author
Stephen Return Riggs
1812–1883
Best known for decades of work among the Dakota people, this 19th-century missionary and linguist helped produce some of the earliest major Dakota-language reference works. He also wrote memoirs and historical accounts that still draw interest today.
2 Audiobooks
Illustration of the Method of Recording Indian Languages From the First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution
by James Owen Dorsey, Albert S. (Albert Samuel) Gatschet, Stephen Return Riggs
Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux
by Stephen Return Riggs
About the author
Born in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1812, Stephen Return Riggs became a Presbyterian missionary and began working among the Dakota in 1837, first at Lac qui Parle in what is now Minnesota. He spent much of the next four decades in the Minnesota River Valley and later in Nebraska and Dakota Territory.
Riggs is remembered especially for his language work. Sources consistently describe him as a missionary and linguist who prepared Dakota-language texts and helped create important reference works, including a dictionary and grammar. He also translated large portions of Christian scripture into Dakota and wrote books such as Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux.
Like many missionaries of his era, he approached Dakota life through a program of conversion and assimilation, and modern reference works present that legacy with needed context. He died in 1883, but his writings remain part of the historical record of missionary activity and Dakota-language publishing in the 19th century.