Gabriel Renville (April 1825 – August 26, 1892), also known as Ti'wakan (Sacred Lodge), was Chief of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Sioux Tribe from 1866 until his death in 1892. He opposed conflict with the United States during the Dakota War of 1862 and was a driving force within the Dakota Peace Party. Gabrielle Renville's influence and political leadership were critical to the eventual creation of the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation, which lies mainly in present-day South Dakota. Early life and family Gabriel Renville was born in April 1825 to two "mixed-blood" parents –– Winona Abigail Crawford (1805–1897) and Victor Renville (Ohiya) (1780–1832) –– most likely in the village of Sweet Corn on the west shore of Lake Traverse. His father Victor was the son of Joseph Rainville, a French Canadian fur trader, and Miniyuhe, a Mdewakanton kinswoman of the Little Crow family, and was the younger brother of Joseph Renville of Lac qui Parle (1779–1846). His mother Winona was the daughter of a British trader and a Sisseton woman, and had been previously married to the son of a fur trader, Narcisse Frenier. Victor Renville was ambushed and killed by a group of Ojibwes in August 1832 as he returned from leading a group of warriors on a retaliatory raid. A few years after his death, Winona Crawford married Akipa, later known as Joseph Akipa Renville (c. 1810–1891), a "full-blood" Dakota from the Wahpeton band. (Akipa, son of Buffalo Man, was "neither a Renville nor a Mdewakanton" but admired Gabriel's famous uncle and adopted his English name in tribute.) In 1838, Gabriel Renville settled on Grey Cloud Island in Washington County, Minnesota with his brother-in-law and legal guardian, Joseph R. Brown; his half-sister, Susan Frenier Brown; and his stepfather, Akipa. Education Gabriel Renville received little formal education beyond classes at the school at Lac qui Parle Mission, where he learned to read and write the Dakota language, and do arithmetic. When Gabriel was a teenager, Joseph R. Brown placed him in boarding school in Chicago, where he lasted for one month. Gabriel's nephew, frontiersman Samuel J. Brown, later wrote that "schoolroom confinement and association with strangers speaking an unintelligible and strange tongue did not agree with him or suit him, and in about a month he ran away on foot across the prairies of Illinois and the woods of Wisconsin back to his home in Minnesota. He could never