The Next Day : Arrival to Dawes (Part 1)

One night we fell asleep, some of us rested well and had good dreams, some of us, those with worries are those going through hard times, we're probably not so fortunate that night, but that of course is a part of being human. The lookout stoked the fire, like any other night, and many awoke to pray to the morning star, none realizing that what happened today would change their world forever. It started almost as a whisper, over time that whisper would grow in intensity, like the wind across the prairie. Maybe some thought it was an empty rumor, but it must have been a strange one, certainly everyone had to see it or them with their own eyes to believe it. In this song recorded in 1939, Louise Twiss sings, Lachichiae, Taku O Tehika, Uctaie, take courage, hardships are coming, Lachichiae, Ozuiae, Nake Nulaia, Chisee, take courage, the ones who are fighting will never give up. Hello my relatives, Chante washtenapichiae was happy, I greet you with a good heart and a handshake. Welcome to the Wamanka Ogananka Ichante, the heart of all oral history project, and seven parts here is exploring some of the most significant stories and events of the Lakota people promoted widely known as the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in what is now South Dakota. Our goal is to tell the important history of the Lakota, from creation stories to crazy horse, from Buffalo Nation days to reservations, from Fort Laramie to Moody Knee, from boarding schools back to the sacred black hills, the heart of all, through the voices of elders and community members who have stories that matter. This project is brought to you by Little Moon School, and generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. For more information about the project, visit www.heartofallohp.com. He said that he went among the dead soldiers and looked at him, he picked up a pistol and said, "I had," he said, "the thing he remembers was the smell of blood everywhere." He said that night when he went to bed in camp, he said, "he remembered the horses that were wounded across the river." The sound is like humans, moaning, he said, "he said I went to sleep to the sound of his eyes, of course he was only 10 years old." Everybody over at Hope Station is talking about the battle of the Old Big Horn or Greasy Class. So as soon as that battle was going on, they knew it, or even before it started, they knew that there was going to be a battle. And then they started, they gave us that name, Nadewasu, it means the people there ain't no good, because they were scared of us. So even when they were signing treaties, there was no signatures from the native part. It's mainly just a mark. The French, they butchered up even further, we would call the Sue, Nadewasu, that's how we got our name to Sue. I looked and looked among all the things I have for signature of my grandpa and there's none. I think it's just a shame that we were very good ones, upon our own land. I pray, but when I pray in Lakota, it always makes me cry. But when you really think about it, look at all the land we left. It's because your prayers in Lakota are powerful, so that's why you cry. In this third episode, we will continue to explore the story of the Lakota, which became much more complicated with the arrival of the Europeans to Keawita. Before then, life had been wash day, good, not easy, but wash day. We had learned to live in harmony with Unchimaka. It was considered a privilege, the highest honor, and it came with certain responsibility as we discussed last episode. Talking with our seven guiding values, we were taught to see ourselves as Ikjai Wichasha, common man, not above anyone or anything else. The act of counting koo, touching our enemy with the koo stick, rather than killing them, was given the greatest respect among Lakota warriors. Our concept of Medakoye Oyase, cherishing all of our relatives, everything in existence, guided our lives and interaction with the world around us. We documented our long history, living the way we were taught by Unchimaka and our ancestors on winter counts. This is Richard Moves Camp. Richard Count is a, you write down the events that happen, what's to place wise and important to remember. To do it on the high, the well-prepared high, there was somebody delegated in every band to keep such history, installing historical markers, you know, that they kept tracking when the treaty was signed and prior to that, the first time they saw a like man in the tragic events. So that's a winter count. We count our years by winter instead of summer. Our summer is our ceremonial month, but our social life and our educational life, the Lakota count, everything by winter. So that's still carries on today. After the Europeans came, they established a Greek calendar and everything that changed. We still managed to keep some of the old teachings. So the elders will ask you, how old are you, they're going to say, "Why need to need don't I, how many winters are you now?" That still happens today, the Lakota elder or somebody will ask you your age through the Lakota language, you will say, "I know one year to need don't I, because winter is a sacred season, that's how it kept our records." As we discussed the arrival of non-indigenous people to Keiowita, we thought that perhaps our ancestors saw them as powerful, maybe even godly with their guns and medicine, but as we looked more at the way things ended up playing out, we had trouble describing it. This is the closest thing we could come up with. At first they earned our trust, but then it was like a monster that kept wanting more. We remembered Ite, the double-faced woman who would switch from good to evil and back again. She relied on Iketomi, the trickster, who teaches us by doing things the opposite way of how they should be done. He never takes responsibility for the problems he creates, laughing his way out of them instead. One story actually tells of Iketomi Inganashva, who is Wakashi Cha or Bad Spirit, teaching languages and customs that were foreign to those of the Oteji Shakaui. Iketomi was even said to teach people about strange gods so that they would forget the gods of their ancestors. In this same story, Takahe encouraged us to continue, united as relatives, even if we have to struggle for the natural rights that we are entitled to like everyone else. In this next segment, Shani Lunapi scholars Steve Nukum and Colonel Conroy discussed the doctrine of discovery that guided European nations in their exploration of the world. So there was one universal faith or religion called Catholicism or Catholic word that means universal. You know, within the hierarchy when people believe that a particular man is the vicar of Christ or they've been raised in that tradition raised to believe such things from childhood, there is a way in which those institutions have a tremendous amount of influence and sway and persuasiveness within that population. There was an alignment between monarchies and papacy because it was understood to be part of the superstructure or power structure of the overall system in Western Europe. They're called Pable Bulls because of the way that they're issued and signed and sealed by the Pope and it's very formalized and a very important document. So in my law class, I go walk backwards to each one of these treaties, all of that because they're the documents to a point of order. So where did the point of order begin? papal bull of Nicholas. us in Africa and China and all the other parts of the globe are designated as heathen. They didn't have a Savior named Jesus. They said they didn't have a God so therefore that gave him a card block to use the word discovery and go to others and set foot and occupy the lands under the doctorate of discovery. That document was issued by Pope Nicholas V to King Alfonso Portugal and the Pope authorized the King of Portugal to go to the Western coast of Africa and to do the following which is a direct quote to invade, capture, banquish and subdue all serisans, pagans and other enemies are prized to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery and to take away all their possessions and property and to convert the land. When Christians are setting foot, discovery and original inhabitants lands and they didn't say sovereign countries because they dehumanize them, degrade them to just bumbling, stumbling, nomadic people without looking at them, they had a commerce, that permanency, that a social structure, a political structure, they had a belief system that similar to theirs, they prayed to a creator, a God, and they didn't look at those because they considered themselves to be civilized and advanced. They gave themselves terms, right? But those ones back in the day were led by monarchs, Spain, England, Netherlands, Portugal, Italy itself and France. At that time declared themselves the only true Christian nations or the other ones who went all over the world. And then when you get to 1493 after Cristobal Cologne, otherwise known as Christopher Columbus, sailed to the Caribbean and the Bahamas back to Europe. The following year in 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued four different people both that year and one of them has a sentence in it, in Latin, which says places or lands that are not under the domination of any Christian dominators. The basis for their whole system was to go and find those places on the planet that were not yet under any Christian domination and to establish domination over those nations and peoples existing there. This idea that these documents were simply for converting people to another religion is nonsense. They were declarations of war against the non-Christian world and all of those words are examples of domination and dehumanization. The first documented interaction with non-indigenous people and what will later become South Dakota took place in 1742, after Francois and Louis Joseph Verendry and two other Frenchmen set out to find a water route to the Pacific Ocean. In the journal of their expedition, they repeatedly make mention of the savages that they expected to encounter along the way. Upon meeting what they called the chief of the bow people, Francois Verendry commented, "Pain us attentions and politeness that had in them nothing of the savage. He had all our baggage put into his lodge and saw the great care was taken over horses." He continued, "Up to that point we had been very well received in all of the villages we had passed through." While the expedition did not make it all the way to the western coast, they were cared for and protected for three and a half months even with the extreme threat of the violent and destructive snake people, thought by at least two scholars familiar with the account to be the Shoshone. It is interesting to note that the tribes of the Oceti Shacoi would come to be known by French traders as "Nado-Wesu", after being given the name "Nado-Wesu-Wok", meaning "little snakes" by one of the rivals "Dos-yue". It is said the English or in the name "Tesu". The proper names "Lakoda, Dakota, and Dakota" actually translate to mean friend or ally. While conflicts certainly existed among indigenous tribes, the arrival of Europeans seemed to push to the Lakoda, who, according to Richard Muscam, had recently acquired the Chinookbo-Wokah. To try and make peace with tribes around Kaya-Wita by the late 1700s. "The father against tribes were invading territory, the court just fought against the croes and honey. They were nice to us and we were nice to them either. But for most tribes, we're friendly to the Lakoda, only because we had a pipe. We had a sacred pipe that was around around late 1700s. The caretaker of the pipe was a woman. She delegated a commission of well to do spiritually, mentally, emotionally, men and women. The made a pipe representing the main sacred pipe. The made a journey over about two-year period, making friends with different tribes and smoking the pipe and promising to never fight each other again. The first tribe that they made friends with was the Cheyenne people. And then they made friends, smoked a pipe with arapohos or ricaraz, madazos, mandens. They go on west all the way down to different parts of the country and there's peace, shoshone. What a time they got done with two-year period, they made friends with over 400 and five different tribes, which exception upon ease and prose. Most of the tribes became friendly to the Lakotas. They even went to Mexico, some say they went to southern America. They went a long way after the two-year period. Most of the 400 tribes would come to visit Lakota people and they'll bring gifts to the pipe keeper. It was a grandma and the pipe traveled as well. They went to someplace in Wyoming. They brought stones together and they had their spiritual gatherings promoting peace. And they created a symbol on the ground in Wyoming. This was over hundreds of years. And today that symbol still odors someplace. It's called the medicine wheel. After that, when the government and the Europeans really came into our country, most of everybody kind of went underground and kept themselves away. That was part of history, that was never written by the scholars and the white people. But we had a winter count that was part of those records. It is fairly well understood and admitted that colonization was devastating for Indigenous people around the world. Through disease and direct conflict, 90% of those populations were killed in what would later come to be known as the Americas. All within little over 100 years after Christopher Columbus' first voyage in 1492. An estimated 56 million people by 1600. Enough to actually coup the planet. 56 million people. Old world diseases that we're not present in the Americas until contact include bubonic plague, measles, smallpox, mumps, chickenpox, influenza, cholera, dipteria, typhus, malaria, leprosy, and yellow fever. Larson and Martin and Goodman. Indigenous people at that time had never been in contact with the pathogens the colonists brought, creating so-called virgin soil epidemics. People who didn't die from smallpox died from the following wave of influenza. Those who survived that succumbed to measles. Warfare, famine, and colonial atrocities did the rest in the great dying. Caught briarly, mazlin, and Lewis. In this next segment, Marcel Bober, Stella Ironclod, Richard Moose Camp, and Jesse Pooleyum talk about early contact with Europeans. Oh, the first trappers came in. They didn't understand the language. So the first things that they started understanding amongst all the tribes and the first trappers is sign language. Man, it would say, you know, a typical one would be coming on a boat, coming up the river. You know, you're mimicking a paddling. And everyone saw you take your gun out and you shoot something over there for supper, you know, and then they wouldn't pull over and make a cap. You know, they would talk about that. And then the sun comes up and then they're all getting ready and they're going again. So, you know, can you find how interesting that is? And what they were told back in Europe is there's land, a plenty, and free for the taking. So that was what was set in their mind. So when they came and the natives went ahead and welcomed them to come and live among them and started teaching them how to survive. Then more and more were coming because that was the whole idea of that they were going to come and make it in a new world. When did Jefferson, St. Louis, and Clark, early 1800s, 1804, 1805, something like that? And they went to the Pacific and came back and then they went back east because at that point time. know, the United States only went as far as the Mississippi River. And Frenchmen, most of them on the Census, come from lower Canada. And lower Canada is really along the St. Lawrence Riverway and on the eastern seaboard going down to the United States line and put back that they could build tall lower Canada. My time got to forlorn me the word went out so they figured out a situation that they could exploit that and get all of the goods out of there. So that was the beginnings of, you know, the western migration for the gold seekers. And they thought at one time that Oregon has a lot of gold too, but they never did find it. But they had the healing waters up there. You know, volcanic geothermal water up there. So that was, that was kind of cool to know. But also it's a rich and farm, farm land. Man, there's a lot of farm lands up there. I think I told you I have this newspaper and it was written in 1930, but it tells about the Oregon Trail and how many wagons left and throughout the years there was thousands and thousands of wagon trains that went through in what the settlers were experiencing as they were going on. And each time they referred to the Indians, they called them Fabbages. Frenchmen were most of the voyagers or trappers that were out here married native women and had family. So you have this humongous matey ring, an ETIF in Canada, so if you're doing genealogy and you're looking for a Frenchman and you can't find him down here, maybe you'll find him up there because there's the saying that when you see one Frenchman, he had 12 years, they're all over the place. And in fact, most of us have ancestors in Canada that we know nothing about. Underneath the black hills here, between here and Fort Peer and down into Kansas City area in between, there is some trading post and the people would go and trade for the muskets and the knives and skillets, pots and pans of calico for the women, scissors, you know, all of those items of the cattle that made life easier for the Lakruta. They call them friendly white people. They weren't mean people. They came in as friends. Per traders and the white people that were not part of the government, but they were gold figures and prospectors that came and made friends with Indians and they brought alcohol. That was the main thing that they brought. That's how they wound away whiskey and they introduced alcohol. They were the ones that bought it at the store, trading posts and places like that. They bring that four, five, fifty gallon barrels of alcohol. What they would do is that they would cut it in half. Use one barrel. They have an empty barrel from previous. They would take half of that and put it into one barrel, save this one for the next batch and they would mix in water, lognum, gunpowder, rattlesnake heads and there was some rough stuff, but it still got them drunk. Meanwhile, the good stuff was utilized by the fur traders to entice the leadership. That's what they got by. Let's say, alcohol, even though it was outlawed against Indians. It has a possession of alcohol. Most of the fur traders and travelers and settlers, the government have none to do with them. This is my authority. If they test one of them and do not throw an Indian, they'll take that white guy and prosecute him and take them away. They never came in and conquered it like the way they claimed it now. It didn't happen that way. They played it in another way. The same thing, so friendly white people, we know. I don't know why they wanted it, but a little bit of coercion from the fur trader because they knew that they could be able to make them weak to get a lower price. They didn't know, but they tried it and after they got drunk, they were hooked. How would you say it makes so-called make life easier? Momentarily, we put all our bad thoughts or the things that we have in our closet. All of a sudden, we could not worry about that. They were manipulative, and they would have to make that all mighty dollar. That's how I feel about the whole history of America. I feel that this important piece is missing, like from the perspective of the United States. When the pilgrims landed, they were a sorry lot. The Indians took them in, helped them out in that way, but as more and more settlers became overwhelming. That's when the Indians started fighting back. With the influx of European trappers, soldiers, and then settlers, intermarriage began. This mixing affected the trajectory of the Lakota. Seeing obviously today in the many European names, you can find amongst our people. In this next segment, Stella Aaron Cloud talks about how intermarriage came about. The rights of Lakota woman after colonization, the effects of intermarriage on the Lakota and the creation of half breed reservations. She was a typical vampire, you know, and she would sit there and tell me stories. It would just be her and I, you know, during the daytime till my grandpa came home from work. I remember my first little genealogy chart. I still have a copy of it. And she was saying that her grandmother was thought for 15 horses when she was 15 years old, and she was thought by this army lieutenant. Most of these chiefs, they're wanting a way into certain things. So they may give you a daughter or they may want you to buy this daughter because whether you're a trapper or you have a trading post, because when you look at who are the wives of these men, they're mainly native women. And most of them were bought and sold. Now whether it was for 15 horses or for the rights to hunt on this land or fish in this water or whatever, we were still puns a woman until she got separated. Now if you go back into the army history, all of the officers usually bought a woman. They could afford it when you go through the, what do you call it? The mustard call or something. The morning mustard roll or whatever. And you, you know, they've got separated between officers and enlisted men. Well, most of the officers that are listed there have kids over here. I mean the descendants over here. Now, you know, now a lot of people have not heard of half-breed reservations. There was an in Maha one down by Rulona Braska in some cornfield. You'll see a little sign. And in perdition was constant. There was the perdition half-breed reservations. So in 1849, you already had people who were a quarter. Now that means in 1849, if you've taken somebody who is four or four down to a quarter, their descendants are a quarter, that's a hundred years, basically, that those people were diluted, watered down. Whatever you want to word it, the bloodline got down to a quarter. So there was a lot of half-breed and the government just, there was no place to put them. So they started some of these half-breed reservations. While some have perhaps not heard of the doctrine of discovery, many more are aware of the concept of manifest destiny. It held at Europeans or Americans after 1776 were somehow intended to settle across what was declared by the Second Continental Congress as the United States of America. had no claim to land, they had been living on for at least several thousand years. They were considered occupants, not owners. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the following regarding the relationship between the discoverer and the native. In the establishment of these relations, the rights of the original inhabitants were, in no instance, entirely disregarded, but were necessarily, to a considerable extent, impaired. They were omitted to be the rightful occupants of the soil, with a legal as well as just claim to retain possession of it, and to use it according to their own discretion. But their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished, and their power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased, was denied by the original fundamental principle. That discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it. It should be mentioned that the indigenous people of Kauita had already been officially deemed merciless Indian savages, in the Declaration of Independence, which had been presented to Congress on July 4th, 1776. Referring to King George III of Great Britain and Ireland, it reads, "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages. Whose non-rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions." In this next clip, Cornell Conroy and Steve Newcombe established a direct link between the papal bulls of the late 1400s and U.S. federal law that was used to dispossess indigenous people of their land. Then we walked forward to when America won its American Revolution by 1776, began in the Declaration that they were independent from the Crown, their homeland, and became a sovereign state unto themselves through that Declaration. Now, treaty-making came out of, it has an article one sectionate, "Commerce calls to make treaties only for Congress." That's all of us. So America, in and of itself, is an ex-charter business of the Crown of England. Two weeks before the United States purchased it, Spanish gave them parts of their territory to the French. In all the Americans, when it was the seaport of New Orleans for Congress, you come into two ports, one on East Coast and one in the Gulf, but they ended up with this middle of America called the Louisiana Purchase Treaty. And then connecting that language from those documents to the U.S. system, the political and legal system of the United States, and specifically the Johnson v. McIntosh decision issued by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1823 by Chief Justice John Marshall. And that decision is premised upon the framework of domination that comes from those papal bulls or is expressed in those Vatican documents issued by various folks. So the question I always propose to the students is, "If you have two people negotiating the sale of your house and you're standing right outside there, and one sells to the other and pushes you out, what are the legal ramifications?" And they would always say, "Well, it's illegal. Well, there you go." Take a look at a book by Joseph Story, who was an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court when the Johnson v. McIntosh ruling was handed down. In 1833, while he was still on the Supreme Court, he published a book called Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. And in the opening of that book, he makes a direct connection between the Vatican papal bull of 1493 and the Johnson v. McIntosh ruling. He says, for example, the Indians were a savage race sunk in the depths of ignorance and heathenism if they might not be extropated, meaning eliminated, for their want of religion and just morals, they might be reclaimed from their errors, unquote. And then he says, "They, many of the Indians, were bound to yield to the superior genius of Europe, and in exchanging their wild and debasing habits for civilization and Christianity, they were deemed to gain more than an equivalent for every sacrifice and suffering." Finally, at the end of that section, he says this, "The papal authority, too, was brought in aid of these great designs, and for the purpose of overthrowing heathenism and propagating the Catholic religion, Alexander VI, by a bull issued in 1493, granted to the crown of Castile, the whole of the immense territory then discovered, or to be discovered, between the poles, so far as it was not then possessed by any Christian prince." So everything to do with the Black Hills, everything to do with the treaties, the Fort Laramie of 1851, 1868, and so forth, the wounded named Massacre, just all of the boarding schools, every way in which the "Locco to Doco to Doco to Doco to Nations" have been impacted and traumatized, has been a direct consequence of the connection between the Vatican papal bulls from the 15th century, the 1400s, and the Johnson versus Macintosh ruling, and the way in which that has played out in the political and legal system of the United States. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law, authorizing the President to grant lands west of the Mississippi, in exchange for Indian lands within the existing state borders. While some would go willingly, many tribes resisted being relocated from their ancestral home lands. At the same time, the concept of trust responsibility was established by the 1831 Cherokee Nation versus Georgia Supreme Court case. Trust responsibility consists of the highest moral obligations that the United States must meet to ensure the protection of tribal and individual Indian lands, assets, resources, and treaty and similarly recognized rights. Nonetheless, Jackson ignored this newly established trust responsibility, as well as the Warchester versus Georgia Supreme Court decision of 1832, which ruled that the Cherokee were a sovereign nation. This comes from the Museum of the Cherokee Indian. In 1838, Cherokee people were forcibly taken from their homes, incarcerated in stockades, forced to walk more than a thousand miles, and removed to Indian territory, now Oklahoma. More than 4,000 died and many are buried in unmarked graves along the trail where they cried. This is also known as the Trail of Tears. On January 24, 1848, a man named James Wilson Marshall found gold flakes in a river at the base of Water Nile this year on Nevada Mountains near present day, Kaloma, California. By the end of 1849, the non-indigenous population of the so-called California Territory had grown from less than 1,000 to around 100,000. The Oregon Trail, which connected what is now Independence, Missouri, with present day Oregon City, was being used steadily by migrants since 1843. Most indigenous people were welcoming of the travelers along the trail, preferring to trade for goods coming from the east rather than fight. Between 1840 and 1860, 362 migrants and 426 indigenous people had been killed. 90% of those west of present day south pass, which marked the continental divide in what is now Wyoming. This was of the estimated 350,000 migrants who used the Oregon Trail between 1841 and 1866. The Trail was only one of the available western routes at the time. Nonetheless, in 1849, the U.S. government started negotiations with tribes living between the so-called Arkansas and Missouri rivers to ensure the protection of migrants traveling west. The Lakota were one of nine tribes, whose representatives signed the 1851 Fort Lamy Treaty, which promised annuity to the participating tribes in line with the federal government's dress responsibilities. It should be noted that also in 1851, the U.S. government signed the Indian Appropriations Act, which created the reservation system. Under it, indigenous people were not allowed to leave those newly created reservations without permission. This is Marcel Boever and Richard Movescat. Look at 1851. The first treaty, what happened? Why was '51 put together? Okay, they wanted peace. The European forces were pretty strong from the east to west to midwest. They wiped out a lot of the small Indian vans that tried to go. When they came to the territory of the U.S., but what a nation and a scyand and a rapist, the soldiers had some problems. They couldn't defeat the warriors in the war. It was always a struggle. And finally, the Congress spelled this peace commission to come to the Indians and offer for a treaty. and ask to be at peace, they don't want to fight the Indians anymore. Frickster was made for Larmy right there at North Platte River. Wyoming and Nebraska and South Dakota border right in that area. To the west was a Shoshone about two or three hundred miles, a Shoshone people. Every once in a while they would come and raid and steal whatever they could. So the Lakutas had to be on under guard. Up north from a little big horned mountains up will be the cruel people. So there was always conflict with those two tribes. Oh, even further north, straight north will be the Sinomboin and a three-filiated Mandan, Adatsa and Rikura tribes. And those guys are related to the cruel. So even to this day there is a little bit of friction. So there was conflict. For one, according to history, it cost a lot of money to fight the Indians, particularly the Lakota. The Ketan nation was for Christ of Southern Bands, including sitting with people in Hunk Papa. And Lodola was the people, the rest of them, and they couldn't come any further back into the western part of the country. So they entered a treaty asking for permission to have access to rock between the Lakota country post-West. So they wanted to have in the green like that the male and the railroad won't be bothered. And the promise is that all of a sudden it will stay in that line. That treaty was made with the government to pass peacefully along Platt River towards the Oregon Trail. And the gold mines of the Gulf of California, Northern California. They were supposed to be in the white people in the Indian country. But during the time they found out that the soldiers were servicing force all along the way in the territory. So Red Cloud and some of the other leaders got obsessed and they went and burned them down. They called it the Red Clouds War. Article 6 paragraph 2 of the US Constitution states that all treaties made or which shall be made under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land. This clause puts federal treaties with indigenous tribes on the same level as acts of Congress. Despite their supremacy, there are many challenges that came with treaties as passing time would make obvious. The 1851 fortland treaty was no different. For one, there were not enough trans leaders available to ensure that the tribes had a full understanding of the document which was only written in English. Secondly, tribes usually made decisions based on consensus while the US government wanted to speak to elected officials. In the end, the tribes agreed to appoint chiefs to sign the document. But given traditional indigenous governance practices, they had no control over individuals that were not part of the signing. Lastly and certainly most fatally, the terms of the treaty were soon broken by colonists, the US government and the tribes. Marcel Boubert tells the story of what some historians call the Mormon Cal Incident or the Grant and Massacre. A 53/54 gratton from Fort Lermy that came out and read-headed Cadet that wanted to kill some Indians. Well, it was always drunk and mad, he was. So, one time Mormons were coming out of Fort Lermy and hear some of the boys that "Oh, Melco was just barely got kicked off." It was struggling, man, it was barely living. That wagon train went left, so that night and the next morning he was still walking out with. So, one of the boys went over and they killed it and they took a little meat they could off of it and left the rest of it. And here the Mormon man came back and he looked for it, he found it. So, he told Fort Lermy officials that they killed my cow and it was half we did anyway, but well, he won a compensation. So, the negotiation between the head, people and chiefs from all the bruley people, they found out who did it, so he offered to give them a horse. And I said, "No, no, no, no, this guy was greedy, but that cow was half dead. They said, "I'll give you a good horse for him." "No, no, no, I'll give you five horses." "No, no, no, no, no, no." So, you could see the conflict, the tension was going on. So, when we were granted and said, "I'll fix this up," he said. So, he went down there with 30 men and a cannon and tried to take the perpetrator and as all said and done, we were granted him and all 30 men were killed. It was a big issue, the treaty was broken, all because of a cow and a greedy man that didn't want to negotiate. A year later, William Harnie led 600 US Army soldiers to what is now called Blue Water Creek, three miles north of the present-day North Flat River. There they found a Lakota village whose 250 years old inhabitants, Harnie somehow decided it was responsible for the grass and massacre of the year before. Harnie separated his forces and attacked the village using new long grain rifles. The infantry men sent the villagers fleeing towards mounted soldiers to the North. In the end, 86 Malays and Oglaolas were killed and 70 women and children were taken captive. The TPs were plundered instead on fire. This so-called battle of Blue Water or Ash Hollow marked what is considered the first military campaign by US forces against the Lakota. During the 1850s, there was a growing call by Californians for the US Congress to establish a transcontinental railroad to deliver both passengers and goods from the middle and eastern coast of Keowita. In 1852, Congress authorized the Pacific Railroad Service which were carried out by the Secretary of War Jefferson Davis between 1853 and 1855. The first transcontinental railroad, the Pacific, would be constructed between 1863 and 1869. Connecting what is now a council bless Iowa with what was then called Oakland Long Wharf on San Francisco Bay. The Iron Horace had arrived. In 1858, the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, later known as the Colorado Gold Rush, brought 100,000 migrants to what is now Colorado but was then part of the so-called Kansas and Nebraska territories. In May of 1862, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act which granted Americans 160 acre plots and rewarded settlement on Western lands. The Act resulted in 1.6 million official homestead claims, amounting to 270 million acres. The most successful claims were made in present-day Montana, North Dakota, Colorado, and Nebraska. During this time, indigenous tribes, including the Lakota, were forced from their ancestral homelands in onto reservations to make way for homesteaders. In this next segment, Marcel Buber discusses Red Clouds War, which was a reaction to accelerating American westward expansion, without consideration for the country's original inhabitants. It started with 51 treaty, and they started encroaching onto the Indian country from, for learning me up to Wyoming and into Nebraska and the San Hills and they were even coming into the Black Hills at that time. And over here to the Sue River and Sue Falls area, to that area where they were starting to settle in and so boys were going over and discouraging them and chased them off and those best they could. The government wasn't listening to them so then they started actually taking wagon trains down and they found silver up there in Bozeman, Montana, and copper. They found traces of gold. Anyway, they made a trail up that way and the government was trying to put some forts up there. But Red Cloud didn't want them and boy, there was daily squirmishes, you know. So there's some battles attached to that too. I think the Federman and Master Curler was up there and they killed about a hundred. This is on December 21st, 1866, up there, shared in Wyoming. This is a little south of there. There's a monument over there for them. Crazy horse was the one that fought them, but we were protecting our land, protecting our hunting, our way of life and our food. But you know, one of the things that I've started putting detail into so that the students can understand how hard are people or how durable they were. One of them was that battle with Federman. It's the beginning of winter. And if you're. upon the mountains and the edge of it, it was cold. I always quiz my students about that. If we're cold now, your mom says, "Where jacket? Put extra socks on." They had moccasins, but they were very, very creative. Waterproof leggings come from the beaver and the otter. So they put that around their moccasins. And sometimes they would use the wool to wrap your feet in there. So that's why the camps were not very. There shouldn't be no movement until spring comes. When the thunders come back, when the thunders come back, that's the beginnings of the new year. It's not January 1st where we all get drunk and drop the ball and all of that kind of stuff. It's really different. It's all this alcohol over here. What the new year, we welcomed a new life. You know, make prayers to a Waqadqa. But they, you know, the Damascus, I don't realize that. Anyway, so '68, Red Claus' war started going. All right, the government says, "Okay, we're not going to fight." That's what they said. We'll make treaty. For a moment, let us go out of order because we would be irresponsible not to mention it. In August of 1862, around the time they found gold in what is now Western Montana and four years before the beginning of Red Claus' war, the Dakota War, otherwise known as the Sue uprising, began. After having their lands whittled away through treaties between 1805 and 1858, most of the Dakota's annuity payments were going to traders who said they were owed. In 1862, lay annuity payments, failing crops, and the refusal of traders and Indian agents to help the Dakota left many of our relatives starving and desperate. On August 18th, a group of Dakota attacked trading posts and settlements along what is now the Minnesota River Valley. After a month of fighting, most of the Dakota who participated in the war fled and the remaining 2000 or so surrendered. A military commission was created and 392 Dakota men were tried for killing and assaulting civilians. Regardless of what happened previously, the trials were unjust. Little evidence, strong bias against the Dakota and the affairs were conducted exclusively in English. While 300 and 3 were originally sentenced to death, President Lincoln reduced that number to 38. On December 26, 1862, the Dakota 38 were hinged in Makata or Blue Earth, now known as Mankato Minnesota, in the largest mass execution in U.S. history. In this next segment, Richard Moose camp and Richard two dogs explained the importance of Hisapa, the Black Hills, to the entire Oceti Shakongi. Part of the Black Hills, of course, is a nation of trees. Our life, our relatives that are over there. The nation of rocks, the nation of water, the nation of resources like grass, different plants. And throughout the history, people arrived at one of these places and they prayed. They worshipped the Creator. That was the home place of a lot of ceremonial history. That was the center of the life being. It was the center of everything. It was the center of our teachings. It was the center of the creation story. It was the center of the star knowledge. And it was seen as a holy place where we took our sick people to be healed. So just the power of the place could heal you, drinking the water. And just being on the earth inside. I mean, all of the earth was sacred, but this was even more sacred. That was ourselves. And lots and lots of our medicines grow there, which you'll never find anywhere else in the world. They took people there that were healed. They would move there in the spring. And then all the sick people, they would camp it some there and take care of them until they got wild. And they would move back onto the prairie. But it was it wasn't someplace where we lived on a continual basis. Our relationship with the Black Hills goes way beyond the 1400s. That was a sacred kind of like a sacred sacred altar. And they changed 51. Part of the government recognized that that was the the Sue country. And they said that was never going to be taken away. It was always your sacred land. And then again, in 1868. 1868 saw the first US presidential election after the Civil War. Voting rights for newly freed Black slaves were also being considered. In September of that year, George Armstrong Custer was sent to deal with the Cheyenne, some of whom had that summer entered what were by then Kansas and Oklahoma. General Philip Sheridan determined that a raid on the Cheyenne's winner cap might be most effective. On November 26th, Custer located a large village on the lodge pole river near present day Cheyenne, Oklahoma. He did not attempt to identify who this group was, or he would have found out that they were a peaceful band living on reservation land where the commander of nearby Fort Cobb had assured them safety. He must not have noticed the white flag hanging from one of the main dwellings either. At dawn the next morning, Custer ordered four columns of seven Calvary soldiers to overtake the quite village. Within a few hours, a hundred and a Cheyenne were dead, including the peace chief Black Kettle, along with many women and children. This was considered the first major victory by the US government of the Indian Wars. After what many historians call the Battle of the Washington, the Calvary rounded up 800 of the Cheyenne's horses in Chatham. Lenora Hart, Hallamann, said, "The horse enabled us to follow the buffalo herds. The horse was a symbol of wealth. To the Cheyenne people, the horse was like part of our family. That day at the lodge pole, we witnessed our horses shot, one by one. Our relatives say as they were dying, these horses were screaming like people. Today, during special ceremonies, we can still hear the cries of these horses. At least one account of this event says that Custer raped a young Cheyenne girl after the onslaught. According to the story, the young girl gave birth to a blonde baby, both of whom were abandoned by Custer and when his wife rejoined him. That same spring, the US government invited a quota representatives back to Fort Laramie, Wyoming. This is Richard Movescamp, Richard Iron Cloud, and myself Boober. The resettled a new commission, a new treaty of 1868. At this time, they recognized the Black Hills as the two headquarters in the quota territory, and the problem was not even a baller. That's the home of the quota people. I've got several grandfathers that were part of that treaty. One of them was that one on my mother's side. Another one named Black Hawk, he was on my father's side. There's actually a peace treaty, and the negotiate is an area of land, which goes from the Nyobrera River. It goes all the way up to the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming. It will go on to the Yellowstone River. It will go into another part of the river that goes by North Dakota, a place called Red River, and I'm going to that mini-show station, which is the Missouri River. It will come all the way down to Nyobrera, which is in Nebraska. That's the treaty territory of the Teton, and all of them are just a part of that. They're just one band of that group. If you look at '68, they were trying to build a road for the gold mines, and they want to look for more gold up into the Rocky Mountains, and up there along the Platt River, up until the Big Horn Mountains, and parts of Nyobrera. That's what caused a lot of our problems. They all started coming in, and then they started settling in on some of the land. Calvary was established about five or six forts up there along the Platt River, and up towards Blue Big Horn. Just think about that at this time. I think there were still people like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. They didn't want to participate in that treaty. And so they didn't go to Fort Lyury. And I think that created a kind of a vacuum, and it was a part of the Lakotas that didn't want to settle down into a reservation, and that's what they were trying to do, is trying to keep this place open for them. That's why it was part of the issue, as early as they couldn't control the whole Lakota nation. Again, '68 treaty was the western part of the state of South Dakota. And in between there was the Black Hills. In 1871, and what was meant to be a funding bill for Indian agencies which were set up to control trade with indigenous tribes, the U.S. Congress paid an end to any chats of future treaties. The writer to the Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 stated that, "Hereafter, no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty." The first question we had when we learned this was, "What did that mean for the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which had been signed just three years earlier?" Secondly, "What did this mean for the trust responsibility promised by the U.S. government that would provide for our well-being in exchange for giving up our freedom in our land?" In this next segment, Marcel Boobair and Richard Moose camp elaborated on this idea of trust responsibility, which included annuities and later rations or commodities, among other things that play an important role in our lives even today. "In order for us to survive, they promised because of the treaty that they're going to take care of us." "We started establishing federal policy against Indians, 40 Indians. One of the major things that happened was the government promised trust responsibility. Trust responsibility is a promise made during a treaty signing that government will take responsibility over the security, education, and welfare amongst the food fried. They carried it out, but they didn't carry it out in a good way." "So we need food, we need clothing, we need schooling, we need medical, we need energy and there's a whole list of them and one of them was food, rations, you had to bring a ration in for us once a month because we didn't have any food around, no buffalo. But by time it got here to Pine Ridge and finally came into the districts, it was 50% less than what the original price was. People, when it leaves Kansas City on a boat, it's worth $100,000, $78 boats will be coming. By time they get to Weston Bay, the contractor will skim 10-15% off of it. They load up that wagon by time it gets to Pine Ridge. Other 10-15% of that payload was skimmed. Indian agent with his office was skimmed 10% off of that again. Then with that, Indian agent called all the Wichashwit Khachan or the leaders and would skim off another top. By time it came to us, 50% was gone. That's how that system worked. That's a lot of fraud, a lot of fraud. They started bringing in, in '68 they started bringing in those big cattle here from Texas. You probably read about them sitting in Nebraska with the staging point. They have to bring that food in and they bring those cattle. By time they got those cattle here, they're skinny, Texas long ones, I mean there's no meat on them, they had diseases on them. If you look at Fort Robinson, they built cattle vats where cattle that come from the south will have to be dipped and deloused and all of that stuff because people were starting to die. They had those tainted meat, tainted animals, no medicine. There was a lot of death. You know the types of food that the annuity was given or the rations didn't have nothing to do with what we were used to eating. We were using buffalo and elk and wild game, lean meat, wild turnips, wild fruits. There was some plant life that we utilized and good water. Whenever we moved on to the reservation, we were given this rations, flour, white flour, beans, bacon, coffee, sugar, salt and pepper and then beef. That beef lasted only two weeks so they had to make things work where they had to go hunt with the rest of it. And sometimes there was a lot of problems, area ranchers along the edge of the reservation, they would start losing their cattle because of food and that's where some of those guys were sent to prison. When it comes to law enforcement, they established Indian police but the government had the control over them. They were kind of part of the military and then the welfare system, the model was based on the western model, not India. They forced Indians to give up their students, the children sent them to Carlisle Indian schools, boarding schools and then finally later on, the Christian schools on the reservation. So that trust responsibility was there but it wasn't the government, really didn't take full responsibility and then the years to come, there are other on 50s and 60s congressmen and the people that know the power of the government changed the terminology from trust responsibility to the replace it with the word of the government. That word of the government was misprefered by other congressmen and they were, they took it as Indians couldn't control themselves and they couldn't make up their lives. So the government took control over their lives and managed the well being. It changed. It still changed today. So things have gone really bad when the government got involved. You're listening to "Wamaka Oginaka Ichante", the heart of all oral history project brought to you by Lilmoon School and generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. You have reached the end of part one of this episode. For more information about the project visit www.heartofallhp.com.