to tribes to intervene on behalf of the children, stating, "The updated guidelines establish that an Indian child, parent or Indian custodian, or tribe may petition to invalidate an action if the Act or guidelines have been violated, regardless of which party’s rights were violated. This approach promotes compliance with ICWA and reflects that ICWA is intended to protect the rights of each of these parties." The new guidelines also not only prevent courts from taking children away based on socioeconomic status but give a strict definition of what is to be considered harmful living conditions. Previously, the state of South Dakota used "being poor" as harmful.


title: Sioux

text: In the summer of 2016, Sioux Indians and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe began a protest against construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, also known as the Bakken pipeline, which, if completed, is designed to carry hydrofracked crude oil from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota to the oil storage and transfer hub of Patoka, Illinois. The pipeline travels only half a mile north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation and is designed to pass underneath the Missouri River and upstream of the reservation, causing many concerns over the tribe's drinking water safety, environmental protection, and harmful impacts on culture. The pipeline company claims that the pipeline will provide jobs, reduce American dependence on foreign oil and reduce the price of gas.


title: Sioux

text: The conflict sparked a nationwide debate and much news media coverage. Thousands of indigenous and non-indigenous supporters joined the protest, and several camp sites were set up south of the construction zone. The protest was peaceful, and alcohol, drugs and firearms were not allowed at the campsite or the protest site. On August 23, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe released a list of 87 tribal governments who wrote resolutions, proclamations and letters of support stating their solidarity with Standing Rock and the Sioux people. Since then, many more Native American organizations, environmental groups and civil rights groups have joined the effort in North Dakota, including the Black Lives Matter movement, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her running mate Ajamu Baraka, and many more. "The Washington Post" called it a "National movement for Native Americans."


title: Sioux

text: In November 2022, 150 sacred artifacts are repatriated to the Lakota Sioux peoples. They were stored for more than a century at the Founders Museum in Barre, Massachusetts. However, these are just a small fraction of circa 870,000 Native American artifacts (including nearly 110,000 human remains) that are still at prestigious colleges, museums and the federal government.


title: Sioux

text: The earlier linguistic three-way division of the Sioux language identified "Lakota", "Dakota", and "Nakota" as varieties of a single language, where Lakota = Teton, Dakota = Santee-Sisseton and Nakota = Yankton-Yanktonai. However, the latest studies show that Yankton-Yanktonai never used the autonym "Nakhóta", but pronounced their name roughly the same as the Santee (i.e. "Dakȟóta").


title: Sioux

text: These later studies identify Assiniboine and Stoney as two separate languages, with Sioux being the third language. Sioux has three similar dialects: Lakota, Western Dakota (Yankton-Yanktonai) and Eastern Dakota (Santee-Sisseton). Assiniboine and Stoney speakers refer to themselves as "Nakhóta" or "Nakhóda" (cf. Nakota).


title: Sioux

text: The term "Dakota" has also been applied by anthropologists and governmental departments to refer to all Sioux groups, resulting in names such as "Teton Dakota", "Santee Dakota", etc. This was mainly because of the misrepresented translation of the Ottawa word from which "Sioux" is derived.


title: Sioux

text: The Sioux are divided into three ethnic groups, the larger of which are divided into sub-groups, and further branched into bands. The earliest known European record of the Sioux identified them in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. After the introduction of the horse in the early 18th century, the Sioux dominated larger areas of land—from present-day Central Canada to the Platte River, from Minnesota to the Yellowstone River, including the Powder River country.


title: Sioux

text: The Sioux maintain many separate tribal governments scattered across several reservations and communities in North America: in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Montana in the United States; and in Manitoba, and southern Saskatchewan and in Canada. Today, many Sioux also live outside their reservations.


title: Sioux

text: Migrations of Ojibwe from the east in the 17th and 18th centuries, with muskets supplied by the French and British, pushed the Dakota further into Minnesota and west and southward. The US gave the name "Dakota Territory" to the northern expanse west of the Mississippi River and up to its headwaters. Today, the Santee live on reservations, reserves, and communities in Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Canada. However, after the Dakota war of 1862 many Santee were sent to Crow Creek Indian Reservation and in 1864 some from the Crow Creek Reservation were sent to the Santee Sioux Reservation.


title: Sioux

text: The Iháŋkthuŋwaŋ-Iháŋkthuŋwaŋna, also known by the anglicized spelling Yankton (Iháŋkthuŋwaŋ: "End village") and Yanktonai (Iháŋkthuŋwaŋna: "Little end village") divisions consist of two bands or two of the seven council fires. According to "Nasunatanka" and "Matononpa" in 1880, the Yanktonai are divided into two sub-groups known as the Upper Yanktonai and the Lower Yanktonai (Hunkpatina). Today, most of the Yanktons live on the Yankton Indian Reservation in southeastern South Dakota. Some Yankton live on the Lower Brule Indian Reservation and Crow Creek Indian Reservation. The Yanktonai are divided into Lower Yanktonai, who occupy the Crow Creek Reservation; and Upper Yanktonai, who live in the northern part of Standing Rock Indian Reservation, on the Spirit Lake Tribe in central North Dakota, and in the eastern half of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeastern Montana. In addition, they reside at several Canadian reserves, including Birdtail, Oak Lake, and Moose Woods.


title: Sioux

text: They were involved in quarrying pipestone. The Yankton-Yanktonai moved into northern Minnesota. In the 18th century, they were recorded as living in the Mankato region of Minnesota.


title: Sioux

text: Prior to obtaining horses in the seventeenth century, the Lakȟóta were located near present-day Minnesota. Dominating the northern Great Plains with their light cavalry, the western Sioux quickly expanded their territory to the Rocky Mountains (which they call "Heska", "white mountains") by the 1800s.


title: Sioux

text: Their traditional diet includes bison hunt, and corn. They traditionally acquired corn mostly through trade with the eastern Sioux and their linguistic cousins, the Mandan and Hidatsa along the Missouri River prior to the reservation era. The name Teton or Thítȟuŋwaŋ is archaic among the people, who prefer to call themselves Lakȟóta. Today, the Lakota are the largest and westernmost of the three groups, occupying lands in both North and South Dakota.


title: Sioux

text: In the late 19th century, railroads wanted to build tracks through Indian lands. The railroad companies hired hunters to exterminate the bison herds, the Plains Indians' primary food supply. The Dakota and Lakota were forced to accept US-defined reservations in exchange for the rest of their lands and farming and ranching of domestic cattle, as opposed to a nomadic, hunting economy. During the first years of the Reservation Era, the Sioux people depended upon annual federal payments guaranteed by treaty for survival.


title: Sioux

text: In Minnesota, the treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota in 1851 left the Dakota with a reservation wide on each side of the Minnesota River.


title: Sioux

text: Today, half of all enrolled Sioux in the United States live off reservation. Enrolled members in any of the Sioux tribes in the United States are required to have ancestry that is at least 1/4 degree Sioux (the equivalent to one grandparent).


title: Sioux

text: In Canada, the Canadian government recognizes the tribal community as First Nations. The land holdings of these First Nations are called Indian reserves.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The Boston Bruins are a professional ice hockey team based in Boston. The Bruins compete in the National Hockey League (NHL) as a member of the Atlantic Division in the Eastern Conference. The team has been in existence since 1924, making them the third-oldest active team in the NHL, and the oldest to be based in the United States.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The Bruins are one of the Original Six NHL teams, along with the Detroit Red Wings, Chicago Blackhawks, Montreal Canadiens, New York Rangers, and Toronto Maple Leafs. They have won six Stanley Cup championships, tied for fourth-most of any team with the Blackhawks (trailing the Canadiens, Maple Leafs, and Red Wings, with 24, 13, and 11, respectively), and tied for second-most for an NHL team based in the United States.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The first facility to host the Bruins was the Boston Arena (now known as Matthews Arena), the world's oldest (built 1909–10) indoor ice hockey facility still in use for the sport at any level of competition. Following the Bruins' departure from the Boston Arena, the team played its home games at the Boston Garden for 67 seasons, beginning in 1928 and concluding in 1995, when they moved to the TD Garden.


title: Boston Bruins

text: In 1924, as a result of the convincing of Boston grocery magnate Charles Adams, the National Hockey League decided to expand to the United States. Adams had come to greatly enjoy ice hockey while watching the 1924 Stanley Cup Finals between the NHL champion Montreal Canadiens and the WCHL champion Calgary Tigers. The previous year in 1923, Thomas Duggan received options on three NHL franchises for the United States, and he sold one to Charles Adams, who in turn, persuaded the NHL to grant him a franchise for the city of Boston, which occurred on November 1, 1924. With the Montreal Maroons, the team was one of the NHL's first expansion teams, and the first NHL team to be based in the United States. Adams' first act was to hire Art Ross, a former star player and innovator, as general manager. Ross was the face of the franchise for the next thirty years, including four separate stints as coach.


title: Boston Bruins

text: Adams directed Ross to come up with a nickname that would portray an untamed animal displaying speed, agility and cunning. Ross came up with "Bruins", a name for brown bears used in classic folk tales (from the Dutch "Bruin", the name of the bear in Reynard the Fox, literal meaning "brown"). The team's bearlike nickname also went along with the team's original uniform colors of brown and yellow, which came from Adams' grocery chain, First National Stores.


title: Boston Bruins

text: On December 1, 1924, the Bruins played their first NHL game against their expansion cousins the Maroons, at Boston Arena, with Canadian skater Smokey Harris scoring the first-ever Bruins goal, spurring the Bruins to a 2–1 win. This would be one of the few high points of the season, as the Bruins proved to be no match for the established NHL teams. At the time, the NHL did not conduct an expansion draft for new teams, there were few American-born hockey players and many Canadian players were initially skeptical of hockey's long-term prospects in the Eastern United States. Boston was therefore left with a team full of NHL castaways unable to land a spot on the roster of the more established Canadian teams. The Bruins only managed a 6–24–0 record (to this day, their worst points percentage – .200 – in franchise history) and finished in last place in its first season – within this timeframe, only one week later on December 8, 1924, what would become one of the NHL's all-time fiercest rivalries was initiated, as the Montreal Canadiens were the visiting team at the Boston Arena that night, defeating the hometown Bruins by a 4–3 score. The Bruins played three more seasons at the Arena, after which they became the main tenant of the famous Boston Garden, while the old Boston Arena facility – the world's oldest existing indoor ice hockey venue still used for the sport at any level of competition, and the only surviving rink where an Original Six NHL team began their career in the league – was eventually taken over by Northeastern University, and renamed Matthews Arena when the university renovated it in 1979.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The Bruins managed to improve in their second season to a winning record, largely due to the presence of two more expansion teams. Unfortunately for Boston, the NHL did not expand the playoffs for the 1925–26 season and the Bruins missed out on the third and final playoff berth by one point to the expansion Pittsburgh Pirates. In their third season, 1926–27, the organization made some wise personnel moves. Ross took advantage of the collapse of the Western Hockey League to purchase several western stars, including the team's first great star, a defenseman from Fort Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan named Eddie Shore. The Bruins' moves were largely counterbalanced by WHL player acquisitions on other NHL teams, and the team's record was actually slightly worse than the previous season (the Bruins finished only one game above .500), but Boston nevertheless qualified for the then-expanded playoffs by a comfortable margin.


title: Boston Bruins

text: In their first-ever playoff run, the Bruins reached the Stanley Cup Final where they lost to the Ottawa Senators in the first Stanley Cup Finals to be between exclusively NHL teams. In 1929 the Bruins defeated the New York Rangers to win their first Stanley Cup. Standout players on the first championship team included Shore, Harry Oliver, Dit Clapper, Dutch Gainor and goaltender Tiny Thompson. The 1928–29 season was the first played at Boston Garden, which Adams had built after guaranteeing his backers $500,000 in gate receipts over the next five years. The season after that, 1929–30, the Bruins posted the best-ever regular-season winning percentage in the NHL (an astonishing .875, winning 38 out of 44 games, a record which still stands) and shattered numerous team scoring records, but lost to the Montreal Canadiens in the Stanley Cup Finals.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The 1930s Bruins teams included Shore, Thompson, Clapper, Babe Siebert and Cooney Weiland. The team led the league's standings five times in the decade. In 1939, the team captured its second Stanley Cup. That year, Thompson was traded for rookie goaltender Frank Brimsek. Brimsek had an award-winning season, capturing the Vezina and Calder Trophies, becoming the first rookie named to the NHL first All-Star team, and earning the nickname "Mr. Zero." The team skating in front of Brimsek included Bill Cowley, Shore, Clapper and "Sudden Death" Mel Hill (who scored three overtime goals in one playoff series), together with the "Kraut Line" of center Milt Schmidt, right winger Bobby Bauer and left winger Woody Dumart.


title: Boston Bruins

text: In 1940 Shore was traded to the struggling New York Americans for his final NHL season. In 1941 the Bruins won their third Stanley Cup after losing only eight games and finishing first in the regular season. It was their last Stanley Cup for 29 years. World War II affected the Bruins more than most teams; Brimsek and the "Krauts" all enlisted after the 1940–41 Cup win, and lost the most productive years of their careers at war. Cowley, assisted by veteran player Clapper and Busher Jackson, was the team's remaining star.


title: Boston Bruins

text: Even though the NHL had by 1942 been reduced to the six teams that would in the modern era be called the "Original Six", talent had been depleted enough that freak seasons could take place, as in 1944, when Bruin Herb Cain would set the then-NHL record for points in a season with 82. But the Bruins did not make the playoffs that season and Cain was out of the NHL two seasons later.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The stars returned for the 1945–46 season, and Clapper led the team back to the Stanley Cup Finals as player-coach. He retired as a player after the next season, becoming the first player to play twenty NHL seasons, but stayed on as coach for two more years. Brimsek proved to be not as good as he was before the war, and after 1946 the Bruins lost in the first playoff round three straight years, resulting in Clapper's resignation. Brimsek was traded to the last-place Chicago Black Hawks in 1949, followed by the unexpected lifetime ban of promising young star Don Gallinger on suspicion of gambling. The only remaining quality young player who stayed with the team for any length was forward Johnny Peirson, recognizable to fans of a later era as the Bruins' television color commentator in the 1970s.


title: Boston Bruins

text: During the 1948–49 season, the original form of the "spoked-B" logo, with a small number "24" to the left of the capital B signifying the calendar year in the 20th century in which the Bruins team first played, and a similarly small "49" to the right of the "B", for the then-current season's calendar year in the 20th century, appeared on their home uniforms—a nod to the Boston area's nickname of "The Hub". The following season, the logo was modified into the basic "spoked-B" form that was to be used, virtually unchanged (except for certain proportions within the logo), through the 1993–94 season.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The 1950s began with Charles Adams' son Weston (who had been team president since 1936) facing financial trouble. He was forced to accept a buyout offer from Walter A. Brown, the owner of the National Basketball Association's Boston Celtics and the Garden, in 1951. Although there were some instances of success (such as making the Stanley Cup Finals in 1953, 1957, and 1958, only to lose to the Montreal Canadiens each time), the Bruins mustered only four winning seasons between 1947 and 1967. They missed the playoffs eight straight years between 1960 and 1967.


title: Boston Bruins

text: In 1954, on New Year's Day, Robert Skrak, an assistant to Frank Zamboni, the inventor of the best-known ice resurfacing machine of the time, demonstrated a very early model of the machine at Boston Garden to the team management, and as a result, the Bruins ordered one of the then-produced "Model E" resurfacers to be used at the Garden, the first known NHL team to acquire one of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous "Zambonis" for their own use. The Bruins' Zamboni Model E, factory serial number 21—used as late as the 1980s on an emergency basis—eventually ended up in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto in 1988 for preservation.


title: Boston Bruins

text: On January 18, 1958, a milestone in NHL history occurred as the first black person ever to play in the NHL stepped onto the ice for the Bruins, New Brunswick-born left wing Willie O'Ree. He played in 45 games for the Bruins over the 1957–58 and 1960–61 seasons, scoring six goals and ten assists in his NHL career.


title: Boston Bruins

text: During this period, the farm system of the Bruins was not as expansive or well-developed as most of the other five teams. The Bruins sought players not protected by the other teams, and in like fashion to the aforementioned signing of Willie O'Ree, the team signed Tommy Williams from the 1960 Olympic-gold medal-winning American national men's hockey team—at the time the only American player in the NHL—in 1962. The "Uke Line"—named for the Ukrainian heritage of Johnny Bucyk, Vic Stasiuk, and Bronco Horvath – came to Boston in 1957 and enjoyed four productive offensive seasons, heralding, along with scoring stalwarts Don McKenney and Fleming MacKell, the successful era of the late 1950s. There followed a long and difficult reconstruction period in the early to mid-1960s.


title: Boston Bruins

text: Weston Adams repurchased the Bruins in 1964 after Brown's death and set about rebuilding the team. Adams signed a defenseman from Parry Sound, Ontario, named Bobby Orr, who entered the league in 1966 and became, in the eyes of many, the greatest player of all time. He was announced that season's winner of the Calder Memorial Trophy for Rookie of the Year and named to the second NHL All-Star team. When asked about Orr's NHL debut game, October 19, 1966, against the Detroit Red Wings, then-Bruins coach Harry Sinden recalled:


title: Boston Bruins

text: Despite Orr's stellar rookie season, the Bruins would miss the playoffs. The next season, they would go on to make the playoffs for the first of 29 straight seasons, an all-time record. The Bruins then obtained young forwards Phil Esposito, Ken Hodge and Fred Stanfield from Chicago in a deal celebrated as one of the most one-sided in hockey history. Hodge and Stanfield became key elements of the Bruins' success, and Esposito, who centered a line with Hodge and Wayne Cashman, became the league's top goal scorer and the first NHL player to break the 100-point mark, setting many goal- and point-scoring records. Esposito remains one of four players to win the Art Ross Trophy four consecutive seasons (the other three are Jaromir Jagr, Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe). With other stars like forwards Bucyk, John McKenzie, Derek Sanderson, and Hodge, steady defenders like Dallas Smith and goaltender Gerry Cheevers, the "Big Bad Bruins" became one of the league's top teams from the late 1960s into the 1980s.


title: Boston Bruins

text: In 1970, a 29-year Stanley Cup drought came to an end in Boston, as the Bruins defeated the St. Louis Blues in four games in the Final. Orr scored the game-winning goal in overtime to clinch the Stanley Cup. The same season was Orr's most awarded—the third of eight consecutive years he won the James Norris Memorial Trophy as the top defenseman in the NHL—and he won the Art Ross Trophy, the Conn Smythe Trophy and the Hart Memorial Trophy, the only player to ever win four major awards in the same season.


title: Boston Bruins

text: "No one, absolutely no one, could have finished a goal in like manner. For years Orr had been described as someone who was graceful, elegant, powerful, without fear—poetry in motion. All these epithets were captured and immortalized in the photos of the goal that won the 1970 Stanley Cup."


title: Boston Bruins

text: The 1970–71 season was, in retrospect, the high-water mark of the 1970s for Boston. While Sinden temporarily retired from hockey to enter business (he was replaced by ex-Bruin and Canadien defenseman Tom Johnson), the Bruins set dozens of offensive scoring records: they had seven of the league's top ten scorers—a feat not achieved before or since—set the record for wins in a season, and in a league that had never seen a 100-point scorer before 1969, the Bruins had four that year. All four (Orr, Esposito, Bucyk and Hodge) were named first team All-Stars, a feat matched in the expansion era only by the 1976–77 Canadiens. Boston were favored to repeat as Cup champions but ran into a roadblock in the playoffs. Up 5–1 at one point in game two of the quarter-finals against the Canadiens (and rookie goaltender Ken Dryden), the Bruins squandered the lead to lose 7–5. The Bruins never recovered and lost the series in seven games.


title: Boston Bruins

text: While the Bruins were not quite as dominant the next season (although only three points behind the 1971 pace), Esposito and Orr were once again one-two in the scoring standings (followed by Bucyk in ninth place) and they regained the Stanley Cup by defeating the New York Rangers in six games in the Finals. Rangers blueliner Brad Park, who came runner-up to Orr's (then) five-year monopoly on the Norris Trophy, said, "Bobby Orr "was"—didn't make—the difference."


title: Boston Bruins

text: The 1972–73 season saw upheaval for the Bruins. Former head coach Sinden became the general manager. Bruins players Gerry Cheevers, Derek Sanderson and Johnny McKenzie left to join the upstart World Hockey Association. Coach Tom Johnson was fired 52 games into the season, replaced by Bep Guidolin, who had been Orr's coach with the OHA junior Oshawa Generals. The Adams family, which had owned the team since its founding in the 1920s, sold it to Storer Broadcasting. The Bruins' season came to a premature end in a first-round loss to the Rangers in the 1973 playoffs, losing Esposito to injury in that first round. In 1974, the Bruins regained their first-place standing in the regular season, with three 100-point scorers on the team (Esposito, Orr, and Hodge). However, they lost the 1974 Final in an upset to the Philadelphia Flyers.


title: Boston Bruins

text: Don Cherry stepped behind the bench as the new coach in 1974–75. The Bruins stocked themselves with enforcers and grinders, and remained competitive under Cherry's reign, the so-called "Lunch Pail A.C"., behind players such as Gregg Sheppard, Terry O'Reilly, Stan Jonathan, and Peter McNab. This would also turn out to be Orr's final full season in the league, before his knee injuries worsened, as well as the last time Orr and Esposito would finish 1–2 in regular season scoring. The Bruins placed second in the Adams Division, and lost to the Chicago Black Hawks in the first round of the 1975 playoffs, losing a best-of-three series, two games to one.


title: Boston Bruins

text: Continuing with Cherry's rebuilding of the team, the Bruins traded Esposito and Carol Vadnais for Brad Park, Jean Ratelle and Joe Zanussi to the Rangers. That trade was particularly controversial for both Bruins and Rangers fans, as Esposito was one of the most popular Bruins players (though it was known he disagreed with Cherry's coaching), while Park and Ratelle were Rangers stalwarts. However, Boston ended up getting the better of the trade, as Esposito never reached his previous scoring highs with the Rangers, while Ratelle maintained his skill level with the Bruins and was a high scorer for several years more. Particularly, it was Park who reemerged as one of the league's best defensemen and filled the void left by Orr, who had been sidelined by surgery at the start of 1975–76 and only managed to play ten games before being injured and lost for the rest of the season. The Bruins made the semi-finals again, losing to the Flyers.


title: Boston Bruins

text: As an impending free agent, contract talks with Orr and his agent Alan Eagleson had been tumultuous throughout 1975–76. Although insurers would not underwrite Orr and doctors advised he could not play much longer, the Bruins still attempted to re-sign Orr and offered him a five-year deal at US$925,000, or 18.6 percent ownership of the club in 1980. However, Eagleson turned down the offer without informing Orr, instead signing him to the Chicago Black Hawks in 1976; Orr was never effective – having only played 26 games in Chicago – and retired after many knee operations in 1979.


title: Boston Bruins

text: Cheevers returned from the WHA in 1977, and the Bruins got past the Flyers in the semi-finals, but they were swept by the Canadiens in the Stanley Cup Finals. The story repeated itself in 1978—with a balanced attack that saw Boston have eleven players with 20+ goal seasons, still the NHL record—as the Bruins made the Final once more, but lost in six games to the Canadiens team that had recorded the best regular season in modern history. After that series, Johnny Bucyk retired, holding virtually every Bruins' career longevity and scoring mark to that time.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The 1979 semi-final series against the Habs proved to be Cherry's undoing. In the deciding seventh game, the Bruins, up by a goal, were called for having too many men on the ice in the late stages of the third period. Montreal tied the game on the ensuing power play and won in overtime. Never popular with Harry Sinden, by then the Bruins' general manager, Cherry was dismissed as head coach but was later hired in the same capacity with the Colorado Rockies.


title: Boston Bruins

text: At Madison Square Garden on December 23, 1979, just after the Bruins beat the New York Rangers 4–3, John Kaptain, a Rangers fan from New Jersey, stole Stan Jonathan's stick and hit him with it during a post-game scrum. When other fans got involved, Terry O'Reilly charged into the stands followed by his teammates. During the fight, Bruin defenseman and future NBC hockey analyst Mike Milbury famously pulled off Kaptain's shoe and hit him with it. O'Reilly, a future team captain, received an eight-game suspension for the brawl, while Milbury and McNab were suspended for six games and the entire team save for Cheevers was fined $500, while Kaptain was sentenced to six months in prison. In 2012, TSN named the fight, entitled "Milbury and The Shoe", as No. 4 on its Top 10 Craziest Hockey Moments.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The 1979 season saw new head coach Fred Creighton—himself replaced by the newly retired Cheevers the following year. The Bruins trade of Ron Grahame to the Los Angeles Kings for a first-round pick, that turned out to be eighth overall, enabled the Bruins to draft Ray Bourque, one of the greatest defensemen of all-time and the face of the Bruins for over two decades. The Bruins made the playoffs every year through the 1980s behind stars such as Park, Bourque and Rick Middleton—and had the league's best record in 1983 behind a Vezina Trophy–winning season from ex-Flyer goaltender Pete Peeters, with 110 points—but always fell short of making the Finals.


title: Boston Bruins

text: Bourque, Cam Neely and Keith Crowder led the Bruins to another Stanley Cup Finals appearance in 1988 against the Edmonton Oilers. The Bruins lost in a four-game sweep, but a memorable moment in the would-be fourth game ensued, when in the second period with the game tied 3–3, a blown fuse put the lights out at the Boston Garden. The rest of the game was cancelled and the series shifted to Edmonton. The Oilers completed the sweep, 6–3, back at Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton in what was originally scheduled as Game 5. The event is considered to be the reason the Bruins began work on a new arena. Boston returned to the Stanley Cup Finals in 1990 (with Neely, Bourque, Craig Janney, Bobby Carpenter, and rookie Don Sweeney, and former Oiler goalie Andy Moog and Reggie Lemelin splitting goaltending duties), but again lost to the Oilers, this time in five games.


title: Boston Bruins

text: In the 1987–88 NHL season – when the Bruins finally broke the Canadiens' 57-year-long (1930–87) playoff win streak against them – through the 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1994 seasons, the Bruins began to amass a playoff series winning streak of their own, in defeating their Original Six nemesis Montreal Canadiens in the playoffs, getting some revenge for a rivalry which had been lopsided in the Canadiens' favour in playoff action, with Montreal having won 18 consecutive playoff series against the Bruins between 1946 and 1987. In 1991 and 1992, the Bruins suffered two consecutive Conference Final losses to the eventual Cup champion, the Mario Lemieux-led Pittsburgh Penguins. Starting from the 1992–93 NHL season onwards, the Bruins had not gotten past the second round of the playoffs until winning the Stanley Cup after the 2011 season.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The 1992–93 season ended disappointingly for several reasons. Despite finishing with the second-best regular-season record after Pittsburgh, Boston was swept in the first round by the Buffalo Sabres. During the post-season awards ceremony, Bruin players finished as runner-up on many of the honors—Bourque for the Norris, Oates for the Art Ross and Lady Byng Trophy, Joe Juneau (who had broken the NHL record for assists in a season by a left-winger, a mark he still holds) for the Calder Trophy, Dave Poulin for the Frank J. Selke Trophy, Moog for the William M. Jennings Trophy and coach Brian Sutter for the Jack Adams Award. Poulin did win the King Clancy Memorial Trophy, while Bourque made the NHL All-Star first team and Juneau the NHL All-Rookie team.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The 1995 season would be the Bruins' last at the Boston Garden. The final official match played in the Garden was a 3–0 loss to the New Jersey Devils in the 1995 playoffs; the Bruins went on to play the final game at the old arena on September 28, 1995, in an exhibition matchup against the Canadiens. They subsequently moved into the FleetCenter, now known as the TD Garden. In the 1996 playoffs, the Bruins lost their first-round series to the Florida Panthers in five games.


title: Boston Bruins

text: In 1997, Boston missed the playoffs for the first time in 30 years (and for the first time in the expansion era), having set the North American major professional record for most consecutive seasons in the playoffs. The Bruins lost in the first round of the 1998 playoffs to the Washington Capitals in six games. In 1999, the Bruins defeated the Carolina Hurricanes in six games during the first round of the playoffs. Nevertheless, they would lose to the Sabres in six games in the second round of the playoffs. In the 1999–2000 season, general manager Harry Sinden wanted Bourque to have a chance to close out his career with a Stanley Cup win and decided to pursue a trade with the Colorado Avalanche. Bourque and fellow veteran Dave Andreychuk were sent to Colorado in exchange for Brian Rolston, Martin Grenier, Samuel Pahlsson and a first-round draft pick (2000 draft, 27th overall, used to select Martin Samuelsson).


title: Boston Bruins

text: In the 1999–2000 season, the Bruins finished in last place in the Northeast Division and failed to qualify for the playoffs. During a game between the Bruins and the Vancouver Canucks on February 21, 2000, Marty McSorley was ejected for using his stick to hit Canucks forward Donald Brashear in the head. McSorley was initially suspended for the remaining 23 games of the season. However, on October 6, McSorley was convicted of assault using a weapon for his attack on Brashear; he was then sentenced to 18 months of probation. As a result of the conviction, McSorley's suspension was extended through February 21, 2001.


title: Boston Bruins

text: After a 3–4–1 start, the Bruins fired head coach Pat Burns and went with Mike Keenan for the rest of the way. Despite a 15-point improvement from the previous season, the Bruins missed the playoffs in 2000–01 by just one point, and Keenan was let go. Centerman Jason Allison led the Bruins in scoring. The following season, 2001–02, the Bruins improved again with another 13 points, winning their first Northeast Division title since 1993 with a core built around Joe Thornton, Sergei Samsonov, Brian Rolston, Bill Guerin, Mike Knuble and the newly acquired Glen Murray. Their regular-season success did not translate to the post-season, however, as they lost in six games to the underdog eighth-place Montreal Canadiens in the first round.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The 2002–03 season found the Bruins platooning their goaltending staff between Steve Shields and John Grahame for most of the season. A mid-season trade brought in veteran Jeff Hackett. In the midst of a late-season slump, general manager Mike O'Connell fired head coach Robbie Ftorek with nine games to go and named himself interim coach. The Bruins managed to finish seventh in the East, but lost to the eventual Stanley Cup champion New Jersey Devils in five games. In 2003–04, the Bruins began the season with ex-Toronto Maple Leaf goalie Felix Potvin. Later in the season, the Bruins put rookie Andrew Raycroft into the starting role. Raycroft eventually won the Calder Trophy that season. The Bruins went on to win another division title and appeared to get past the first round for the first time in five years with a 3–1 series lead on the rival Canadiens. However, the Canadiens rallied back to win three-straight games, upsetting the Bruins.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The 2004–05 NHL season was wiped out by a lockout, and the Bruins had a lot of space within the new salary cap implemented for 2005–06. Bruins management eschewed younger free agents in favor of older veterans such as Alexei Zhamnov and Brian Leetch. The newcomers were oft-injured, and by the end of November, the Bruins team traded their captain and franchise player, Joe Thornton (who went on to win the Art Ross and Hart Trophies). In exchange, the Bruins received Marco Sturm, Brad Stuart and Wayne Primeau from the San Jose Sharks. After losing 10 of 11 games before the trade, the Bruins came back with a 3–0 victory over the league-leading Ottawa Senators, as rookie goaltender Hannu Toivonen earned his first career NHL shutout. When Toivonen went down with an injury in January, journeyman goalie Tim Thomas started 16-straight games and brought the Bruins back into the playoff run. Two points out of eighth place at the Winter Olympic break, the Bruins fired general manager Mike O'Connell in March and the Bruins missed the playoffs for the first time in five years.


title: Boston Bruins

text: Peter Chiarelli was hired as the new general manager of the team. Head coach Mike Sullivan was fired and Dave Lewis, former coach of the Detroit Red Wings, was hired to replace him. The Bruins signed Zdeno Chara, one of the most coveted defensemen in the NHL and a former NHL All-Star, from the Ottawa Senators, and Marc Savard, who finished just three points short of a 100-point season in 2005–06 with the Atlanta Thrashers, to long-term deals. The 2006–07 season ended in the team finishing in last place in the division. The Bruins traded Brad Stuart and Wayne Primeau to the Calgary Flames for Andrew Ference and forward Chuck Kobasew.


title: Boston Bruins

text: After the disappointing 2007 season, Lewis was fired as coach, and the Bruins announced on June 21, 2007, that former Canadiens and Devils head coach Claude Julien had been named as the new head coach. The Bruins also unveiled a new logo and a brand new shoulder patch closely based on the main jersey logo used until 1932.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The 2008 campaign got to witness the Bruins regain some respectability, finishing 41–29–12 and making the playoffs. The season ended on a bright note for the Bruins when they forced the Montreal Canadiens to play a seven-game playoff series, including a memorable Game 6 in which Boston came back to win 5–4. Their performance, despite a 5–0 loss in the seventh game, rekindled interest in the team in New England, where the Bruins had for years been heavily overshadowed by the Red Sox, Patriots and Celtics, all of whom had recently won championships in their respective leagues. Although Bruins center Patrice Bergeron was injured with a concussion most of the season, youngsters Milan Lucic, David Krejci, Vladimir Sobotka and Petteri Nokelainen showed promise in the playoffs.


title: Boston Bruins

text: After a slow start to the 2008–09 season, the Bruins won 17 of their next 20 games, leading many to see them as a revival of the "Big Bad Bruins" from the 1970s and 1980s. During the 2009 All-Star Weekend's Skills Competition, captain Zdeno Chara fired the NHL's then-fastest measured "hardest shot" ever, with a clocked in speed of 105.4 mph (169.7 km/h) velocity. (Chara has since broken his own record three times, two of those on the same night.) The number of injured players in the season saw many call-ups from the Bruins' American Hockey League (AHL) Providence Bruins farm team, with rookie defenseman Matt Hunwick and forward Byron Bitz seeing success. The Bruins went on to have the best record in the Eastern Conference and qualified for the playoffs for the fifth time in nine years, facing the Canadiens in the playoffs for the fourth time during that span, defeating them in four games before losing in seven games to the Carolina Hurricanes in the conference semi-finals.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The 2009 summer off-season saw the departure of long-time defensive forward P. J. Axelsson from Sweden, who signed a multi-year contract with his hometown Frölunda HC team. With Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke threatening an offer sheet and Bruins management unable to meet his salary demands, forward Phil Kessel was traded to Toronto for a trio of future draft picks.


title: Boston Bruins

text: On January 1, 2010, the Bruins won the 2010 NHL Winter Classic over the Philadelphia Flyers in a 2–1 overtime decision at Fenway Park, thus becoming the first home team to win an outdoor classic game. However, following the New Year's Day game, the Bruins, hobbled by injuries, would go through a five-week-long period of lackluster play, with only two wins and compiling ten regulation losses earning them only eight points in the Eastern Conference standings in that 15-game long period, before breaking the losing streak in an away game against the Canadiens on February 7, with Tuukka Rask shutting out the Habs 3–0. The win over the Canadiens was the first of four successive victories leading into the break in play for the NHL's participation in the 2010 Winter Olympics, and established Tuukka Rask as the number one goaltender for the Bruins, as Tim Thomas would only start 8 of the 22 games remaining in the post-Olympic period of the season, with Rask winning eight of his post-Olympic starts, including two shutouts. Thomas was on the silver medal-winning U.S. team, with Patrice Bergeron on the gold medal-winning Canadian team.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The importance of former Buffalo Sabres forward Daniel Paille's acquisition by the Bruins, and his emergence as a penalty-killing forward, was emphasized on April 10, 2010, as Paille, Steve Begin and Blake Wheeler combined for the first-ever known trio of short handed goals within one penalty kill, in only 1:04 of game time, in a home game against the Carolina Hurricanes, helping the Bruins to sixth place in the NHL Eastern Conference, and a 2010 NHL playoff opening round appearance against the Buffalo Sabres, which they won 4–2. Boston became only the third team in NHL history to lose a playoff series after leading 3–0 when they lost in Game 7 to the Philadelphia Flyers after losing a 3–0 lead in the second round on May 14, 2010, also losing the services of Marco Sturm in the first game and playmaking center David Krejci to injury in the third game of the series.


title: Boston Bruins

text: On April 13, 2010, the Boston Bruins received the second overall draft pick for the 2010 NHL Entry Draft, having received it via the trade that sent Phil Kessel to the Toronto Maple Leafs. With the pick, the Bruins selected Tyler Seguin on June 25, 2010. In other off-season moves, Greg Campbell and Nathan Horton joined the team, and Vladimir Sobotka and Dennis Wideman left the Bruins in the 2010 free agency. After the season ended on June 16, 2010, Cam Neely was named the new team president of the Bruins.


title: Boston Bruins

text: On September 8, 2010, the Boston Bruins entered an affiliate with SM-Liiga (Finnish Elite league) team JYP Jyväskylä. Under the terms of the partnership, the two organizations will be able to transfer contracted players on loan to each other.


title: Boston Bruins

text: On February 15, 2011, the Bruins acquired center Chris Kelly from the Ottawa Senators after Marc Savard's attempted comeback ended due to another concussion, this one delivered away at Colorado by former Bruin Matt Hunwick. Ottawa received the Bruins' second-round pick in 2011. Just two days later and on the brink of the trade deadline, the Bruins acquired defenseman Tomas Kaberle in a trade from the Toronto Maple Leafs in exchange for prospect Joe Colborne, a first-round selection in 2011 and a potential second-round pick in 2012 (which became official on May 27 when the Bruins clinched a berth in the Stanley Cup Finals). Mark Stuart and Blake Wheeler were also traded to the Atlanta Thrashers for Rich Peverley and Boris Valabik.


title: Boston Bruins

text: In the 2011 Stanley Cup playoffs, the Bruins became the first team in NHL history to win a seven-game series without scoring a power-play goal, as they eliminated the Montreal Canadiens in seven games, and also won their first playoff series after trailing 2–0. On May 6, the Bruins swept the Philadelphia Flyers in four games to advance to the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time since 1992. Boston then defeated the Tampa Bay Lightning in seven games and advanced to the Stanley Cup Finals for the first time since 1990 to face the Vancouver Canucks.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The Bruins lost the first two games of the series in very close contests, 1–0, on a goal with less than 19 seconds left in regulation, and then 3–2 in overtime. Game 3 did not start well for the Bruins either, as they lost Nathan Horton to injury at the 5:07 mark of the first period following a late hit by Canucks defenseman Aaron Rome that left Horton prone on the ice for nearly ten minutes. Despite losing Horton, the Bruins defeated the Canucks with four goals in each of the second and third periods, twice scoring short-handed goals, and going on to win, 8–1. It was the highest score by one team, and largest winning margin, in a Finals game since 1996. Game 4 saw the Bruins defeating the Canucks in a 4–0 shutout. The home team continued to be the winner, with Game 5 in Vancouver going to the Canucks in a 1–0 shutout, then Game 6 going to the Bruins, who staved off elimination with a 5–2 defeat of the Canucks. The Bruins set a new record for the quickest four goals ever in a playoff series game, scoring in only 4:14 of game time in the first period of Game 6. Game 7, which was played in Vancouver on June 15, was the first time the Bruins have ever played in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. The Bruins shut out Vancouver 4–0 after two goals each from Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand, winning the sixth Stanley Cup in franchise history and breaking a 39-year Cup drought. The 2010–11 Bruins were the first team in NHL history to win a Game 7 three times in the same playoff run.


title: Boston Bruins

text: The championship also meant that all four Boston teams had won their respective championships at least once in the previous decade after the Red Sox won two World Series, the Patriots won three Super Bowls and the Celtics recaptured an NBA championship. Following the Stanley Cup Finals, "Boston Globe" columnist Dan Shaughnessy ranked all seven championships during the decade and ranked the Bruins' 2011 Stanley Cup triumph as third, behind only the Patriots winning Super Bowl XXXVI (second) and the Red Sox winning the 2004 World Series (first, breaking the "Curse of the Bambino").


title: Boston Bruins

text: Following their Stanley Cup win, the Bruins lost Mark Recchi to retirement and Michael Ryder and Tomas Kaberle to free agency. The Bruins tweaked their roster by adding defenseman Joe Corvo and forward Benoit Pouliot. On October 6, 2011, prior their first home game of the 2011–12 season against Philadelphia, the Bruins raised their 2011 Stanley Cup Champions Banner to the roof at TD Garden. Members of the 1972 Championship Team, with Milt Schmidt and Bobby Orr leading the way, participated in the official Banner Raising Ceremony. The Bruins' short summer took its toll early, going 3–7–0 in the month of October, before responding with a 21–3–1 record to cap off 2011, highlighted by a near-perfect November in which the team did not lose in regulation. Sophomore forward Tyler Seguin shone the brightest during the streak, eventually paving the way for his first All-Star Game selection, joining teammates Zdeno Chara and Tim Thomas on Team Chara. On January 23, Thomas caused a stir by not attending the Bruins' visit to the White House, saying the government had "grown out of control". After an 8–4–1 record to begin 2012, the Bruins' inconsistent form resurfaced for much of February and March, during which they endured key injuries to Nathan Horton (concussion) and Tuukka Rask (groin), and an impotent power play. At the February 27 trading deadline, they traded for Greg Zanon, Mike Mottau and one-time Bruin Brian Rolston, then signed goalie Marty Turco to add goaltending depth. The Bruins went on to finish second in the Eastern Conference with 102 points, winning the Northeast Division title.


title: Boston Bruins

text: They faced the Washington Capitals in the first round of the 2012 Stanley Cup playoffs. In a seven-game series in which all of the games were decided by only one goal, the Bruins came up short against rookie goalie Braden Holtby and head coach Dale Hunter's defensive-minded game plan. The seventh game saw Joel Ward deflect the series-winning goal past Tim Thomas in overtime to give the Capitals the victory and end the Bruins' season.


title: Boston Bruins

text: During the off-season preceding the lockout, Tim Thomas made his decision to sit out the 2012–13 season. General manager Peter Chiarelli confirmed Thomas' decision. Thomas was first suspended for not reporting to training camp, then his rights were traded to the New York Islanders on February 7. The Bruins decided to go with the goaltending pair of Tuukka Rask and Anton Khudobin for the season. Meanwhile, highly touted prospect Dougie Hamilton was promoted to the main roster after spending a season in the juniors.