What did the Sioux look like?

Answer 1

It is not clear if you are asking about physical appearance, facial characteristics or clothes.

The many different tribes of the Sioux people were and are typical of the central and northern Plains and marginal Plains people, with no single facial type but generally with round faces, high cheekbones, narrow mouths and firm jaws; children are born quite pale and with yellowish skin, quickly tanning to a much darker shade in the sun. They are generally tall, some notable examples such as the Minneconjou chief Touch the Clouds reaching more than six feet tall.

Historically women wore full-length dresses made of two or three skins of deer, antelope or elk (collectively known as buckskin), tanned soft and pale in colour. Short leggings and moccasins completed their outfit. Trade cloth dresses later replaced the native type.

Men considered themselves fully dressed and respectable wearing only a thin leather belt and a breechclout, originally of buckskin but later of trade cloth. Moccasins, leggings and plain poncho-like shirts were added as required, but warfare and hunting were generally done in just moccasins and breechclout. Only those warriors who had proven themselves in battle by counting four or more coups could wear a decorated shirt bearing four strips of porcupine quill or beadwork designs (one over each shoulder and one along each arm), fringed with human hair or strips of fur. A shirt-wearer was also a minor chief who might lead a war party.

Sioux decorated shirts would often be painted a solid colour or be marked with symbols of the wearer's deeds in battle, or have the top half painted blue or green and the lower half yellow.

No headbands were worn historically, but in more recent times such non-traditional trappings have been adopted as part of dance costume.

Warriors might wear feathers attached to the hair, or small "medicine wheels", or the stuffed skin of a small animal or bird, or even an entire stuffed eagle. ar bonnets were again reserved for those warriors who distinguished themselves many times in battle - they were definitely not the mark of a chief, simply of a successful warrior. Some might have a trailer attached, or split buffalo horns and strips of ermine fur.

Both sexes favoured shell ornaments, including abalone, dentalia and "hair pipes" - all of them traded from other tribes or from white traders.

Historically, all Plains tribes removed all facial hair including the eyebrows (as did most native American tribes) - something completely forgotten by modern native actors.

See links below for images: