Library:Our History is the Future

Our History Is the Future
Author	Nick Estes
Publisher	Verso Books
First published	2019
Type	Book
ISBN	978-1-78663-673-7
Source	Libgen

Prologue: Prophets

Thanksgiving is the quintessential origin story a settler nation tells itself: “peace” was achieved between Natives and settlers at Plymouth, Massachusetts, where Mayflower pilgrims established a colony in 1620, over roast turkey and yams. To consummate the wanton slaughter of some 700 Pequots, in 1637 the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Bradford, proclaimed that Thanksgiving Day be celebrated “in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.” Peace on stolen land is borne of genocide.

It was Thanksgiving 2016. We had spent a bitterly cold night at a Wyoming gas station off I-80, among a half-dozen other cars loaded with camp supplies and Water Protectors. Everyone was up before sunrise, hoping the interstate would reopen after the overnight freeze. Among them were Natives and non-Natives from the Pacific Northwest and West Coast, sporting fatigues and signature black and tan Carhartt jackets with patches declaring: “WATER IS LIFE.” “This is Trump country—we gotta hit the road!” one of the Water Protectors exclaimed, half-jokingly, to the packed truck stop bathroom. Outside, white men glared at us from their dually pickups. Wyoming is an oil, gas, and coal state, and it was sending its police to fight the modern-day Indian war that we were on our way to help resist. We filed into our cars and took the on-ramp toward Standing Rock.

This was my fourth and final trip to Oceti Sakowin Camp, the largest of several camps that existed at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, north of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, from April 2016 to February 2017. Initially, the camps had been established to block construction of Energy Transfer Partners’ $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), a 1,712-mile oil pipeline that cut through unceded territory of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and crossed under Mni Sose (the Missouri River) immediately upstream from Standing Rock, threatening the reservation’s water supply.

This was not just about Standing Rock water: The pipeline crossed upriver from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation on the Missouri River, transporting oil extracted from that reservation’s booming fracking industry. It cut under the Mississippi River at the Iowa–Illinois border, where a coalition of Indigenous peoples and white farmers, ranchers, and environmentalists in Iowa opposed it. And it crossed four states—North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois. But it was Standing Rock and allied Indigenous nations, including Fort Berthold, who had put up the most intense resistance.

After North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple declared a state of emergency on August 19, 2016—to safeguard the pipeline’s final construction—the movement surged. Dalrymple deployed the National Guard and invoked powers under the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) that are normally used only during natural disasters, such as floods, fires, and hurricanes. EMAC also allows for state, municipal, and federal law enforcement agencies to share equipment and personnel during what are declared “community disorders, insurgency, or enemy attack.” In April 2015, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan had also used EMAC powers to crush a Black-led uprising for justice for Freddie Gray, a Black man killed by Baltimore police. This time it was an Indigenous nation that was declared the threat.

The encampments were about more than stopping a pipeline. Scattered and separated during invasion, the long-awaited reunification of all seven nations of Dakota-, Nakota-, and Lakota-speaking peoples hadn’t occurred in more than a hundred years, or at least seven generations. Oceti Sakowin, dubbed the “Great Sioux Nation” by settlers, once encompassed territory that spanned from the western shores of Lake Superior to the Bighorn Mountains. Only in stories had I heard about the Oceti Sakowin uniting, its fire lit, and the seven tipis or lodges—each representing a nation—arranged in the shape a buffalo horn. Historically, this reunification had happened in times of celebration, for annual sun dances, large multi-tribal trading fairs, and buffalo hunts. But the last time was also in a time of war—to resist invasion. Now, the gathering had become what the passengers of our car—Carolina, an Indigenous immigration lawyer, Dina, an Indigenous writer, and I—liked to call “Indian City”; at its peak, the camp was North Dakota’s tenth-largest city. Its population surpassed 10,000 people, possibly reaching as many as 15,000.

The camp was at a standstill when we arrived, and completely encircled by law enforcement employing hundreds of miles of concertina wire, road blocks, and twenty-four-hour aerial surveillance, in what resembled a military occupation. In an effort to sow division, TigerSwan, a private security contractor hired by DAPL to assist North Dakota law enforcement, infiltrated the camps and planted false reports on social media and local news comparing Water Protectors to jihadist insurgents. The #NoDAPL movement was “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component,” they claimed, in documents released by the Intercept. The effects were devastating, and many of the planted stories continue to circulate as truth, the divisions cleaved still festering. And because of the violent police crackdown on protests, including the infamous October 27 raid on the 1851 Treaty Camp, a hiatus had been placed on high-risk direct actions like placing bodies before earthmovers.

So the next day—Black Friday—we went to the mall. In Bismarck, North Dakota, shoppers, mostly white, flooded the Kirkwood Mall, eager to cash in on holiday discounts. Our plan was to disrupt Black Friday shopping, in unison with other Black Friday actions, to keep the message of #NoDAPL in the news and the fire burning in people’s hearts and minds. Back at camp, I had run into a childhood friend, Michael, and his partner Emma, and we had packed into his car. Through traffic was entirely blocked on Highway 1806, the fastest route to reservation border towns Mandan and Bismarck, and military checkpoints choked off business to Prairie Knights Casino—a major employer in the reservation and source of revenue for Standing Rock—and hampered residents’ access to off-reservation jobs and groceries. What resembled an economic embargo and, in different circumstances, could be considered an act of war against a sovereign nation, added an extra half hour to forty-five minutes to our drive.

The mall was packed. Bismarck police, all of them white, guarded the entrances with AR-15 rifles. Once inside, our goal was to create a prayer circle in the mall’s large food court, without getting caught; this meant we would have to “blend in.” That’s hard enough for Natives in a sea of whites.

Our cover was blown. A white woman cried out: “They smell like campfire!” Shoppers stopped and looked. She pointed to a group of women—faces wind and sun-burnt, jackets and skirts unwashed—heading toward the mall’s restrooms. Two cops, their AR-15s slung over their shoulders, approached, and grabbed and twisted one of the women’s arm. She was dark-skinned, and her black hair was neatly braided to her waist. I waited to hear her arm pop from dislocation or fracture, as the cop slammed her face-first on the thin carpet.

“I’m trying to go to the bathroom!”

“Shut the fuck up!”

Soon all four of them were sitting on the ground with their hands zip-tied behind them, and then the cops dragged them away. The smell of fire, a central aspect of camp life—ceremony, planning, cooking, eating, sleeping, singing, storytelling, and keeping warm—had given them away. “Oceti” in “Oceti Sakowin,” after all, means “council fire.” In another time, they might have been accused of “smelling like an Indian” because fire is central to Lakota ceremonial life; but now, smoke also indicated that one had come from the #NoDAPL camps.

“What’s your problem?” asked a white man, approaching the cops. With a leg sweep, he was also facedown, with a knee on his neck and knee on his spine.

“Quit resisting!” the officer shouted. They didn’t bother to pick him up, instead dragging him belly-first across the ground.

“He smelled like campfire,” shrugged the cop who had thrown him down.

Eventually, we formed a prayer circle—before cops began tackling, punching, and kicking us too. A man’s crutches were taken from him, and he hobbled on one foot as another cop tackled him. White men from the crowd began holding Water Protectors for the police or throwing them into the police line.

“Go back to the reservation! Prairie niggers!” one of them screamed in our faces.

White children looking on also screamed, though they seemed more scared of the police than of the Water Protectors. A woman got caught between the police and our retreating line, and cops grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to the ground crying. Her partner stepped in and was kneed several times in the face. A woman began running as we made our way through the exit doors and was tackled on the pavement by a cop.

We had flinched each time they nabbed one of us from the crowd, expecting the now-familiar chemical shower of CS gas or pepper spray—another odor that was mixed in with the smoke, and that, in a single attack, could dull a person’s sense of smell for days, sometimes weeks. But the presence of white shoppers and their families—unwanted collateral damage—protected us from being shot or sprayed. Instead, the cops used their hands and feet. Thirty-three were arrested. After Michael, Emma, and I escaped, we rendezvoused at the car.

Michael turned to me, his hands shaking. “Now I know what it’s like to be hunted.”

At camp, the smell of campfire brought us back to another world—an older world, an Indigenous world always thought to be on the brink of extinction, a place at once familiar to Native peoples and radically unfamiliar to settlers. In the twilight hours, Water Protectors told stories and shared the prophetic visions of a better world, not just in the past, but one currently in the making, as purple-grey smoke filled the spaces between tipis, tents, and lines of cars and trucks.

The camps had attracted Indigenous and non-Indigenous people from across North America. On my first day in camp, in August, I dug compost holes with my Ojibwe relative Josh—a cook from Bismarck—and built a cook shack at the camp’s main kitchen with my Diné relative Brandon and a Palestinian network administrator, Emad, from Yankton, South Dakota—himself a refugee from the US-backed Israeli colonization of his homelands. My Palestinian comrade Samia once called our sacrosanct duty at camp an “intifada on the plains,” because she saw it as an uprising against the same occupier. The cook shack, pieced together with genuine solidarity and gnarly fallen trees, survived a brutal Northern Plains winter and helped feed thousands.

I also knew Michael, a white kid from my small hometown of Chamberlain, South Dakota, along the Missouri River. I grew up in a single-parent, single-income household, in a mobile home literally on the wrong side of the tracks. Michael’s parents made ends meet by working at the Catholic-run Indian boarding school where my father and his siblings had their Lakota culture and language beaten from them. Along with other kids like us, both Native and white, the two of us bonded over skateboarding, punk rock, and left politics—everything we felt rebelled against the pervasive, and often violent, conservatism of our hometown.

Politicians and media attempted to play up divisions in the camps, depicting white Water Protectors as “hippies” who treated the movement like “Burning Man.” Those elements existed, and some Native people played along. But such portrayals gloss over meaningful solidarities. For example, our national camp, Kul Wicasa, welcomed everyone. Our camp’s leader, my friend and Tahansi (cousin) Lewis Grassrope, helped create the Oceti Sakowin Horn, inviting not only Indigenous, but also non-Indigenous peoples to participate. (Our families had shared political commitments that went back generations. In the 1930s his great-grandfather Daniel Grassrope, a traditional headman, and my great-grandfather Ruben Estes, a translator, traveled together to Washington, DC, to encourage Congress to pass the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act.) Lewis knew the importance of allies.

Two years earlier he and I had spent cold nights in poorly insulated tipis protesting our own nation. Of all the tribal councils, that of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe was the only to cast support for TransCanada, the company building the Keystone XL Pipeline. Our protest camp had little to no help from our own people, nor from the outside world. There were no television cameras or social media live streams, and there was no Mark Ruffalo. But now the world had come to #NoDAPL. A white woman named Maria, a local reporter and a friend from Chamberlain, embedded herself in the camp as a cook, feeding thousands. Abe, a white military veteran from Colorado, ran our camp security. In Chicago, my comrades Kofi from #BlackLivesMatter and Renae, a Nuu-chah-nulth revolutionary socialist, led solidarity delegations. And there were many more.

Political elites and corporate media have frequently depicted poor whites and poor Natives as irreconcilable enemies, without common ground competing for scarce resources in economically depressed rural areas. Yet, the defense of Native land, water, and treaties brought us together. Although not perfect, Oceti Sakowin camp was a home to many for months. And the bonds were long lasting, despite the horrific histories working against them.

Chamberlain is a white-dominated border town next to the Lower Brule and Crow Creek Indian reservations. The settlement began as Fort Kiowa, across the river, a notorious trade hub whose early history is depicted in the 2015 blockbuster film The Revenant with great historical accuracy, despite its tired trope of a white savior “playing Indian.” The film shows the nineteenth-century fur trade’s organized plunder of not only the river ecosystem, but entire nations of people, and its apocalyptic death-world of rape, genocide, poaching, trespass, theft, and smallpox. In the final scene, the main protagonist, Hugh Glass, a real historical figure, approaches Fort Kiowa, where he sees Native women and children begging outside the gates and being bought and sold inside by drunk white traders. These river trade forts were the first “man camps”: large, usually temporary, encampments of men working in extractive industries, from the fur trade to oil and gas development, where rates of sexual and domestic violence, and murders and disappearances of Native women and girls are intensified. As Ihanktonwan elder and member of the Brave Heart Society Faith Spotted Eagle has pointed out, “history teaches us that during times of crisis violence escalates;” indeed, the proliferation of violence against the land has been directly related to attacks on Indigenous women’s bodies.

This region—our homeland—is also part of He Sapa, the Black Hills, or the heart of everything that is. He Sapa is the beating heart of the Lakota cosmos, where we emerged from red earth, took our first breath, and gained our humanity as Oyate Luta: the “Red People,” or the “Red Nation.” During the last ice age, massive glaciers carved up the land. After the ice retreated, it left rolling hills and tunneling valleys that became buffalo roads, where herds that once blackened the plains traveled during seasonal migrations to and from water. The buffalo followed the stars, and the people followed the buffalo. To honor our relations, we called ourselves “Pte Oyate” (the Buffalo Nation), and “Wicahpi Oyate” (the Star Nation). In these ebbs and flows of migration, all roads led to Mni Sose, which translates to “roiling water,” for the once-astir and often-muddy river. Many Lakotayapi nouns, like “Mni Sose,” indicate not merely static, inanimate form, but also action. In this landscape, water is animated and has agency; it streams as liquid, forms clouds as gas, and even moves earth as solid ice—because it is alive and gives life. If He Sapa is the heart of the world, then Mni Sose is its aorta. This is a Lakota and Indigenous relationship to the physical world. What has been derided for centuries as “primitive superstition” has only recently been “discovered” by Western scientists and academics as “valid” knowledge. Nevertheless, knowledge alone has never ended imperialism.

The US military understood this vital connection to place and other-than-humans in the 1860s when it annihilated the remaining 10 to 15 million buffalos in less than two decades. A century later another branch of the military, the US Army Corps of Engineers, constructed five earthen rolled dams on the main stem of the Missouri River, turning life-giving waters into life-taking waters. A river that was once astir was now choked and plugged. After World War II, the United States also aimed to “get out of the Indian business”: to terminate federal responsibilities to Indigenous peoples that had been guaranteed through treaties, to relocate Indigenous peoples off their reservations, and to sell off remaining lands and resources to private industry and white settlers. The Pick-Sloan Plan, a basin-wide multipurpose dam project—which aimed to provide postwar employment, hydroelectricity, flood control, and irrigation to white farming communities and far-off cities—worked in tandem with Indian termination and relocation. With the flooding of the fertile river bottomlands, people were forced off the reservation. Remaining lands were largely uninhabitable, making relocation the only option for many. Thirty percent of Missouri River reservation populations were removed; 90 percent of commercial timber was destroyed; thousands of acres of subsistence farms and gardens were flooded; and 75 percent of wildlife and plants indigenous to the river bottomlands disappeared.

Oglala visionary and prophet Nicholas Black Elk, himself a Catholic, compared the invasion of white Christians as akin to the biblical flood. But unlike the Genesis flood that receded after 150 days, Black Elk’s apocalyptic deluge had no end. It has worked continuously to eliminate Indigenous peoples and their other-than-human relatives from the land, thereby severing their relationship with the land. According to the vision Black Elk described to poet John Neihardt in 1931, white men came like an endless wall of floodwater, creating “a little island,” or a reservation, “where we were free to try to save our nation, but we couldn’t do it.” Constantly hounded as fugitives, escaping from one patch of dry land to the next, the people “were always leaving our lands and the flood devours the four-leggeds as they flee.” The four-leggeds were bears, elk, deer, buffalos, wolves, and so forth—some of whom are presently extinct in the lands of the Oceti Sakowin. The Department of the Interior is tasked with managing the diminished lands and territories of both wildlife and Indians, survivors of an ongoing holocaust. “All of our religion of the old times that the early Indians had was left behind them as they fled and the water covered the region,” Black Elk lamented. “Now, as I look ahead, we are nothing but prisoners of war.” His “we” included the four-leggeds.

Over the last 200 years, the US military has waged relentless war on the Oceti Sakowin as much as it has on their kinship relations, such as Pte Oyate (the buffalo nation) and Mni Sose (the Missouri River). What happened at Standing Rock was the most recent iteration of an Indian War that never ends. DAPL was originally meant to cross the Missouri River upstream from Bismarck, a city that is 90 percent white. But the Army Corps rerouted it to cross downstream, citing a shorter route, fewer water crossings, and reduced proximity to residential areas. Now, it crossed the river just upstream from an 84 percent Native residential area—a suggestion made not by Dakota Access, but by the Army Corps, which went so far as to guide companies funding the pipeline to create environmental justice studies that would find no “disproportionate risk to a racial minority.”

In fact, the Army Corps had been one of the main driving forces behind choking the Missouri River after World War II. In 1946, without authorization from Congress, the Army Corps modified the Garrison Dam project to protect the small majority-white town of Williston, North Dakota, from flooding. Nothing was done, however, to protect against the flooding of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The 212-foot dam flooded 152,360 acres of reservation lands, dislocating 325 families (80 percent of the tribal membership) and destroying 94 percent of their agricultural lands. In 1955, the Army Corps selected the Big Bend dam site on Lower Brule and Crow Creek reservation lands, without notifying either tribal council. Six different sites were considered, four of which would not have flooded the agency town of Lower Brule. The reservation site was chosen for hydraulic reasons but also because its location wouldn’t flood the upriver town of Pierre, the white-dominated state capital of South Dakota, or its neighboring town of Fort Pierre. Big Bend Dam flooded and dislocated both reservation communities for the second time, forcing some families who had moved to higher ground to relocate yet again. The first flood took out the Crow Creek Agency (the combined headquarters of the Crow Creek and Lower Brule tribes). A quarter of Lower Brule’s population was removed during the first deluge, and half during the second.

My grandparents, Joyce and Andrew Estes—both Kul Wicasa from Lower Brule—fought the construction of the Pick-Sloan dams in the 1950s and 1960s. The dams flooded nearly all of my great-grandmother Cornelia Swalla’s allotment. My grandfather, a World War II veteran and, according to my father, Ben, a Lakota code talker, returned from the war to find his homelands and nation under threat from the very government he fought to defend. Our lands, and lives, were targeted not because they held precious resources or labor to be extracted. In fact, the opposite was true: our lands and lives were targeted and held value because they could be wasted—submerged, destroyed. Grandpa Andrew, nicknamed “Brown” for his dark complexion, later gifted his mother Cornelia’s remaining allotted lands to the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe so that our nation could rebuild the inundated Lower Brule town site. In 1937, my great-grandfather Ruben Estes, Cornelia’s husband and the first tribal chairman, opposed the state of South Dakota’s attempt to build dams on the Missouri River without Lower Brule’s consent. The old ones called Ruben “Tongue” because, after butchering his cattle, he gave away all the meat to elders and the hungry, keeping only the tongues for himself. My ancestors were tribal historians, writers, intellectuals, and fierce Indigenous nationalists at a time when Indians weren’t supposed to be anything but drunk, stupid, or dead. They were also Water Protectors, treaty defenders, and humble people of the earth, and they fought for and took care of Mni Sose as best as they could.

In 1963, my grandfather Frank Estes, who was named after Franklin Delano Roosevelt in honor of the “Indian New Deal,” wrote and published the first book on Lower Brule, Make Way for the Brules. His book was a study of Indigenous movement before and during the reservation period. It was a response to the forced removals caused by the Fort Randall and Big Bend Dams and a challenge to the confinement narrative that Native people should just stay “home” in prisoner of war camps, now called “reservations,” out of sight and out of mind. In 1971, my grandfather George Estes, with Richard Loder, cowrote Kul-Wicasa-Oyate—a more extensive history of Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, including the reconstitution of communities and families after surviving forced removal by the US military to our river reservation homeland in the nineteenth century, as well as the two forced relocations caused by the Pick-Sloan dams in the twentieth century.

My grandfather Andrew, who had an eighth-grade education, wrote in the preface of Kul-Wicasa-Oyate what would have been a fitting epigraph for this book about our nation’s history of the defense of our land, our water, and our people:

My people’s history has been lost or destroyed since the coming of the white man. My people, in many ways, have been lost and destroyed by the coming of the white man … This book is not the whole story of my people nor is it all that is best in our heritage. Some of our traditions, our hopes and our roots, we will never write down for the world to see. What we will allow the world to see is, in good part, in these pages. Read them my brothers and you white man, you read them too. It is a history of a proud people: a people who believe in the land and themselves. My people were civilized before the white came and we will be civilized and be here after the white man goes away, poisoned by his misuse of the land and eaten up by his own greed and diseases.

In September 2016, at a #NoDAPL protest in Chicago organized by the Native community and groups such as #BlackLivesMatter, I told this family history in front of a crowd of thousands outside the Army Corps headquarters. That city’s vibrant Native community was itself a result of federal relocation programs onto traditional Potawatomi territory, an Indigenous nation subjected to genocide and removed from its homelands in the place currently called “Chicago.” My ancestors could never have imagined that thousands, perhaps millions, would one day rally to defend the river, our relative Mni Sose. Half a century ago, there were no mass protests against the dams that still wreak havoc on our river, a history I have spent the more than a decade speaking and writing about, with little interest from the outside world.

As we marched, a light rain fell.

“Tell me what the prophecy looks like!” we chanted.

“This is what the prophecy looks like!”

And it was prophecy. Prophecy told of Zuzeca Sapa, the Black Snake, extending itself across the land and imperiling all life, beginning with the water. From its heads, or many heads, it would spew death and destruction. Zuzeca Sapa is DAPL—and all oil pipelines trespassing through Indigenous territory. But while the Black Snake prophecy foreshadows doom, it also foreshadows historic resistance and resurgent Indigenous histories not seen for generations, if ever. To protect Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples will have to unite to turn back the forces destroying the earth—capitalism and colonialism. But prophets and prophecies do not predict the future, nor are they mystical, ahistorical occurrences. They are simply diagnoses of the times in which we live, and visions of what must be done to get free. In the past, youth followed the guidance of Indigenous elders, the old ones. But in these prophetic times, it is the old ones who are following the leadership of the young, the youth leaders of the #NoDAPL movement—among them, Zaysha Grinnell, Bobbi Jean Three Legs, Jasilyn Charger, and Joseph White Eyes, among others, who brought the message of the Black Snake to the world through thousand-mile relay runs from April to July of 2016.

For the Oceti Sakowin, prophecies like the Black Snake are revolutionary theory, a way to help us think about our relationship to the land, to other humans and other-than-humans, and to history and time. How does one relate to the past? Settler narratives use a linear conception of time to distance themselves from the horrific crimes committed against Indigenous peoples and the land. This includes celebrating bogus origin stories like Thanksgiving. But Indigenous notions of time consider the present to be structured entirely by our past and by our ancestors. There is no separation between past and present, meaning that an alternative future is also determined by our understanding of our past. Our history is the future. Concepts such as Mni Wiconi (water is life) may be new to some, but like the nation of people the concept belongs to, Mni Wiconi predates and continues to exist in spite of white supremacist empires like the United States.

The protestors called themselves Water Protectors because they weren’t simply against a pipeline; they also stood for something greater: the continuation of life on a planet ravaged by capitalism. This reflected the Lakota and Dakota philosophy of Mitakuye Oyasin, meaning “all my relations” or “we are all related.” Water Protectors led the movement in a disciplined way, by what Lakotas call Wocekiye, meaning “honoring relations.” To the outside world this looks like “praying,” the smoking of the Canupa, the sacred pipe, offering tobacco, ceremony, and song to human and other-than-human life. The late Lakota linguist and scholar Albert White Hat Sr. notes that Wocekiye was purposely mistranslated to “praying” by Christian missionaries to describe “bowing and kneeling to a supreme power, which is much different from the original meaning of acknowledging or meeting a relative.” There was no equivalent to “praying” in the Lakota language, although the word has taken on that meaning because of Christian influence.

For the Oceti Sakowin, Mni Sose, the Missouri River, is one such nonhuman relative who is alive, and who is also of the Mni Oyate, the Water Nation. Nothing owns her, and therefore she cannot be sold or alienated like a piece of property. (How do you sell a relative?) And protecting one’s relatives is part of enacting kinship and being a good relative, or Wotakuye, including from the threat of contamination by pipeline leak—in other words, death. This would also spell death for the Oceti Sakowin and its nonhuman relations. In this way, the rallying cry of Mni Wiconi—“water is life”—is also an affirmation that water is alive. Hunkpapa historian Josephine Waggoner has suggested that the word mni (water) is a combination of the words mi (meaning “I”) and ni (meaning “being”), indicating that it also contains life.

Mni Wiconi and these Indigenous ways of relating to human and other-than-human life exist in opposition to capitalism, which transforms both humans and nonhumans into labor and commodities to be bought and sold. These ways of relating also exist in opposition to capitalism’s twin, settler colonialism, which calls for the annihilation of Indigenous peoples and their other-than-human kin. This is distinct from the romantic notion of Indigenous people and culture that is popular among non-Natives and has been aided by disciplines such as anthropology—a discipline that has robbed us of a viable future by trapping us in a past that never existed. In the last two centuries, armies of anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, hobbyists, and grave robbers have pillaged and looted Indigenous bodies, knowledges, and histories, in the same way that Indigenous lands and resources were pillaged and looted. Their distorted, misinterpreted Indigenous histories are both irrelevant and unfamiliar to actually existing Indigenous peoples, and they are deeply disempowering.

There exists no better example of Indigenous revolutionary theory, and its purposeful distortion, than the Ghost Dance. In popular history books, the Ghost Dance appears briefly, only to die at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. The Ghost Dance, in the revolutionary sense, was about life, not death; it was about imagining and enacting an anticolonial Indigenous future free from the death world brought on by settler invasion. It originated with Paiute prophet and healer Wovoka. In his vision, the Great Spirit’s Red Son transforms the earth. This Red coming of the Messiah wipes away the colonial world, bringing back the animals, plants, and human and other-than-human ancestors destroyed by white men and, in turn, destroying the destroyers. Wovoka did not predict the future. Rather, he profoundly understood the times in which he lived, and his prophecy occurred in response to the hardships brought on by reservation life. Its message of a coming Indigenous future spread like wildfire up the Western Canadian coast, down to the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico, and onto the Plains. The Ghost Dance unified Indigenous peoples behind a revolutionary movement—one that sought nothing less than the complete departure of the colonial reality. Its visions were powerful and remain so today. Indigenous dancing had itself been outlawed and was therefore a criminal act. Lakota and Dakota Ghost Dancers attempted to shut down the reservation system by refusing to send children to boarding schools or to heed the orders of Indian agents. But the absence of the colonial system was not enough to bring about true freedom; rather, freedom could only find its genuine expression in actions that would create a new Indigenous world to replace the nightmarish present.

The beauty and power of the Ghost Dance moved Oglala prophet Nicholas Black Elk, who saw it as parallel to his own vision: that the people must unite to nourish back to health the tree of life, so that it can bloom once again. The dance brought Black Elk new visions of Wanikiya, the Lakota word for the Red Messiah that literally means “to make live.” In 1932, poet John Neihardt published a literary interpretation of Black Elk’s vision in Black Elk Speaks, an influential book that Standing Rock scholar Vine Deloria Jr. described as “a North American bible of all tribes.” After the Seventh Cavalry Regiment massacred more than 300 Lakota Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee in 1890, the Ghost Dance and Black Elk’s vision were thought to be dead or dying, like Native people. Neihardt contributed to this notion by fabricating the most-quoted lines in Black Elk Speaks. “A people’s dream died there,” mourned Black Elk in this made-up version, seeing the carnage at Wounded Knee and his relatives’ bodies strewn across the bloody snow. “The nation’s hoop is broken and scattered.” But Black Elk never believed that, and he knew that collective visions for liberation didn’t die at Wound Knee. “The tree that was to bloom just faded away,” he said reflecting on the massacre forty years later, “but the roots will stay alive, and we are here to make that tree bloom.”

Roots are an apt metaphor to explain how the aspirations for freedom—the tree of life—had stayed alive. Ceremonies, dance, language, warrior and political societies, and spiritual knowledge were forced underground, each of them made illegal by the punitive Civilization Regulations and only fully “legalized” in 1978 with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Like many, to protect himself and his family, Black Elk had converted to Catholicism, but he never lost faith in his vision. For him, liberation wasn’t a one-off event, a single action, or a moment. If history books do not altogether deny the Wounded Knee Massacre, sympathetic treatments tend to label the Ghost Dance as a “harmless” trend that would have faded into the past, like the Indians practicing it. But if it were just dancing that was the threat, then why did the United States deploy nearly half its army against starving, horseless, and unarmed people in order to crush it?

Indigenous resistance draws from a long history, projecting itself backward and forward in time. While traditional historians merely interpret the past, radical Indigenous historians and Indigenous knowledge-keepers aim to change the colonial present, and to imagine a decolonial future by reconnecting to Indigenous places and histories. For this to occur, those suppressed practices must make a crack in history.

Karl Marx explained the nature of revolutions through the figure of the mole, which burrows through history, making elaborate tunnels and preparing to surface again. The most dramatic moments come when the mole breaks the surface: revolution. But revolution is a mere moment within the longer movement of history. The mole is easily defeated on the surface by counterrevolutionary forces if she hasn’t adequately prepared her subterranean spaces, which provide shelter and safety; even when pushed back underground, the mole doesn’t stop her work. In song and ceremony, Lakotas revere the mole for her hard work collecting medicines from the roots underfoot. During his campaign against US military invasion, to protect himself Crazy Horse collected fresh dirt from mole mounds. Because he knew it to contain medicines, he washed his body with the dirt. Hidden from view to outsiders, this constant tunneling, plotting, planning, harvesting, remembering, and conspiring for freedom—the collective faith that another world is possible—is the most important aspect of revolutionary work. It is from everyday life that the collective confidence to change reality grows, giving rise to extraordinary events.

At Oceti Sakowin Camp, courage manifested through the combination of direct actions and the legal strategy to defeat DAPL in court, which the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe spearheaded. Direct actions drew media attention and thus amplified the messages of #NoDAPL and Mni Wiconi, putting pressure on the federal courts and institutions to weigh in on the issue of Standing Rock’s sovereignty. Direct actions also had the immeasurable psychological effect of empowering the powerless to action, by encouraging everyday people to take control of their lives and to shrug off the self-doubt and genuine fear that accompanies centuries of violent occupation. It also formed in everyday camp life.

The camps also performed another critical function: caretaking, or providing nourishment, replenishment, comradery, encouragement, warmth, songs, stories, and love. The ultimate goal for Dakotas, and therefore the Oceti Sakowin, “was quite simple: One must obey kinship rules; one must be a good relative,” wrote the Dakota scholar Ella Deloria. This was the underground work of the mole and the foundation of any long-term struggle, though it often receives less attention than headline-grabbing spectacles of mass protest and frontline action. Yet, both are equally important and necessary. As Dakota scholar Kim TallBear argues, caretaking labor is often gendered, and is seen as the work of women. But the fact that many contemporary social movements—in particular #NoDAPL, Idle No More, and #BlackLivesMatter—were led by women, and Two-Spirit and LGBTQ people, is important.

My friend and relative, Lakota Water Protector Marcella Gilbert, pointed out how these roles have been taken up by generations of Indigenous women. Marcella’s mother, Madonna Thunder Hawk, and her aunties, Phyllis Young and Mabel Anne Eagle Hunter, were all leaders and participants of the Red Power Movement during the 1960s and 1970s. They were all pivotal members of the American Indian Movement, helped found the International Indian Treaty Council at Standing Rock in 1974, and formed Women of All Red Nations that same year—movements I will describe later in this book. Their leadership continued at Oceti Sakowin Camp by seeing to it that the next generation carried on the tradition. Phyllis Young was a respected Standing Rock elder and former councilwoman. Madonna and Mabel Anne fell back into leadership roles in their own camps, teaching and mentoring young people. For Marcella, freedom was education. She was a product of the “We Will Remember” Survival School, founded in Rapid City, South Dakota, in 1974. Her mother, Madonna, helped to create the school, where students were taught treaty rights and Native culture and history. We Will Remember was one of many survival schools created to address rampant discrimination against Native students in public schools, and to undo the indoctrination of Christianity and US patriotism at government- and church-run boarding schools. For Marcella, the #NoDAPL camps continued the tradition, providing a radical grassroots education on Indigenous self-determination and political autonomy—what it’s like to live and be free—to thousands of young Native people. In other words, moments like #NoDAPL are ones where the Indigenous movement reproduces itself and grows.

Our History Is the Future explores the movement to protect the Missouri River marching under the banner of Mni Wiconi. How did it emerge, and how does settler colonialism, a key element of US history, continue to inform our present? #NoDAPL and Mni Wiconi are part of a longer history of Indigenous resistance against the trespass of settlers, dams, and pipelines across the Mni Sose, the Missouri River. The Oceti Sakowin—our relationship to Mni Sose, and our historic struggle for liberation—are fundamentally tied to our prior history of Indigenous nationhood and political authority. This book is less a story about objects, individuals, and ideas than it is a history of relationships—those between the Oceti Sakowin, Mni Sose, and the United States as an occupying power. By focusing on these relationships, we can see that Indigenous history is not a narrow subfield of US history—or of the history of capitalism or imperialism, for that matter. Rather, Indigenous peoples are central subjects of modern world history.

This is not simply an examination of the past. Like #NoDAPL and Mni Wiconi, what I call traditions of Indigenous resistance have far-reaching implications, extending beyond the world that is normally understood as “Indigenous.” A tradition is usually defined as a static or unchanging practice. This view often suggests that Indigenous culture or tradition doesn’t change over time—that Indigenous people are trapped in the past and thus have no future. But as colonialism changes throughout time, so too does resistance to it. By drawing upon earlier struggles and incorporating elements of them into their own experience, each generation continues to build dynamic and vital traditions of resistance. Such collective experiences build up over time and are grounded in specific Indigenous territories and nations.

For the Oceti Sakowin, the affirmation Mni Wiconi, “water is life,” relates to Wotakuye, or “being a good relative.” Indigenous resistance to the trespass of settlers, pipelines, and dams is part of being a good relative to the water, land, and animals, not to mention the human world. Contrast this with the actions of Energy Transfer Partners (the financial backers of DAPL)—and of capitalism, more broadly, which seeks above all else to extract profits from the land and all forms of life. This is not to suggest that Indigenous societies possess the solution to climate change (and in fact, many Indigenous nations actively participate in resource extraction and capitalist economies in order to strengthen their self-determination). But in its best moments, #NoDAPL showed us a future that becomes possible when everyday Native people take control of their own destinies and lands, while drawing upon their own traditions of resistance. I am interested in the kind of tradition of Indigenous resistance that is a radical consciousness, both anti-capitalist and anti-colonial, and is deeply embedded in history and place—one that expresses the ultimate desire for freedom.

In this book, I move through seven episodes of Oceti Sakowin history and resistance. This history is by no means exhaustive, but I have chosen to focus on these particular cases to show how they inform our present moment, and to chart a historical road map for collective liberation.

Chapter 1 tells the story of the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock and its origins in the battle against tar sands extraction and the Keystone XL Pipeline, whose defense of Lakota and Dakota lands are part of a tradition of resistance against US imperialism that began centuries ago. I turn to the beginning of that history in chapter 2, which describes the Oceti Sakowin’s emergence as a nation and its first encounters, in the nineteenth century, with the United States as a predator nation.

Before long, those encounters evolved into the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century—the subject of chapter 3—that raged across the Northern Plains, in which the Oceti Sakowin defended against US military invasion and counterinsurgency tactics. By the turn of the twentieth century, Indigenous people had been largely confined to ever-dwindling reservations. The Oceti Sakowin, however, confronted the US military—the Army Corps of Engineers—again in the mid twentieth century, as US policy turned to the use of large-scale river development to continue the project of Indigenous dispossession—with policymakers attempting, all the while, to relieve themselves of the responsibilities outlined in the treaties.

In chapter 4, I outline these schemes through the story of the mid-century Pick-Sloan Plan, which authorized the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation to dam the main stem of the Missouri River. These dams specifically targeted and destroyed Native lives and lands, with 611,642 acres of land condemned through eminent domain, 309,584 acres of which were vital reservation bottomlands. Flooding also forced more than a thousand Native families to relocate, in patent violation of treaties and without prior consent. The memory of this experience was still fresh at the #NoDAPL camps.

Chapter 5 outlines the story of the urban-centered American Indian Movement (AIM) and their 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation—the culmination of more than a decade of Red Power organizing. This became the catalyst for a mass gathering of thousands at Standing Rock in 1974, which resulted in the founding of the International Indian Treaty Council—a body that would eventually lead international efforts for Indigenous recognition that have had a deep, global significance.

Chapter 6 traces the history of twentieth-century Indigenous internationalism—particularly, the Oceti Sakowin’s central role in spearheading the four-decade-long campaign for Indigenous recognition at the United Nations, which was the basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The global Red Power movement eventually became a catalyst for the contemporary #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock. Chapter 7 draws out these links, reflecting upon the ways our past and present struggles are connected, as they are to both past and present international anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements around the world.

1. Siege

To us, as caretakers of the heart of Mother Earth, falls the special responsibility of turning back the powers of destruction … Did you think the Creator would create unnecessary people in a time of such terrible danger?

—Chief Arvol Looking Horse,

Keeper of the Sacred Buffalo Calf Pipe

“We’re going to declare war on the Keystone XL Pipeline,” announced Oglala Sioux Tribal President Bryan Brewer, before a throng of cameras and microphones. It was late March 2014, at an opening ceremony for a spirit camp on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. A crowd erupted into bursts of akisas and lililis—Lakota war cries and the high-pitched tremolos of assent. Keystone XL (KXL), or any oil pipeline, would not pass through Oceti Sakowin territory without a fight. This is a war story. But it is not always with weapons that warriors wage their struggle.

A dozen tribal national flags fluttered behind Brewer in the prairie wind, a sign of growing unity among Indigenous nations. His speech marked the beginning of a historic resistance that was to coalesce against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016. It was not orchestrated behind closed doors by wealthy think tanks or big environmental NGOs. Rather, like its people, it grew from the earth and this humble landscape, often viewed as flyover country. It also grew from a deep history of struggles over land and water, and a fight for a livable future on a planet so thoroughly devastated by climate change.

Earlier in March, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, under the direction of its president, Cyril “Whitey” Scott, abruptly ended a lease with a white farmer renting reservation land adjacent to the KXL pipeline’s path. The pipeline snaked carefully through a complex checkerboard of private and tribal land ownership, a legacy of the 1887 Dawes General Allotment Act that broke up large chunks of reservation land by selling it off to white settlers. With yellow cornstalks still jutting through the snow from last year’s harvest, workers from the Wica Agli men’s health initiative, citizens of Rosebud, and supporting Native people erected tipis on reclaimed earth—directly in the path of the pipeline. They called the camp Oyate Wahacanka Woecun, meaning “shield the people.” Large, round hay bales were taken from another plot leased by a white rancher and stacked to surround the camp, forming a barrier against harsh winds. The thick straw walls, it was said, may have also stopped bullets fired in the cover of darkness by vengeful white farmers.

It didn’t matter if this was private property. It was still treaty territory, territory that generations of Lakotas and Dakotas had died defending and lived to care for. If not stopped, 800,000 barrels of tar sands oil would be transported each day across 1,200 miles of land—from Hardisty, Alberta, to Steele City, Nebraska—traversing 357 streams and rivers (all tributaries of the Missouri River), and crossing the Ogallala Aquifer, North America’s largest aquifer. Because everyone depended on the water, whether for drinking or agriculture, Mni Wiconi (Water is life) trumped the sacredness of private property. “It’s not an Indian thing, it’s not a white thing,” Rosebud Sioux Council Representative Wayne Frederick explained. “It’s everybody’s issue.”

White landowners from Nebraska were also at the camp’s opening, standing at the edge of the crowd holding signs that read “PIPELINE FIGHTER.” They had joined the Cowboy-Indian Alliance, a campaign led by a progressive group of white farmers and ranchers from Bold Nebraska and Dakota Rural Action. Some of the landowners, however, were libertarians who were more concerned with the sanctity of private property and the evils of “big government” than with Indian treaties and climate change. And while they captured much of the media attention around KXL resistance, they represented a minority of the affected white landowners from Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska. On the plains, solidarity with Indigenous nations is a hard sell that often comes down to land and money. By this time, TransCanada, the company building the KXL, reported at least 92 percent of the 302 South Dakotan landowners in the pipeline’s path had agreed to sell their lands voluntarily. The situation was similar in Nebraska and Montana. The holdouts had filed lawsuits to stop eminent domain proceedings, the seizure of private land for “public use,” the definition of which includes privately owned oil pipelines. But these were a mere handful of individuals, as compared to the many Indigenous nations who, for the most part, wholly opposed KXL.

This leg of KXL crossed through the permanent reservation boundaries of the Great Sioux Nation and unceded lands of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which forbids white settlement without Indigenous consent. The irony, Lakota historian Edward Valandra observed, was that any condemned private land would be “twice stolen”—land white squatters first stole from Natives would then be taken by a Canadian oil company. Settlers and private property have always been the vanguards of invasion, and the sanctity of private property never applied to Indigenous peoples. But instead of turning their backs, like the first settlers did to them, Native nations—such as Rosebud, Pine Ridge, Yankton, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock—welcomed the potential allies. After all, “Lakota” (or “Nakota” or “Dakota”) translates to “ally.” To turn away, on account of differences, those with shared enemies or mutual interests goes against the very being of Lakota culture.

Much as it has been for centuries, this conflict was about the land: who stole it, who owned it, and who claimed it. On the High Plains, land is a matter of race, class, and colonialism. KXL was possible only because Indigenous genocide and removal had cleared the way for private ownership of land. Federal laws such as the Dawes Act and the 1862 Homestead Act, which opened up 270 million acres of Native land, subsidized white settlement to supplant entire Native nations, and eventually concentrated it in the hands of a few. According to a 2002 report by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), white settlers own 96 percent of all private agricultural lands in the United States, and 98 percent of private lands overall. According to a 2012 USDA report, in Lakota and Dakota reservations, non-Natives collect 84.5 percent of all agricultural income, controlling nearly 60 percent of the agricultural lands and 65 percent of all reservation-based farms. This includes the white billionaire and media tycoon Ted Turner, who owns more than 2 million acres of ranchland across the globe and more than 200,000 acres of Oceti Sakowin treaty land in western South Dakota. The radical scholar Cedric Robinson identified this system, in which a single white man owns more wealth and land than entire Indigenous nations, as racial capitalism. Capitalism arose under a racist European feudal system. It used “race” as a form of rule—to subordinate, to kill, and to enslave others—and used that difference for profit-making. Racial capitalism was exported globally as imperialism, including to North America in the form of settler colonialism. As a result, the colonized and racialized poor are still burdened with the most harmful effects of capitalism and climate change, and this is why they are at the forefront of resistance. The legacy of racial capitalism and ongoing settler colonialism were why the Oceti Sakowin had gathered to oppose KXL in 2014, and why they would gather again to oppose DAPL.

KXL resistance emerged six years after the US housing market collapsed and the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, inherited the mantle of a white supremacist empire. As global temperatures continued rising, Obama committed to curbing carbon emissions, but as part of his “all-of-the-above energy strategy,” he also embraced the oil industry as it opened new markets and lands to exploit. US domestic crude oil production skyrocketed from 2008 to 2016—an 88 percent increase, thanks to the shale oil boom in the United States and the tar sands boom in Canada. With this acceleration came new oil pipelines and new sites of extraction. As 9.3 million US families—many of them poor, Black, and Latinx—faced home foreclosures, Indigenous lives, lands, waters, and air were once again sacrificed to help pull settler economies out of the gutter.

In response to the economic crisis, revolutionary flowers had blossomed in public squares around the world, offering for a brief moment a vision for a different world. In 2010, young people of the Arab Spring toppled dictators, and tragedy and betrayal soon followed. In 2011, disenchanted millennials of the Occupy Wall Street movement put anti-capitalism back on the agenda to challenge the rule of the 1 percent, the wealthy elite. In response, police bludgeoned, tear gassed, and jailed the 99 percent. Out of this chaos, a mass Indigenous movement reawakened, the seeds of which were planted generations before. While the movements of public squares arose in the cities, the Indigenous uprising mobilized city and country alike, everywhere Indigenous peoples and their allies were found.

During the winter of 2012 to 2013, Indigenous rebellion was afoot on Turtle Island. Its heartbeat was a drum, its voice a song. In what is currently Canada, Indigenous women of Idle No More led a mass movement of round dances (traditional healing and celebratory dancing and singing) in shopping malls and blockades of rail lines transporting oil. They protested Stephen Harper’s Conservative government’s abuse of Indigenous rights, privatization of Indigenous lands, and rollback of environmental protections to intensify fossil fuel extraction. As Cree Idle No More cofounder Sylvia McAdam noted, it was out of necessity that the movement linked Indigenous and environmental struggles to protest a system that, if not stopped, will continue to “devastate the very things needed to sustain humanity—our lands and waters—for the generations to come.” It was more than a battle for the present; it was a battle for the future. The growing alliances resonated across the Medicine Line, the US–Canada divide. In February 2013, one of the largest actions in the history of the US climate movement descended on Washington, DC. More than 40,000 people gathered outside the White House to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline, bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous movements committed to halting the extraction and transportation of highly toxic and volatile tar sands.

That summer, Métis and Cree women and elders led hundreds in a two-day journey through the Alberta tar sands during an annual Healing Walk. Jesse Cardinal, a Métis cofounder of the walk, described how “participants [saw] tailings ponds and desert-like areas of ‘reclaimed land’ that was once the boreal forest and now grows almost nothing.” It’s a stark and immense landscape, encompassing an area larger than the state of Florida. In Treaty 6 and Treaty 8 territories, tar sands extraction—by companies such as Suncor Energy, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell Canada—has poisoned water, land, air, plants, animals, and people. Duck and moose—staple foods of many Indigenous communities—have become contaminated with toxins, and harvests of wild berries and plants have been decimated. According to Cardinal, in this modern-day gold rush, “many ‘outsiders’ are driven here by their own economic desperation.”

Like the land itself, the bodies of Indigenous women, girls, trans, and Two-Spirit people are also seen as open for violence and violation. Resource extraction intensifies a murderous heteropatriarchy, meaning that grounding resistance in Indigenous feminist interventions has become all the more urgent. An influx of men has also flooded the region’s “man camps,” which house migrant oil laborers. Men outnumber women two to one in the tar sands boomtown of Fort McMurray, Alberta. While a movement has existed since the 1970s to honor the lives of the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women across Canada, the Two-Spirit Métis activist Sâkihitowin Awâsis has noted the “links between presence of the tar sands industry and heightened rates of missing and murdered Indigenous Two-Spirits, women, and girls.” It’s no coincidence that Indigenous women led the movement against the tar sands.

Put another way, settler states like Canada and the United States continue to settle the land, raping and killing Native women and Two-Spirit people in order to do so. From the 1970s onward, communities and activists have documented thousands of cases where Indigenous women, girls, trans, and Two-Spirited people who have been murdered, disappeared, and targeted by all forms of violence in Canada. The movement, operating under the hashtag #MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls), holds rallies around Canada every February 14, honoring the lives of the disappeared and demanding answers—a call that has been partially answered by the creation of the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women. Canada’s death culture, however, is little different than its southern neighbor. In the United States, May 5 has been declared the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls. In a 2016 report, there were 5,712 cases of missing Indigenous women nationwide; experts and activists, however, believe the number to be considerably higher.

And Canadian prosperity is gained not just at the expense of First Nations. More than half the world’s mining companies are headquartered in Canada, with properties in more than one hundred countries. Canadian extractive industries target Indigenous and colonized people throughout the world, and some have been linked to egregious human rights abuses, especially against Indigenous peoples. For example, beginning in 2007, Hudbay Minerals, a Canadian company with investments in the Fenix nickel mine, was linked to assassinations, beatings, gang rapes of women and girls, and arsons in Mayan communities in Guatemala.

The links between the extractive industry and violence against Indigenous peoples also turn up in the United States. The Bakken shale oil boom that began in 2007, and would eventually prompt the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, made North Dakota the second-largest oil producing state, after Texas. Much of this occurred on the Fort Berthold Reservation, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation, which sits atop some of the region’s deepest oil reserves. In 2011, Tex Hall, the tribal chairman, adopted the mantra “sovereignty by the barrel,” expressing a belief that oil wealth can strengthen economic self-determination and autonomy. Oil revenues, Hall hoped, would bring his nation out of crushing poverty and relieve the enduring devastation caused by the federal government’s construction of the Garrison Dam in the heart of the reservation in the 1950s, which forced the reservation’s residents from the fertile Missouri River valley onto the open, less productive plains. In short order, the MHA Nation became one of the wealthiest in Indian Country, and with this ascent came political corruption and high rates of violence, especially against women and girls.

“We found a crying, naked, four-year-old girl running down one of the roads right outside of the Man Camp. She had been sexually assaulted,” Grace Her Many Horses recalled. It was just one of many horrific incidents of rape, abuse, and sex trafficking during Her Many Horses’ time at Fort Berthold in 2013 as a tribal cop. Most of her calls were related to man camps or the oil and gas industry they served. Towns of thousands literally sprang up overnight, made up of mobile homes and FEMA trailers, as hotels overflowed. Existing towns doubled and quadrupled in population, taxing already overstretched or nonexistent social infrastructure, including reservation emergency services. Nearly all the new arrivals were men, leading to some of the highest concentrations of men, outside of prisons, in North America. While emergency calls and violent assaults were frequent, prosecutions were not. Non-Native oil workers exploited a complex patchwork of federal, state, and tribal jurisdictions in which tribal law enforcement has little or no jurisdiction over non-Natives, allowing perpetrators to escape tribal justice.

Since the Bakken boom, the rolling prairies and lush river valleys that had survived Army Corps flooding in 1953 have been replaced by miles of metal fracking rigs and heavy construction equipment. Clustered constellations of oil flares burning off methane are visible from space at night. “What we’re dealing with is a death by a thousand cuts,” said Kandi Mossett, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network and citizen of the MHA Nation. She explained that cancer, asthma, and respiratory diseases have increased among the children and elders because of the toxic environment. Mossett herself is a cancer survivor. But this toxic landscape is connected to another. “You would never see this in Houston’s most affluent neighborhoods,” said Yudith Neito, a resident of Houston’s mostly Latinx community Manchester, where the air smells of burnt plastic and diesel from the oil refineries along the Houston Ship Channel next door. These are the refineries that process oil from the Canadian tar sands and the Bakken shale.

Nevertheless, in 2012, despite massive opposition, Obama fast-tracked the construction of KXL’s southern leg from Cushing, Oklahoma, to the Gulf Coast. “As long as I’m president,” he boasted in 2012, “we’re going to keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure, and we’re going to do it in a way that protects the health and safety of American people.” But those protections didn’t extend to communities like Neito’s or Mossett’s—nor would they be extended, with the Dakota Access Pipeline, to Standing Rock and the millions who depend on the Missouri River for fresh water.

In response to Obama’s order, that same year the Tar Sands Blockade sprang into action, a coalition that reflected the diversity of communities affected: conservative landowners, green anarchists and leftists, Latinx and Mexican-American communities, and Indigenous organizations from Canada and the United States. At an eighty-day sit-in action obstructing KXL construction on its southern route, local authorities and private security crushed the opposition with beatings, Tasers, and pepper spray—a prelude of what was to come. It was also part of what Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein calls “Blockadia,” a “roving transnational conflict zone” of grassroots resistance to the fossil fuel developments—whether “open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands pipelines”—that are not simply causing climate change, but threatening the very livelihoods of communities.

But some communities remained disunited, especially among the Oceti Sakowin. Despite pulling together a historic alliance with non-Natives, one small nation remained an outlier—my own. TransCanada had carefully avoided crossing reservation lands to avoid provoking Indigenous resistance, except at one key location: the Lower Brule Indian Reservation, a place that received little media attention, despite its central role.

TransCanada needed to build a seventy-one-mile electric transmission line that connected hydroelectricity generated at the Big Bend Dam to one of seventeen pipeline pump stations at Witten, South Dakota. Because the power line crossed sixteen acres of Lower Brule land, it required tribal consent. Although a crucial detail, the power line project was easy to miss, buried in the thousand-page technical manuals TransCanada produced. It was also easy to miss the name of the Lower Brule Sioux tribal chairman, Michael B. Jandreau, listed among the “Consulting Tribes’ Points of Contact.” Jandreau was the longest-serving tribal chairman in US history, in office for more than three decades before dying in office in 2015. As his health declined during his last term, so too did faith in his administration.

After months of denying negotiating with the company, in March 2014 suspicions surrounding the Lower Brule Tribal Council’s collaboration with TransCanada had been confirmed. A November 12, 2013, Lower Brule Sioux Tribal Council resolution had been leaked to the public in which the council spelled out plans to pursue “prospective benefits and working relationships” with TransCanada and to inform President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden of its support for the Canadian oil company. Lower Brule’s actions directly violated the spirit of the Mother Earth Accord, which its leaders signed in September 2011 at a historic summit held in Rosebud with Alberta First Nations, Indigenous governments, grassroots treaty councils, human rights NGOs, and the Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Fort Peck, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Standing Rock, and Santee Reservations. By signing the accord, the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe committed to end the extraction, transportation, and refinement of Alberta tar sands by asking President Obama to reject the presidential permit required for KXL. Now, Lower Brule had crossed a picket line, betraying not only their relatives in the Oceti Sakowin but also frontline communities around the world being devastated by climate change and extractivism.

The label “sellouts” stung, spurring the small nation into action. The Kul Wicasa, the people of Lower Brule, called an emergency town hall meeting, inviting tribal leaders and organizations from other reservations as well as the entire Lower Brule Tribal Council. Members of Owe Aku (Bring Back the Way), led by renowned Oglala environmentalist Debra White Plume, facilitated the meeting in a show of solidarity. From Lower Brule, the brother-and-sister twins Loretta and Lewis Grassrope, Kevin Wright, and Marlo Langdeau, among others, organized a town hall meeting calling on their nation to end its relationship with TransCanada, to uphold the Mother Earth Accord, and to join the growing alliance against KXL. More than a hundred attended, including the presidents of Pine Ridge and Rosebud. But the Lower Brule council boycotted the entire gathering.

“I used to be proud to be from here,” said Langdeau, with tears in her eyes, after Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and Rosebud had booted TransCanada officials off the reservation. Now, their leaders refused to face their own people. “It’s embarrassing to be called a ‘sellout’ when you don’t even know what’s going on.”

When there was no response from their elected officials, the organizers took matters into their own hands. Lewis Grassrope and Kevin Wright attempted to occupy land in front of the proposed transmission line, but before they could establish a camp, Bureau of Indian Affairs police (a federal police agency that operates without tribal oversight) stopped them. Undeterred, they set up on Grassrope’s mother’s homesite, several miles north of Medicine Butte on reservation land. They called the camp “Wiconi Un Tipi,” which loosely translates to “the way we live when we live in community.” As the name suggests, this was about more than stopping a pipeline. It was about restoring dignity to a little nation of people that had earned the reputation as “the forgotten Sioux.”

For Grassrope, a former tribal cop, it was Indigenous people at the grass roots who made the movement. The ikce wicasa, the ikce winyan, (the common men and women, the humble people of the earth), were the ones who changed history, not “great men” or tribal councils. When humble people moved, the earth moved with them. “We don’t have a voice. We don’t have a standing. We don’t have influence. But as you can see here,” Grassrope said in November 2016, gesturing to seven tipis embodying the reunification of the Oceti Sakowin Camp at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, “we are the tip of the spear. We’re saying, ‘mni wiconi.’ We’re saying, ‘treaty.’”

Wright, a firefighter, was a Water Protector from a different generation and a long-time dissident of his own government. In 1999 Wright joined members of the Lakota Student Alliance in a yearlong occupation of LaFramboise Island, a nature reserve in the middle of the Missouri River and, to the Oceti Sakowin, unceded earth. At the time, he also stood against the Lower Brule council’s support of federal legislation known as the “Mitigation Bill,” in which South Dakota lawmakers had proposed transferring jurisdiction over more than 200,000 acres of Missouri shoreline from the Army Corps of Engineers to the state of South Dakota. All Missouri River Indigenous nations objected to it except for Cheyenne River and Lower Brule, who chose to support it.

This history of bad faith on the part of both state politicians and their own tribal council was fresh in the minds of the Lower Brule opposition in 2014. To Wright and Grassrope, the primary conflict boiled down to governance. The reservation system and the imposition of the elected tribal councils had all but dissolved traditional governance. In its place, a winner-takes-all electoral system turned relatives against each other, and harsh political divisions broke down the family kinship unit, the tiospaye—an extended network of relatives that was fundamental to decision making and caretaking. The arrangement that replaced it instead fomented division and rivalry over scant resources, catering to outside corporate and state interests; it was a type of neocolonialism.

The divisions were a result of a sordid history of colonial land grabs. In 1889, in advance of North and South Dakota statehood and to encourage white settlement, Congress passed the so-called “Sioux Agreement” that broke up the Great Sioux Reservation into five separate reservations—Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Lower Brule. For traditionalists and treaty councils, it was hardly an agreement; the 1889 partition didn’t get the required three-fourths approval from adult Native men, as stipulated by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. In their eyes the creation, under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), of modern reservations, which later became separate governments, fractured national unity and undermined customary government and treaty law. This was the primary dispute in 1973 when American Indian Movement members, at the request of Oglala elders, took over Wounded Knee in protest of Pine Ridge’s IRA government, which was under the authoritarian leadership of Chairman Dick Wilson, who was criminalizing dissent. In short, AIM and their supporters opposed colonial administration. While AIM promoted traditional governance, it never achieved the reunification of the Oceti Sakowin on the scale realized at Standing Rock in 2016. But AIM’s militancy a generation earlier paved the way for the historic movement. While Indigenous nations rallied to support Standing Rock and the Oceti Sakowin, two years earlier Lower Brule was thrown into turmoil as grassroots councils called for overturning the status quo.

The so-called “Lower Brule constitutional crisis” of 2014 to 2016 was not an armed takeover like the one that took place at Wounded Knee in 1973. Nevertheless, it was without hesitation that supporters of the old order called it “an attempted overthrow of the tribal government.” And they weren’t entirely wrong. In the fall of 2014, a grassroots reform movement had galvanized under the slogan Mni Wiconi, electing three anti-KXL candidates to the six-person council: Sonny Zeigler and Desiree LaRoche as council members, and Kevin Wright as vice-chair. Michael Jandreau defeated Lewis Grassrope for the position of chairman by a slim margin. The new council members quickly set to work pushing for reform and transparency, and they met a strident opposition.

A November council meeting escalated to a shouting match, nearly ending in a fistfight between opposing sides, when Wright called for Jandreau’s removal for corruption and financial malfeasance, among other charges. In December, the opposition council members attempted to circumvent Jandreau and his supporters by appointing an entirely new council. This back-and-forth led to a flurry of lawsuits and countersuits, and day-to-day operations ground to a halt. After Jandreau passed away in April 2015, Grassrope was named his successor, but due to opposition from other council members, he never fully assumed the role. In May, in response to the unfolding political chaos, the Kul Wicasa Ospiye, a grassroots treaty organization, gathered signatures from the leadership of the traditional tiospayes of the Kul Wicasa to assert their right to be “self-governing” and that the people, not the federally recognized IRA council, were “the sole source for the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe’s existence.” The move underscored the gravity of the vicious power struggle that was unfolding, and the profound desire for an accountable government based on Lakota values, including kinship.

In Jandreau’s absence, and with the backing of the grassroots movement, Wright called for the removal of TransCanada from 1868 Treaty lands. “We see [TransCanada] as ‘bad men’ as defined by our treaties with the United States,” Wright said in a statement. He cited a treaty clause that allows for the removal of “bad men among the whites” who “commit any wrong upon the person or property of the Indians.” It was a bold move: the question of whether or not a corporation, which has personhood under US law, can be removed from treaty lands has yet to be tested in court. But for Wright and his supporters, the existential threat posed by KXL and climate change justified the risk. “This land is all we have,” Wright explained, “and we are obligated to preserve it for our future generations.” However, the action went nowhere, as the council had failed to form a consensus—or even to convene.

The Lower Brule opposition, even with support from the grassroots community, was unable to dramatically improve conditions on the reservation or to significantly change the structure of the IRA council during their brief two-year tenure. Nevertheless, their advocacy would have a resonating impact. After Obama denied the required presidential permit for KXL’s northern leg in December of 2015, the newly elected Lower Brule council changed course. One of its first actions was the passage of a resolution supporting Standing Rock’s battle against the Dakota Access Pipeline. And in December 2016, preempting Donald Trump’s incoming administration, which was expected to reapprove KXL’s northern leg, the council passed a resolution opposing construction of the Big Bend–Witten line that would power KXL, stating that they opposed oil pipeline development and the construction of any infrastructure related to it. Those two major victories would not have occurred without the tumultuous grassroots struggle against KXL, a movement that fed into the DAPL fight.

In November 2016 at Oceti Sakowin Camp, Lewis Grassrope was sitting in his tipi. It was one of seven that were arranged in the shape of a buffalo horn, with a large fire pit in the middle. The entire camp was arranged in a half circle facing Mni Sose and Wiyohiyapata (meaning “where the sun rises”). About half the size of a football field, the camp horn at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers was surrounded by Indigenous national camps—such as Ihanktonwan Camp, Oglala Camp, and Kul Wicasa Camp—and organizations’ camps—such as Indigenous People’s Power Project and Red Warrior Camp. The Seven Council Fires of the seven nations—the Mdewakantonwan, Sissintonwan, Wahpetonwan, Wahpekute, Ihanktonwan, Ihanktonwanna, and Tintonwan—had been lit, and a nation reunited. It was a dream come true. On the horizon, on a hill, shadowy figures of cops in riot gear idled under floodlights and behind tangled razor wire. But the constant drone of the surveillance aircraft circling above was hardly noticeable over the sounds of children playing and the boisterous chuckles around campfires. Young boys and girls sang round dance songs and raced horses along the shoreline. Men and women cleaned and sliced up tripe for menudo. This was Wiconi Un Tipi, Lower Brule’s national camp and one of the first camps to set up at Oceti Sakowin after Standing Rock put out the call in August.

“A lot of people didn’t believe, they didn’t have faith,” Grassrope said, reflecting on the adversity he and his small nation faced over the years. He looked outside his tipi to the life, breath, prayer, and song around him. “When KXL happened, the belief came back. When DAPL happened, the belief came back.”

The harbingers of the Dakota Access Pipeline arrived on an early fall morning, September 30, 2014, to Fort Yates, the headquarters of the Standing Rock tribe. A special meeting had been scheduled between the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council, and representatives of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and Energy Transfer Partners (ETP, the Texas-based firm financing the project).

Earlier in 2014, the Army Corps had rerouted the pipeline from upriver of North Dakota’s white-dominated capital, Bismarck, to upriver of the poorest county in North Dakota, Sioux County—the Standing Rock Reservation. In its environmental analysis, the Army Corps had concluded that the Bismarck path crossed a “high consequence area,” which meant that a spill would have an adverse effect. Not once did it mention Standing Rock, for which a spill half a mile upriver was of no consequence to the Army Corps. The new route also saved on time, constructions costs, and the unwanted headache of contaminating the drinking water of white settlers in the state’s capital.

In an audio recording of the September meeting in Fort Yates released by the tribe, Chairman David Archambault II can be heard whispering off mic, “What is the name of the company?” He then asks, “Dakota Access Pipeline, are they here?” No answer. DAPL was late. It seemed fitting. Amid the historic resistance unfolding against tar sands and KXL across the continent, DAPL seemed like an afterthought, arriving late and under the radar. At this time, a year ahead of the pipeline permitting process, hardly anyone had heard of DAPL. But those who saw it coming knew it was dangerous.

When DAPL representatives finally arrived, Archambault made Standing Rock’s position clear: “We oppose the pipeline,” he stated. Archambault cited a 2012 resolution that forbade any oil pipeline within the boundaries of the Fort Laramie Treaties of 1851 and 1868. Where federal and state governments have historically chosen to ignore them, Standing Rock has recognized and enforced its original treaty boundaries. In their report, DAPL representatives Tammy Ibach, Chuck Frey, and Joe Malucci mentioned that the pipeline crossed less than a mile north of the reservation boundaries, but they never mentioned treaty lands. They also never asked whether Standing Rock wanted the pipeline in the first place. DAPL was looking for “consultation,” not consent.

“It’s not consultation, because the plan’s already done,” Councilman Randy White rebuked the representatives. “And to me, that’s really wrong.”

Wasté Win Young, the Standing Rock Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, agreed. After studying the company’s initial reports, what concerned her most was the Army Corps’ intention to fast-track the project. (Despite their central role planning DAPL’s route, the Army Corps did not attend the September 30 meeting.) Unlike KXL, which crossed an international border and therefore required State Department review and presidential approval, DAPL was a domestic project. This allowed the Army Corps to assess the pipeline according to a Nationwide Permit 12, which only considers individual construction sites, rather than cumulative negative impacts on entire nations of people, ecosystems, or the climate. As Young pointed out, fast-tracking the project under Permit 12 regulations bypassed environmental reviews under the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. It also skirted the type of public scrutiny received by KXL and significantly undermined the ability of impacted communities to mobilize, protect, and defend themselves.

Moreover, DAPL cut through about 380 archeological sites, such as burials, with at least 60 at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers alone. Though not recognized as reservation land, under the National Historic Preservation Act’s Section 106, the presence of these culturally sensitive sites made the area “ancestral territory.” Any potential disturbance required the Army Corps to consult with Standing Rock in order to proceed, a procedure Young claimed the Army Corps had failed to do in the past. The place where the pipeline crossed the river also held deep historical and cultural significance. Many Horses Heads Bottom, where DAPL crossed the Missouri River, Young explained, was where Dakotas fled generals Sibley and Sully’s 1863 “columns of vengeance.” After the 1862 Dakota Uprising, the United States punished survivors of that war at the Whitestone Hill Massacre, where they gunned down more than 400 Lakotas and Dakotas on a buffalo hunt. It was a massacre nearly forgotten by settlers, but no less horrific than Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. The soldiers led a manhunt up and down the river, capturing or killing survivors. Mothers plugged their babies’ noses to silence their cries as they swam to safety across the river in the cover of darkness.

“I struggled with this last night,” said Young at the meeting. “Do we want to tell something so important and sacred to us to a pipeline company?” Descendants of those who survived that genocidal campaign were sitting in the room, face to face with the very people who would two years later bring a whole new wave of chaos and violence.

What concerned Councilwoman Avis Little Eagle was the water. “Every oil pipeline leaks,” she said, “and it’s going to ruin the water we consume and that future generations are going to consume.” Her fears were warranted: from 2010 to 2016, Sunoco Logistics, the operators of DAPL, had more than 200 of their pipelines leak; indeed, DAPL would leak five times within six months of beginning operation. Little Eagle also sat on the Standing Rock water control board, which, having reviewed DAPL’s route the previous day, passed a resolution opposing it on the grounds that it threatened the reservation’s source of drinking water, the Missouri River. This action fell in line with Standing Rock’s Constitution, which was drafted with the water in mind. Article 1 of the Constitution reserves jurisdiction over “all rights-of-way, waterways, watercourses[,] and streams running through any part of the Reservation.” A threat to its drinking water was thus a threat to Standing Rock’s sovereignty, as well.

“Our water is our single last property that we have for our people, and water is life—Mni Wiconi,” remarked Phyllis Young to the DAPL representatives. Young was a council-woman, a longtime AIM member, and Wasté Win Young’s mother. The elder stateswoman described her homelands as a “national sacrifice area.” In order to generate hydroelectricity to power homes in far-off cities like Minneapolis and Chicago, the Army Corps had flooded her home in the middle of a cold winter. “I know what it is to be homeless,” Young said. “I know what it is to be hungry in this great land of plenty, where we lived in the richest riverbed in the world.”

The dams, which I describe in chapter 5, were the reason why the Army Corps had final say over DAPL’s route: claiming sole jurisdiction over the river and shoreline, they had inundated the land in the 1950s and 1960s, usurping Indigenous jurisdiction, kicking people out of their homes, destroying the river that nurtured them, and shrinking reservation boundaries in the process. The Army Corps never sought the consent of Missouri River Indigenous nations for these incursions, nor did Congress ever authorize them to extinguish Indigenous jurisdiction over the river. Now, it was also without their consent that the Army Corps sought to route the Dakota Access Pipeline through their homelands.

“We are not stupid people. We are not ignorant people,” Young chided the DAPL spokespeople. “Do not underestimate the people of Standing Rock. We know what’s going on, and we know what belongs to us, and we know what we have to keep for our children and our grandchildren.”

This was a history she had lived through, and it was an intergenerational struggle her children had inherited. In 1974, Phyllis Young and Standing Rock council representatives, including David Archambault Sr. (David Archambault II’s father), organized the first International Indian Treaty Council at Standing Rock (detailed in chapter 6). Standing Rock gave AIM the mandate to pursue, at the United Nations, all legal means available to enforce the 1868 Treaty. The historic meeting brought together 5,000 people from ninety-seven Indigenous nations from around the world, and it was the beginning of a movement that culminated in a touchstone document on Indigenous rights: the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Unlike other federally recognized IRA governments at the time, Standing Rock had maintained amiable relations with treaty councils, grassroots movements, and even militants such as AIM. On occassions when, as in Lower Brule in 2014, the antagonisms between these bodies turned destructive or violent, the Standing Rock’s capacity to bridge these divides set it apart from other IRA governments. This history was decisive in the creation of the #NoDAPL movement, which began with the coalescence of tribal councils and Indigenous grassroots movements.

“It’s nothing for you to come and say, ‘We want to do this [build a pipeline]. We want to be friends with you,’” Young said to DAPL. To her, naming a pipeline, Dakota Access, and a state, North Dakota, after the very people they intended to swindle, and about whom they knew nothing, was an insult. “North Dakota?” she asked. “Miye ma Dakota! I am Dakota! Dakota means ‘friend’ and ‘ally.’” By trespassing, the pipeline company and the state didn’t behave as “friends” or “allies.” Quite the opposite.

“This is Dakota territory. This is treaty territory. This is where you agreed not to come into my territory,” she continued. It was a reminder that treaties are not an “Indian problem”; they are everyone’s problem. Signed between settler government and Indigenous nations, they are also the responsibility of non-Natives: an even older document, the US Constitution, regards treaties as “the supreme law of the land.”

If DAPL didn’t respect Standing Rock’s sovereignty or the Oceti Sakowin’s ancestral and treaty territory, then, Young warned, “We will put our best warriors in the front. We are the vanguard. We are Hunkpapa Lakota. That means the ‘horn of the buffalo.’ That’s who we are. We are the protectors of our nation, of Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires. Know who we are.” She left them with this final message: “We understand the forked tongue that our grandfathers talked about. We know about talking [out of] both sides of your mouth, smiling with one side of your face. We know all the tricks of the wasicu world [the colonizer’s world]. Our young people have mastered it. I have mastered your language. I can speak eloquently in the English language. My grandmother taught me. But I also know the genetic psyche. And I also have the collective memory of the damages that have occurred to my people. And I will never submit to any pipeline to go through my homeland. Mitakuye Oyasin!”

DAPL seemed to have forgotten the lessons imparted that day. “I really wish for the Standing Rock Sioux that they had engaged in discussions way before they did,” Kelcy Warren, a billionaire Texas oilman and CEO of ETP, told the Wall Street Journal in November 2016. “We could have changed the route. It could have been done, but it’s too late.” Apparently, Warren didn’t consider the initial 2014 meeting a “discussion,” nor did he accept Standing Rock’s flat-out refusal. In a 2016 statement to a federal judge, however, DAPL Vice-President Joey Mahmoud did confirm his company had received Standing Rock’s message loud and clear. He admitted the company was told “to stop the project” and to avoid Oceti Sakowin territory altogether. But Mahmoud found it “an impossible request to accommodate,” and he and his employees could hardly hide their contempt. In March 2016, an Army Corps archeologist warned in an email: “Someone needs to tell Joey [Mahmoud] the next RACIST comment will shut down the entire project.” The email concerned Mahmoud and his employees’ treatment of Native cultural resource workers who had identified culturally sensitive sites, such as graves and sacred sites, along the pipeline route. This wasn’t a “clash of cultures” or a lack of “cultural sensitivity” towards those they saw as different; this was full-blown settler colonialism—a struggle over the land and water in which a people were fighting for their lives.

#NoDAPL was also a struggle over the meaning of land. For the Oceti Sakowin, history is the land itself: the earth cradles the bones of the ancestors. As Tasunka Witko, Crazy Horse, once said, “My land is where my dead lie buried.” For others, however, the earth had to be tamed and dominated by a plow or drilled for profit. Because Native people remain barriers to capitalist development, their bodies needed to be removed—both from beneath and atop the soil—therefore eliminating their rightful relationship with the land.

Recognizing this, Standing Rock chose a legal route to stop the pipeline, filing a complaint in federal court against the Army Corps on July 27, 2016, the day after the Army Corps approved DAPL’s route across the Missouri River and through culturally sensitive sites. In late August 2016, as pipeline construction approached Highway 1806, Standing Rock grew desperate. Legal mechanisms weren’t working; more drastic measures had to be taken. Sensing what was coming, on August 15, DAPL filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction against a number of individuals, including Chairman Archambault, from interfering with pipeline construction (a suit dismissed on September 19). Four days later, the governor, Jack Dalrymple, a legacy Yale man, declared a state of emergency, asking for assistance from the federal government, DAPL, “and any entity we can think of.”

“Perhaps only in North Dakota, where oil tycoons wine and dine elected officials, and where the governor, Jack Dalrymple, serves as an adviser to the Trump campaign, would state and county governments act as the armed enforcement for corporate interests,” penned Archambault in a New York Times op-ed, days before police arrested him. “In recent weeks, the state has militarized my reservation, with road blocks and license-plate checks, low-flying aircraft and racial profiling of Indians.”

Standing Rock, the nation of the great Tatanka Iyotake, Sitting Bull, was facing down county, state, federal, and corporate powers. His people—some of the poorest in North America, and armed only with sage, prayer bundles, Canupas (sacred pipes), and the spirit of their ancestors—were facing down a mounting legion of police and private security backed by some of the most powerful people in the world.

On Friday, August 26, Chairman Dave Archambault II gave tribal employees the day off. He joined a prayer action at the location where DAPL crossed the highway and was arrested trying to break through a police line, along with eighteen others, during a two-day blockade of a construction site. Tribal cultural resource management experts, among them Tim Mentz Sr., an elder and citizen of Standing Rock, had identified at least twenty-seven burials west of the highway—on private land, and directly in the pipeline’s path. The immense historical importance of the discoveries, in other circumstances, would have given pause to tribal historians and scholars. Mentz characterized one finding—a rock structure arranged in the shape of the Dakota constellation Iyokaptan Tanka (the “Big Dipper”)—as “one of the most significant archeological finds in North Dakota in many years.” He notified a federal court of the discovery on Friday, September 2, and requested immediate action to protect the site. What happened the next day, Mentz and others believed, was no accident.

In the early morning hours of Saturday, September 3, 2016, blood was spilled in the struggle over hallowed ground. Caterpillar earthmovers came barreling across the prairie. A small army of attack dogs and their handlers, private security hired by DAPL, guarded the site, followed closely by a spotter helicopter whirling above; all of them were ready for a fight. It was Saturday of Labor Day weekend, a holiday celebrating the working poor who had picketed and protested (and were beaten and shot) to win an eight-hour workday. But this holiday weekend, it was unionized pipeline workers who clocked in while Indigenous people formed a picket line. The Indigenous marchers who showed up that day were working to protect their lands and waters—they were Land Defenders and Water Protectors. Workers who cross picket lines, on the other hand, are called “scabs” because they undermine working-class solidarity. The pipeline workers met a march of Water Protectors coming down Highway 1806, which had begun with the Canupa, a pipe ceremony (as had nearly all actions), to grant strength and protection for the ancestors who might be unearthed. When the Water Protectors saw the heavy machinery that morning turning soil, it was human remains—their relatives—that were unearthed. Native people quickly formed a blockade. The Water Protectors pushed down fences, throwing themselves in front of bulldozers. A white man jumped from a truck, spraying a line of women and children with CS gas, a chemical that burns skin, eyes, and throats and can cause blindness. The handlers—the people who train animals to hunt human beings: manhunters—sicced attack dogs on the picket line. Blood dripped from the dogs’ maws.

“In that moment, everything changed,” recalled LaDonna BraveBull Allard, Tamakawastewin, Her Good Earth Woman. That morning Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman was interviewing BraveBull Allard when the phone rang. “The bulldozers are here!” They rushed to film the scene. BraveBull Allard had been in the middle of telling the story of Nape Hota Winyan, her great-grandmother, a survivor of the Whitestone Hill Massacre, which occurred September 3, 1863; the same day 155 years later, Caterpillar earthmovers desecrated her ancestors’ graves. At Whitestone Hill, women tied their babies to dogs in hopes that they would escape the soldiers. As soldiers finished off the wounded, the order came to shoot the dogs. These terrible histories, separated by time, were eerily similar.

“They took our footprint out of the ground,” said BraveBull Allard of the havoc wreaked upon the land. “And who has the right to do that?” Before DAPL, Ladonna BraveBull Allard considered herself a tribal historian, but never an activist. That changed when DAPL released its plans showing the proposed pipeline crossing near the confluence of Mni Sose (the Missouri River) and Inyan Wakanagapi Wakpa (the Cannonball River), threatening the land and water. Once, shallow waters made it a place of passage, trade, and commerce. Large villages of the Mandan, Arikara, and Dakota peoples hugged the lush riverfront, and the Cheyennes and Pawnees were known to frequent the area, too. Many came to fast and hold ceremony; and because of its deep spiritual significance, the landscape was also considered neutral territory where, out of reverence, warring factions laid down their arms and camped within sight of each other without incident. Lewis and Clark misnamed it “Cannonball”—to their minds, the spherical sandstones resembled tools of war—but for the Dakota people, it was a place of life. They called it “Inyan Wakangapi Wakpa” (River that Makes the Sacred Stones). BraveBull Allard’s grandfather, Tatanka Ohitika (Brave Bull) held sun dances here, continuing to maintain relations with the landscape by putting medicine and prayer into the earth while also harvesting food from it.

It was here that water shaped earth—making sacred stones. It was also here that state institutions used water and earth to shape and destroy a people’s history. After the Army Corps dredged the mouth of the Cannonball River, the swirling waters stopped creating the sacred stones. In the 1950s, the Army Corps built the Oahe Dam, flooding the sun dance grounds and the most fertile, arable land. When land and water are taken and destroyed, so too is the possibility of a livable future.

“Our people are in that water,” recalled BraveBull Allard who, as a little girl, saw the floodwaters take her land. “This river holds the story of my entire life.” To honor this history, “Inyan Wakanagapi Oti,” the name for the Cannon Ball area, became the name for the prayer camp that BraveBull Allard helped found in April 2016. She was in Long Soldier District at a meeting on the KXL fight with Joye Braun, Jasilyn Charger, and Joseph White Eyes from Cheyenne River, and Wiyaka Eagleman from Standing Rock. Together they decided to start a #NoDAPL camp. BraveBull Allard approached Braun afterward and offered up her land.

On April 1, they attended a meeting with the Army Corps to give testimony against DAPL. The Oceti Sakowin, Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota nations arrived in caravans by horse, motorcycle, and car to show support. Indigenous youth organized a run. Elders came to offer their Canupas and prayers, and tipis went up; they called it “Sacred Stone.”

BraveBull Allard remembers one day coming down to camp after work: “They were roasting deer meat on the grill. The women were cutting meat on the side to dry it. Kids were running and screaming. All of these people sitting around the fire were telling stories and what it was like to live on the river. Here was the catch: nobody was speaking English. They were all speaking Dakota. I looked at them and I thought, ‘This is how we’re supposed to live. This makes sense to me.’ Every day I came down to the camp and saw such blessings. I saw our culture and our way of life come alive. Nobody can take that away from me.”

Between the first meeting with DAPL in 2014 and the founding of Sacred Stone in 2016, Standing Rock ran grassroots awareness campaigns about Mni Wiconi and #NoDAPL. Chairman Dave Archambault II traveled tirelessly from district to district, informing the reservation that DAPL was coming. The youth organized a water campaign called “Rezpect Our Water,” crafting the media message to the outside world and demonstrating this was a youth-led movement. But as construction began in April 2016, a sense of urgency grew. Given that Obama denied the permit for KXL, would he do the same for DAPL? Did he care about Native sovereignty and lives?

Archambault once had a connection to, and admiration for, President Obama. His sister, Jodi Archambault Gillette, had served as the president’s special assistant for Native American affairs from 2009 to 2015. On June 13, 2014, Obama gave the opening remarks at Cannon Ball’s annual Flag Day Powwow, accompanied by Archambault and his family. Obama’s visit was historic. Only eight sitting US presidents had ever visited Indian reservations, the last being Bill Clinton.

During his speech, Obama focused on Native youth and played off the oft-quoted line by Sitting Bull: “Let’s put our minds together to see what life we can build for our children.” “Let’s put our minds together to advance justice—because like every American, you deserve to be safe in your communities and treated equally under the law,” Obama told a crowd of thousands of cheering Lakotas and Dakotas.

Shortly after Obama’s visit, Archambault issued a statement assuring Native youth across the nation “that the President and First Lady are truly listening to them.” But were they really? Beginning in July 2016, thirty-eight Indigenous youth ran a grueling 2,000 mile relay from their homes in North Dakota to Washington, DC and hand-delivered to the White House and the Army Corps a petition with 160,000 signatures opposing DAPL’s construction. Tariq Brownotter, a sixteen-year-old Standing Rock youth runner and organizer with Rezpect Our Water, wrote to Obama: “After your visit to Standing Rock you said you felt we were like your own children. Mr. President and First Lady we have no doubt you meant every word you said and we know you have not forgotten us.” There was no public response from Obama to the youth’s demands to stop DAPL.

Not until November 2—months after DAPL began construction, and hundreds of arrests later—did Obama speak publicly about the pipeline, simply saying he wanted to respect Native sacred lands, was open to a possible reroute (by then the pipeline was less than a half mile from the river), and would take cues from the Army Corps of Engineers. He would “let it play out for several more weeks.” This stance angered both North Dakota politicians like governor Jack Dalrymple, who demanded federal intervention to crush the protests, and Indigenous people, who were being mercilessly brutalized by cops. Obama’s statement came five days after live video showed a militarized police force, acting on orders from the state of North Dakota, violently evict the short-lived 1851 Treaty Camp that blockaded DAPL construction crews on Highway 1806. Cops in riot gear conducted tipi-by-tipi raids, slashing tents and tipi canvases. They dragged half-naked elders from ceremonial sweat lodges, tasered a man in the face, doused people with CS gas and tear gas, and blasted adults and youth with deafening LRAD sound cannons. The 142 arrested were marked with a number in black permanent marker on their forearm, led onto buses, and kept overnight in dog kennels. To add insult to injury, personal belongings—including ceremonial items like pipes and eagle feathers, as well as jackets and tents—confiscated by the police during the raid were returned soaked in urine.

When asked what Obama thought about this level of brutality and dehumanization, the Nobel laureate admonished “both sides,” the unarmed protestors defending Indigenous land and the heavily-militarized, small army of police who ritualistically beat the Water Protectors, all the while extolling the virtues of civility: “There’s an obligation for protestors to be peaceful and there’s and obligation for authorities to show restraint.”

Three days before the 1851 Treaty Camp raid, Archambault wrote to US Attorney General Lorretta Lynch, urgently requesting a civil rights investigation into the escalating police violence. After declaring a state of emergency, Governor Dalrymple immediately went to work soliciting aid and personnel under the Emergency Management Assistance Compact. It was the largest mobilization of cops and military in the state’s history since 1890, when nearly half the standing military was deployed to crush the horseless and starving Ghost Dancers in Standing Rock. Seventy-six law enforcement jurisdictions responded to Dalrymple’s call and were deployed alongside the National Guard and private security firms hired by DAPL such as TigerSwan. The agencies that arrived were among the largest recipients of the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program that ships surplus military equipment to law enforcement agencies nationwide. For example, between 2006 and 2015 the South Dakota Highway Patrol, which sent troopers to police Water Protectors, obtained $2 million worth of military equipment, including dozens of assault rifles and five armored vehicles. The Lake County Sheriff’s Office in northwestern Indiana, which sent four deputies, had collected $1.5 million in military gear, including one hundred assault rifles and two armored trucks. (Demonstrating incompetence with this military-grade weaponry, one deputy shot himself in the foot with one of the assault rifles while deployed at the protests.) The fifteen-ton, tank-like MRAP vehicles, which were visible at nearly all the major police actions, were also Department of Defense military surplus placed at the disposal of county sheriff’s offices. Because of the large influx of equipment and personnel, police saw it “as a sort of law enforcement laboratory.” Tom Butler, a colonel with Montana Highway Patrol, called the multi-agency police response “enlightening and educational,” encouraging police agencies in western states like Montana to attend on account that they share “all those same issues” with states like North Dakota. To Butler, those “same issues” were the large, land-based Indigenous nations protesting extractive industries. In other words, these states had a lot to learn from North Dakota about how better to police their own “Indian problem.”

Despite the intimidating display of force, it was the standard-issue weapons of police—chemical weapons like tear gas and pepper spray—that inflicted the most pain and violence. As Paiute anthropologist Kristen Simmons points out, because these weapons were the dominant means of crowd control, rather than military combat gear, they inflicted more injuries upon Water Protectors. While the Geneva Protocol prohibits such chemical weapons in warfare, they are, paradoxically, permitted for domestic policing. For example, on November 20, a day known as “Backwater Sunday,” police sprayed Water Protectors with water laced with pepper spray from a water cannon mounted to an MRAP and shot with tear gas canisters, used as projectile weapons. Temperatures dropped below freezing. Police also used beanbag rounds, rubber bullets, and flashbang grenades to pummel the young, the old, the unarmed. More than 200 people suffered injuries—one Navajo woman lost an eye, becoming permanently disabled, and one white woman had her arm nearly blown off by an exploding crowd-control agent lobbed at her by police. Most, however, suffered from hypothermia and chemical exposure. Camp medics saved many lives that night by treating hypothermia with heat blankets and by applying an antacid mixture to chemical burns in the eyes, nose, and mouth to prevent suffocation.

In a Democracy Now! interview, Archambault also pointed out how police humiliated Water Protectors by strip-searching them upon arrest (he was also strip-searched in late August). According to Laguna Pueblo journalist Jenni Monet, strip searches were common and primarily reserved for Native people and people of color, while white inmates were often exempt. Monet also reported that some Native transgender people were separated from the general population and placed in solitary confinement as a “policy.” The police also targeted journalists covering the protests, arresting Amy Goodman in September 2016, Monet in January 2017, and several reporters from the media collective Unicorn Riot.

In his letter to Lynch, Archambault compared the policing tactics used against Water Protectors as “reminiscent of the tactics used against protesters during the civil rights movement some 50 years ago.” In an 2018 Netflix interview, Obama spoke of being inspired by the courage of Black civil rights activists and freedom riders, who faced dog attacks, fire hoses, and police brutality, and “who risked everything to advance democracy.” Yet under his watch, private security working on behalf of DAPL unleashed attack dogs on unarmed Water Protectors who were attempting to stop bulldozers from destroying a burial ground; Morton County sheriff’s deputies sprayed Water Protectors with water cannons in freezing temperatures, injuring hundreds; and police officers and private security guards brutalized hundreds of unarmed protesters. All of this violence was part of an effort to put a pipeline through Indigenous lands. In the twilight of his presidency, on December 4, 2016, the Army Corps denied the permit for DAPL to cross the Missouri River. But the move was too little, too late, and it was quickly reversed by President Trump within two weeks of taking office. (Trump also reversed KXL’s presidential permit, bringing back to life the all-but-dead pipeline project.)

Even though Obama had thus far turned his back on Indigenous youth and written off the violence inflicted upon them by police, their courage, demonstrated in the thousand-mile relay across the country, had won the hearts and minds of conscientious people, regardless of political affiliation. Following the historic run, the ranks of Sacred Stone swelled. By late August there were more than 90 Indigenous nations present, as well as allies from across the globe; by November that number had grown to nearly 400. Oceti Sakowin Camp was created partially to capture the growing influx of people, who came pouring in from all corners of the globe.

The media also arrived in droves, often covering the violent clashes between Water Protectors and the police that, while frequent, also gave a distorted view of both everyday camp life and the actions themselves. From August to October, marches and rallies occurred almost daily, and without incident. At first, they started from Oceti Sakowin Camp and headed several miles north, where the pipeline crossed Highway 1806. The keeper of the White Buffalo Calf Pipe, Chief Arvol Looking Horse, frequently led these early marches, beginning with a pipe ceremony. Later on, marches branched out to target construction sites or to provide a distraction for those brave enough to chain themselves to heavy machinery.

“Men have come up to me, young men who said they were ready to lay down their lives,” Archambault said to a crowd in late August. From the beginning, he had feared someone would be killed (fortunately, no one was), and his message was one of life: “But I told them, no! We do not want that! We want you to live and prosper and be good fathers and grandfathers.”

Indeed, Mni Wiconi and the spirit of #NoDAPL, enacted daily in camp life, embodied a brief vision of what Native life could be.

“I think it’s a rebirth of a nation,” Faith Spotted Eagle said. “And I think that all of these young people here dreamed that one day they would live in a camp like this, because they heard the old people tell them stories of living along the river. They heard them talking about the campfires and the Horse Nation, and they’re actually living it. They’re living the dream.”

All one had to do was walk through camp to witness that dream. Flag Row—a half-mile procession of more than 300 Indigenous national flags that lined each side of the road—cut through the heart of camp. Starting at the north gate, where new arrivals checked in with camp security, it was the “main drag” of the “Indian city”—the tenth-largest city in North Dakota at its peak. Alcohol and drugs were strictly prohibited. Media were required to report to the media tent. No photographs of children, or of anyone, were permitted without consent. Nor was the recording of prayers or ceremonies. Facebook Hill rose beyond the main camp kitchen; a grassy knoll with the only decent cellphone reception in the entire camp, it was where people reconnected with loved ones. (Someone jokingly called it “little Brooklyn,” for all the white filmmakers from Brooklyn who congregated there.)

The main camp was a fully functioning city. There was no running water, but the Cannon Ball Community Center opened its doors for showers. There was no electricity, but Prairie Knights Casino, the tribal casino two miles up the road, had Wi-Fi. And there were no flushable toilets, but Standing Rock paid for porta potties. Where physical infrastructure lacked, an infrastructure of Indigenous resistance and caretaking of relations proliferated—of living and being in community according to Indigenous values—which for the most part kept people safe and warm.

If you brought donations, you checked in at the main council fire. Supervised by Standing Rock elders, the council fire remained lit twenty-four hours a day. A steady rotation of young Native men, the firekeepers, fed logs to the fire at all hours, a humble but important duty. An Eyapaha (a town crier or emcee) handled the mic, announcing grand entries of visiting delegations, mealtimes, activities for children, missing or lost items, and guest speakers. At sunup and sundown, elders of Standing Rock and the Oceti Sakowin sang grandmother’s lullabies for the children and gave words of encouragement to Water Protectors. Next to the PA system stood several large fire pits with industrial-grade cooking pots, always boiling corn and soup. The main kitchen served three hot meals a day. (At its height, there were about thirteen free camp kitchens and a half dozen medic tents.) Elders and children ate first, following a meal prayer. If there were guests (and there were often delegations from around the world), they ate first. The donations tent was well stocked with sleeping bags, blankets, tents, socks, gloves, hats, boots, and so forth. Native families frequently arrived by the carload, sometimes wearing only T-shirts and gym shorts. Everyone was fed and clothed. Everyone had a place. At camp check-in, bodies were needed to cook, dig compost holes, chop wood, take care of children, give rides to Walmart, among other tasks. Many quit their jobs, instead making it their full-time work to cook and to keep others warm and safe. After all, one ceases to be Lakota if relatives or travelers from afar are not nurtured and welcomed. Generosity, Wowacantognake, is a fundamental Lakota virtue. And it was this Indigenous generosity—so often exploited as a weakness—that held the camp together.

It was an all-ages affair in which youth played a major role, and there was a fully functioning day school. The camp was an unprecedented concentration of Indigenous knowledge keepers. Standing Rock Lakota language specialist Alayna Eagle Shield saw this. She went to every camp asking if they could share their knowledge with the children families brought with them. “From there,” Eagle Shield recalled, “I was told that we need a school and a place for children to be.” So she founded the Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižin Owáyawa, the Defenders of the Water School, a name chosen by the students. Education centered treaties, language, culture, and land and water defense. The curriculum of Indigenous song, dance, math, history, and science was less about indoctrinating youth to be good citizens of settler society. As Indigenous educator Sandy Grande points out, the Defenders of the Water School provided anticolonial education for liberation—how to live and be free and in good relation with others and the land and water.

If one was willing and able, there were nonviolent direct action trainings hosted daily. Mark Tilsen, an Oglala poet and teacher from Pine Ridge, led most of the direct action trainings. He possessed a biting but magnetic humor that added a playfulness to otherwise-serious trainings on nonviolent resistance. Dallas Goldtooth, comedian and organizer with Indigenous Environmental Network, lightheartedly referred to Tilsen as the camp’s “spirit animal” because nearly everyone knew him and turned to him for advice on actions. Almost every day, Tilsen read aloud and explained the Oceti Sakowin Camp principles to new arrivals, whose numbers typically ranged from a handful to several dozen. The rules, which applied to everyone, were scrawled on whiteboards and hand-painted signs:

We are protectors.

We are peaceful and prayerful.

“Isms” have no place here.

Here we all stand together.

We are non-violent. We are proud to stand, no masks.

Respect locals.

No weapons or what could be construed as a weapon.

Property damage does not get us closer to our goal.

All campers must get an orientation.

Direct action training is required for everyone taking action.

We keep each other accountable to these principles.

This is a ceremony—act accordingly.

Campers were also directed to the legal tent, where they wrote a phone number in permanent marker on their forearms to call in case they were arrested. Volunteer lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild and elsewhere provided free legal aid and kept in touch with arrestees.

Prayer actions generally started with the call “Kikta po! Kikta po! Wake up! Wake up!”—a voice blaring over a megaphone as the sun rose. When there was an action planned for the day, an Eyapaha rode through the camp on a bicycle, a horse, or in the back of a pickup rousing people from slumber. “You didn’t come here to sleep. This ain’t a vacation. We came here to stop a pipeline!”

At one action in mid October, the Two-Spirit Nation led the prayer and march. Police intercepted the caravan of cars and barred vehicle travel on a gravel road. Only foot traffic, they said. By the time the march arrived at the construction site, more than a hundred police officers with riot gear and sniper rifles, a dozen SUVs, and an armored personnel carrier had formed a police line. The Two-Spirit Nation offered tobacco and water to the land and marched toward the police line. The officers rebuffed them, telling the entire crowd to disperse over a megaphone. But where? It was surreal, but soon it became a normal experience. Unlike protest marches in the cities where there are bystanders, buildings, and plenty of media, the majority of #NoDAPL marches happened on backcountry roads where there was no CNN, just independent media like Democracy Now!, Unicorn Riot, and Indian Country Today. Sometimes the police outnumbered protestors—in the middle of nowhere! Because it was private property, Water Protectors couldn’t go as far as the ditch on the road; the fields were off limits. And there were certainly no bathrooms or water fountains to be found in the midday heat. That day, the march was a grueling eight miles, and an elder fainted from exhaustion.

“What you’re doing here is wrong,” Brandon Sazue, the Crow Creek tribal chairman, approached the line of masked police as Water Protectors retreated once the action ended. “What we’re doing here is right, because we are not the ones [who are] trespassing. You are trespassing for big money. But we pray for you, we pray for your children.”

Sazue was a man of his people. In 2009, the IRS attempted to seize 7,100 acres of Crow Creek land—in Buffalo County, the poorest in the United States—for purported back payroll taxes. During the brutal South Dakota winter of 2009 to 2010, Sazue camped out on a portion of the land in protest of the sale. He joined the DAPL protests in August, providing tribal resources to the Crow Creek Riders, a group of youth horse riders. On October 27, Sazue was arrested during the police raid of the 1851 Treaty Camp.

While the media foregrounded images of the camp’s leadership, often donning headdresses, and frequently men, it was common for Two-Spirited people and women to hold leadership roles in all aspects of camp life—from sitting on the general camp council (composed of elders and traditional leadership), to leading direct actions. Candi Brings Plenty, an Oglala trans and queer healthcare specialist, was the leader of Two-Spirit Nation at Oceti Sakowin camp. For Brings Plenty, “Two-Spirit” is “an umbrella term for Indigenous people who identify as LGBTQAI+.” Colonization imposed a gender binary that largely destroyed historically plural Indigenous gender formations and fluid Indigenous sexualities, which are much more dynamic and expansive than those of the hetero-nuclear family introduced by white Christian society. Prior to colonization, Two-Spirited people also held social and cultural significance among Indigenous societies, from performing naming ceremonies to adopting the roles and responsibilities of male-, female-, or nonbinary-gendered people. Two-Spirit Nation played a central role in camp life, and one that went far beyond merely calling out heteropatriarchy. “We have Two-Spirit folk in security, at the school, at the medics, at the kitchen, and I sit on the Council,” Brings Plenty explained. In other words, Two-Spirit Nation was represented in all aspects of everyday life at camp.

The vision of an anticolonial Indigenous world coexisting with non-Indigenous people has been overshadowed by violent police crackdowns. There were important political victories, but they were short lived, too late, and not enough to stop DAPL. On November 25, 2016, the Army Corps issued an evacuation order for Oceti Sakowin Camp, setting December 5 as the deadline. On December 4, the Army Corps announced that they would not grant DAPL the easement to cross the Missouri River, pending a more thorough environmental assessment. This temporary win coincided with the arrival of more than 4,000 veterans, who braved a whiteout blizzard to march to the barricade where police were mercilessly dousing Water Protectors with chemical weapons and water in freezing temperatures. Veterans also staged a forgiveness ceremony, asking Indigenous elders—Arvol Looking Horse, Faith Spotted Eagle, Phyllis Young, Paula Horne, Jon Eagle Sr., and Leonard Crow Dog—for forgiveness for the horrors the US military inflicted upon Indigenous peoples that continued with the police and military violence against unarmed protesters. It was vindication for the months of brutality. But it didn’t last long.

While the punishment was collective, it proved effective at fomenting divisions. For months police blockaded Highway 1806, cutting off Standing Rock from the state of North Dakota and creating a strain between the camps and local community. Chairman Archambault asked Water Protectors to go home in December, in hopes of relieving the burden of the police checkpoints and constant influx of outsiders to the reservation. When Trump took office in January 2017, he expedited the environmental review process, giving the go-ahead for DAPL to drill under the Missouri River. With the camps largely evacuated, Standing Rock activist Chase Iron Eyes led a group called “Last Child Camp” to reclaim treaty land in response to Trump’s decision. Police quickly raided the camp, which was on private land, and arrested seventy-six, including Iron Eyes. In February, the Cannon Ball District and the Standing Rock Council passed resolutions calling for the evacuation of remaining campers at Sacred Stone and the defunct Oceti Sakowin Camp. It was a controversial move that pitted factions against each other at a critical juncture when unity was needed most.

On February 22, 2017, the Army Corps, Morton County deputies, and North Dakota Highway Patrol forcefully evicted the remaining campers at Oceti Sakowin. The same day, the Bureau of Indian Affairs raided and evicted campers at Sacred Stone—the only police action to take place on reservation land, and one that contributed to mounting divisions between grassroots organizers and Standing Rock. Those divisions came to a head at a March 10 Native Nations Rise march in Washington, DC, when Water Protectors booed Archambault during his speech and confronted him as he left the rally. The march garnered 5,000 attendees and arrived on the heels of the larger Women’s March. Despite the smaller turnout, it was a unified showing of support for Standing Rock, even if some didn’t agree with its political leadership. There was also mounting disillusionment with the established political order, both Democrat and Republican, for selling out the movement under Obama, and now under Trump.

“There’s only one resolution,” said Lewis Grassrope reflecting on the camp eviction and the march in Washington, DC. “Let us be who we are. Let us live. Let us be free.”

By the time that the last Water Protector was led off the land in handcuffs, 832 had been arrested. Four Water Protectors face years in prison. Red Fawn Fallis faced charges for discharging a firearm (later dropped) when she was arrested during the October 27, 2016, Treaty Camp raid. The gun belonged to Heath Harmon, an FBI informant, who had infiltrated the camp and had a relationship with Fallis. As it has for all political struggles, the state created a new generation of political prisoners to discourage other potential movements. Fallis’s family was active in AIM and had been also surveilled by the FBI. In their day, Dakota political prisoner Leonard Peltier, who is currently serving two life sentences, represented the suppression of the Red Power movement. During the #NoDAPL movement, Obama once again turned his back on Indigenous peoples. Because he had already issued so many pardons (including, for example, Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar López Rivera), and with so much pressure mounting from the horrific police violence against Water Protectors, many through Indian Country thought Obama would grant clemency to Peltier. But Obama denied his clemency application. And after #NoDAPL, there are even more Native political prisoners, more Leonard Peltiers: Redfawn Fallis was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison; Michael “Little Feather” Giron was sentenced to 36 months in federal prison; and Michael “Rattler” Markus and Dion Ortiz face years in federal prison.

Though not without its faults, the reunification of the Oceti Sakowin reawakened an Indigenous movement intent on making, and remaking, a world premised on Indigenous values, rather than on private ownership and heteropatriarchy. While Indigenous peoples committed themselves to caretaking relations, the police had also taken up their familiar role as caretakers of violence, attempting to snuff out the fires of resistance before they burned too hot or spread too far. But the fire of the prophesied Seventh Generation had been lit, and although the Oceti Sakowin campfire was ceremonially extinguished to mark the end of one form of resistance (and the beginning of another), its warm coals went on to rekindle the fires of Water Protectors’ home communities.

For Lakotas, fire is also a gateway to the past, because it is around fires that histories are shared and ceremonies held. Now, the long tradition of Indigenous resistance also includes the story of #NoDAPL. But to understand it, we have to look further into the past: to the history of the land, the water, and its people, the Oceti Sakowin.

2. Origins

There are no two sides to the history of the United States and its relationship to people who have lived here for thousands of years. There are no two sides to that story. You have no right to displace people, to steal their resources, and steal their lives … What America has done is criminal. And they’re still doing it. —Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

There is one essential reason why Indigenous peoples resist, refuse, and contest US rule: land. In fact, US history is all about land and the transformation of space, fundamentally driven by territorial expansion, the elimination of Indigenous peoples, and white settlement. From its original 1784 boundaries of the first thirteen colonies, the US rapidly expanded westward from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Pacific coast, annexing nearly 2 billion acres of Indigenous territory in less than a century. Most was west of the Mississippi River.

This includes the Missouri basin, a massive circulatory system of streams, rivers, creeks, and tributaries that empties into its main artery, Mni Sose (the Missouri River). In Oceti Sakowin cosmology, Mni Sose begins everywhere the water falls from the sky to touch the earth and trickle into one of these waterways. The river is 2,466 miles long, with a drainage basin encompassing a massive 529,000 square miles, a landmass one-sixth the size of the continental United States. The Oceti Sakowin and the Indigenous nations with which it has shared territory, and has sometimes fought, are as much defined by Mni Sose as they are by their own political, cultural, and social relationship to its life-giving waters.

In this world, water is life, and so too is the buffalo nation, the Pte Oyate. Vast buffalo herds once migrated according to the river’s seasonal ebbs and flows, followed by the hunting nations of the Northern Plains. At the center of this world is He Sapa, the Black Hills, the heart of everything that is. If He Sapa is the heart of the earth, then Mni Sose is its aorta. It is from this country that the Oceti Sakowin emerged as a nation, a people, and gained its humanity.

Much has been written about the history of the Missouri River. Yet, few histories have focused on the river’s role in the colonial project. Book titles such as Unruly River, River of Promise, River of Peril, and The Dark Missouri, as well as the settler nickname for the Missouri—“Old Misery,” for its frequent flooding and the property damage that ensued—depict the river as a deadly, treacherous, and inhospitable landscape. Early settlers often described the Missouri basin as an irrational and violent country, plagued by endless inter-Indigenous warfare; settlers saw Indigenous peoples as equally irrational and violent. “This is a delightful country,” wrote British trader Alexander Henry about the Northern Plains in 1800, “and were it not for perpetual wars, the natives might be the happiest people on earth.”

European and US explorers, traders, and settlers dubbed the many nations here “the Sioux,” mythologizing them as the most hated, the most feared, and the most violent North American Indigenous people. Viewed as a noble warrior society, they have come to symbolize the violent hypermasculinity of the frontier and are the basis of the standard image of Indigenous culture as equestrians who lived in tipis, wore headdresses, and aimlessly wandered the land like the wild game they called kin. The University of North Dakota’s racist “Fighting Sioux” mascot (retired in 2012), a disembodied head of a Native male warrior, represented such views. (Among the tribes in the state, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe stood alone in opposing it). The “Sioux warrior” myth is portrayed in the award-winning film Dances with Wolves (1990). Such stereotypes, however, are not confined to the realm of popular culture. Prominent US historians such as Richard White portray the Sioux as a pillaging band of expansionists who violently expelled their Indigenous neighbors, and who never crossed west of the Missouri River—with no small irony—until the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In fact, these attempts to classify the Sioux as imperialist newcomers—a label that more accurately describes the United States—marked the Sioux as nomadic, rootless, unsettled, and malicious, which made their removal, genocide, and colonization more palatable. Oral histories and careful Indigenous record keeping, including Dakota and Lakota winter counts, show otherwise. Winter counts marked each year or winter by recording a significant event with a pictograph on hide (or sometimes on paper), accompanied by an oral recounting of the event, and constitute a meticulous record of family, individual, and larger national histories. US historians, however, have misinterpreted winter counts to support their claims that the Lakotas crossed the Missouri River and subsequently “discovered” the Black Hills sometime around 1776.

The Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations never called themselves “Sioux”—that term derives from an abbreviation of “Nadouessioux,” a French adoption of the Ojibwe word for “little snakes,” denoting the Ojibwe’s enemies to its west. Instead, they simply called themselves the “Oyate,” the “Nation,” or the “People,” and sometimes the “Oyate Luta” (the Red Nation); as a political confederacy, they called themselves the “Oceti Sakowin Oyate” (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires). Their geographical span was vast. The oldest Dakota-speaking nations were located mostly in the western Great Lakes forests, glacial lakes, and rivers. They are the Mdewakantonwan (the Sacred Nation that Lives by the Water); the Sissintonwan (the Medicine Nation that Lives by the Water); the Wahpetonwan (the Nation that Lives in the Forest); and the Wahpekute (the Nation that Shoots Among the Leaves). The Nakota-speaking nations are the caretakers of the middle territory that began on the eastern banks of the Missouri River. Their names came from their location in the camp horn: Ihanktonwan (the Nation that Camps at the End) and Ihanktonwanna (the Little Nation that Camps at the End). And the youngest and largest, the Lakota-speaking nations, covered the vast expanse of the Northern Plains west of the Missouri River, called Tintonwan (the Nation of the Plains). Among the Tintonwans, there are also seven divisions: the Oglala (the Nation that Scatters Their Own); the Sicangu (the Nation of the Burnt Thighs, also known as the Brulé); the Hunkpapa (the Nation at the Head of the Circle); the Mniconjou (the Nation that Plants by the Water); Itazipco (the Nation without Bows, or the Sans Arc); the Sihasapa (the Blackfeet Nation); and the Oohenupa (the Nation of Two Kettles).

Like most human societies, the origin stories of the Oceti Sakowin are as diverse as its people and the lands they continue to live with and protect. To name but a few examples, their origin histories include emergence from the earth—from the Wase (red clay); emergence from He Sapa; emergence from Bde Wakan (Spirit Lake or Mille Lacs); descent from the Wicahpi Oyate (the Star Nation); descent from the Pte Oyate (the Buffalo Nation); and westward and southern migrations from the Atlantic Seaboard or Central America. None of these origin stories are more or less true than others. What they have in common, however, is their collective significance in defining both a historical experience within a specific geography, and the moral universe of how one relates to others and the land. The origin stories contradict settler narratives that describe the Oceti Sakowin as “late arrivals” west of the Missouri River, at best; or as expansionists, at worst—driven, like their US counterpart, by purely economic motives to control river trade by violently displacing other Indigenous nations.

In the absence of written law, according to Lakota author Luther Standing Bear, “a great tribal consciousness” reigned at the individual level in Oceti Sakowin societies. No human institution employed force or violence to compel behavior. Social conduct was based on mutual solidarity and kinship, in what Standing Bear calls Woucage, “our way of doing things.” The ultimate punishment for breaking group solidarity was exile, which “meant to lose identity or die.” An individual’s responsibility was first and foremost to ensure the survival of the collective. Decisions—concerning anything from hunting to travel to warfare—were made at the community level in the open council, a decentralized political authority that frequently rotated leadership, affording equal say, that is, to separate societies of men and of women and, in some cases, places of honor to Wintke societies, those who did not conform to the binary gender roles. An Oyate Okizu, or the assembly of the entire Oceti Sakowin, was called only for matters of great importance such as sun dances, or, in the late nineteenth century, the negotiation of treaties and repulsion of US invasion. In contrast to their own customary laws, Lakotas created the word Woope Wasicu to describe the white man’s law. Woope Wasicu described “the cruel equipment” of law—from armed soldiers and cops, to guns, cannons, balls and chains, and prisons. According to Luther Standing Bear, this kind of law “designated not order but force and disorder.” Next to the maintenance of good relations within the nation, an individual’s second duty was the protection of communal territory. In the east, the vast wild rice patties and seasonal farms that grew corn, beans, and squash demarcated Dakota territory. In the west, Lakota territory extended as far as the buffalo herds that traveled in the fertile Powder River country. For Dakotas, Lakotas, and Nakotas, territory was defined as any place where they cultivated relations with plant and animal life; this often overlaid, and was sometimes in conflict, with other Indigenous nations.

For example, the Lakotas were by no means the only Indigenous nation with connections to the Black Hills. When different peoples combined through alliance (whether through the formation of kinship relations, or purely for survival), they often incorporated aspects of one another’s histories. Among the more than fifty Indigenous nations who possessed similar, often overlapping, relationships and claims to the Black Hills were the Arikara, Osage, Shoshone, Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Pawnee, Mandan, Hidatsa, Kiowa, Ponca, Crow, Omaha, Winnebago, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Blackfeet.

Like the countries that constitute the United Nations, the political authority of the Oceti Sakowin didn’t prevent them from sometimes warring with other Indigenous nations. Luther Standing Bear, commenting on Lakota warfare in 1931, admits as much. He notes how the United States criminalized the assertion of Indigenous political authority to make war and defend territory. “We kept our lands to ourselves,” he writes, “by making all other tribes stay away from us.” When whites began to fear the Oceti Sakowin’s political power, Standing Bear observed, “they called us Sioux.” In settler vernacular, “Sioux” became equivalent to “criminal” and was used to justify invasion and endless war. But, as Indigenous scholars and intellectuals have contended for the last two centuries, war, diplomacy, and sovereignty are just a few of the Oceti Sakowin’s many characteristics. Nonetheless, “Sioux” warfare, diplomacy, and sovereignty dominate settler histories of nineteenth-century Indigenous life on the Missouri River and in the Northern Plains. This is not because Indigenous nations are inherently militaristic, but because they had come to know the United States—which the Lakotas called “Milahanskan” (the nation of the long knives)—best through its army.

The first Indigenous–US interactions on the Missouri River were military encounters. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson finalized the Louisiana Purchase from the French Republic: an annexation of 827 million acres. Louisiana Territory encompassed the entire Missouri River basin and more than doubled the territory of the fledgling United States. Shortly thereafter, Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to lead a military expedition up the Missouri River, bearing arms, flags, and “gifts,” to claim the “new” land and its people. Their goal was to proclaim US sovereignty over the region and its nations, and to bring the Indigenous people into trade relations with the United States. And of all the Indigenous nations, Jefferson mentioned only “the Sioux” by name. “On that nation,” Jefferson ordered Lewis, “we wish most particularly to make a friendly impression, because of their immense power, and because we learn they are very desirous of being on the most friendly terms with us.”

The Corps of Discovery (a unit of the US Army) met several divisions of the Oceti Sakowin as they traveled upriver. After navigating the Big Bend of the Missouri (present-day Crow Creek and Lower Brule Reservations) in late September of 1804, the expedition was intercepted by a camp of Sicangus, a political subdivision of the Lakotas. As per custom, the Lakotas hailed the corps with a plume of smoke that rose in the northwest, signaling the expedition had been spotted. The Lakotas sought council and some form of payment to pass through their territory, but Lewis and Clark rebuffed the Lakotas’ assertion to determine who shall pass and at what cost—clearly disobeying Jefferson’s instructions “to make a friendly impression.”

After eight days of failing to negotiate their passage without paying a toll, Lewis and Clark resorted to violence. According to John Ordway, an expedition volunteer, Clark informed the intransigent Lakota headman, Black Buffalo, that they were sent by Thomas Jefferson, who could “have them all distroyed [sic].” But, obviously surrounded and overwhelmed, Lewis and Clark’s threats were worthless. Because he led the negotiations between the Corps of Discovery and the Sicangus and he refused to let the expedition pass, Lewis and Clark took Buffalo Medicine (and possibly other leaders like him) hostage and to secure their passage north. (Buffalo Medicine was later released once the expedition was free from Lakota country.) Taking Indigenous hostages was common practice; Jefferson had earlier advised Lewis that “taking influential chiefs” or their children “would give some security to your party.” Reflecting on the encounter, Clark later wrote that the Lakotas were “the vilest miscreants of the savage race, and must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri.” “Unless these people are reduced to order, by coercive measures, I am ready to pronounce that the citizens of the United States can never enjoy but partially the advantages which the Missouri presents,” he continued. “[The Sioux] view with contempt the merchants of the Missouri, whom they never fail to plunder, when in their power.”

Historians have uncritically taken Lewis and Clark’s testimony of that first encounter at face value: they were waylaid by a band of river pirates straight from the pages of a Robinson Crusoe fantasy novel. This was most recently retold in popular accounts like US historian Stephen Ambrose’s 1997 bestselling book Undaunted Courage and documentarian Ken Burns’s 2001 PBS film Lewis and Clark. But in their estimation, the Lakotas didn’t make much of the encounter. Lewis and Clark came and left, and the Lakotas continued living as before. This was a fairly routine engagement: merely a different flavor of whites traveling through their territory bearing flags and guns. According to Clark, even the downriver and more “peaceful” Ihanktonwan “invariably arrested the progress” of all traders traversing the river by exacting tolls and demanding more accommodating trade prices. However, for the United States this first interaction held great significance, and it profoundly shaped their feelings toward a nation they viewed as criminal “pirates of the Missouri.” As Oglala historian Craig Howe observes, this exchange “gave rise to storm clouds of deceit that have in some sense darkened two centuries” of Lakota–US relations.

But for the historian Jeffrey Ostler, the foundation for genocide in US Indian policy had in fact been laid decades earlier, in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. The ordinance opened up the area north of the Ohio River and in the Great Lakes region for settlement, creating territories that became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Additionally, Article 3 stated (of the “Indians”) that “in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.” While, as Ostler observes, this “did not call for genocide in the first instance,” it legalized genocidal war in the event that land cessions could not be achieved through “peaceful” means and Indigenous people were unwilling to submit to US authority.”

The 1823 Supreme Court decision Johnson v. M’Intosh, in which Chief Justice John Marshall spelled out the rights of the United States to Indigenous lands, also drew upon a centuries-old doctrine. Indigenous peoples, he ruled, only possessed “occupancy” rights, meaning their lands could be taken by powers that “discovered” them: the “Doctrine of Discovery.” The origin of this notion was a fifteenth-century papal bull known as the “Doctrine of Christian Discovery” that distinguished Christian from non-Christian nations. The latter were regarded as little more than “savage” peoples awaiting the gift of European civilization, and according to Lenape scholar Steven Newcomb, the United States interpreted the doctrine as describing Indigenous peoples as “politically non-existent, partially or entirely.” Therefore, Indigenous title to the land could not be extinguished where it did not exist. Commenting on the Johnson decision, Onondaga international jurist Tonya Gonnella Frichner observes, “The newly formed United States needed to manufacture an American Indian political identity and concept of Indian land that would open the way for the United States in its westward colonial expansion.” This founding myth eventually became known as “Manifest Destiny.”

In 1807, following the expedition, Jefferson appointed Clark brigadier general and Indian agent for Louisiana Territory, and he served as an Indian Affairs agent under the War Department until his death in 1838. The expedition and the annexation of land west of the Mississippi was a part of a rapid push westward, and the Louisiana Purchase was a landmark achievement. For one, it provided the means by which southern plantation capitalists could expand their “cotton kingdom” to new markets—hence the importance of imposing trade relations with the Indigenous nations. Without expansion, the plantation system was doomed to fail. Jefferson envisioned an “Empire of Liberty” for the lands west of the Mississippi; one that required the expansion of Black slavery and the transformation of Indigenous land into private property for advancing a yeoman farming empire. In this way, the expansion of the plantation system coincided with Indigenous dispossession and removal.

Jefferson saw the Louisiana Territory as a partial solution to the “Indian problem”—the problem being that the “Indian tribes” still resided on lands coveted by the United States. His primary targets were the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes”—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Seminole—and his intention was to break up and ultimately dissolve these eastern nations. Because these nations had become slaveowners with farms and plantations, like their white neighbors, their system of land tenure resembled a claim to permanence. Thus, they had to be departed. And new lands in the West offered a new opportunity for eastern Indigenous removal. For example, Section 15 of the 1804 Louisiana Territorial Act afforded that “the President of the United States is hereby authorized to stipulate with any Indian tribes owning lands on the east side of the Mississippi, and residing thereon, for an exchange of lands, the property of the United States, on the west side of the Mississippi, in case the said tribes shall remove and settle thereon.” Jefferson wanted to further concentrate eastern Indigenous nations into ever-diminishing territories. By making their wild game, land, and resources scarce, he could force them to either “incorporate” or “remove beyond the Mississippi.”

Dakotas, Nakotas, and Lakotas had been trading with the French and British for decades by the time the Lewis and Clark expedition arrived. By the early 1800s, the fur trade had enveloped Northern Plains life (the Europeans also brought the Bible, the gun, and disease), and the Lakotas had a vested interest in maintaining a foothold in the river trade; they certainly didn’t consent to the US claim over the land and waterway. But the Lakotas never saw themselves as owning the river; on the contrary, it was to the river that they belonged. The many centuries they spent living in relationship to the land and water reinforced this understanding. And by 1804 they also belonged to the river trade, both economically and politically, making the river a different source of their livelihood and survival.

Early settlers and traders heavily relied on Indigenous labor and patronage for trapping and hunting, while Indigenous societies in turn relied on trade goods such as cloth, guns, ammunition, knives, iron cooking utensils, and food items. From the early colonial times through the end of the nineteenth century, the fur trade was dominated by rival trading firms (and rival European colonizers), who encouraged sporadic inter-Indigenous trade wars. From 1806 to 1835, US Indian policy introduced a factory system of trade houses to curb the criminal behavior of these white traders, but the policy had little effect, because the US government and traders themselves participated in the same criminal enterprise of trespass and theft. All of these companies were in the business of trading beaver pelts, to be sold on the European and US markets; however, by the 1830s beaver populations had been all but exterminated.

Historians and archeologists largely view Indigenous peoples as responsible for the decline of fur-bearing animals in the Northern Plains, and the adoption of horse culture increased the ability of Indigenous peoples to hunt buffalo. But their capabilities never compared to the killing efficiency of white trappers and hunters. For example, the killing efficiency of the “Rocky Mountain system” of trapping, dominant in the early nineteenth century, rapidly depleted fur-bearing animals. Made up of heavily armed company employees, these units knowingly trespassed into Lakota and Arikara territories, fortifying their positions and trade routes as they advanced. According to Indigenous custom, no one was barred from hunting for subsistence and survival. But they did place restrictions on whites who hunted for profit; thus, these highly romanticized frontiersmen were in fact little more than poachers. As beaver populations declined and demand for their pelts decreased, buffalo robes were quick to fill their place. Yet when US companies began to bypass Indigenous peoples and dominate the trade, buffalo herds, like the beaver, were all but exterminated, from the 1870s to the 1880s. This expropriation went hand in hand with military-sponsored extermination campaigns, which began in 1865. Taking only the hides, white hunters not only left buffalo carcasses to rot on the plains, but also poisoned them with strychnine to kill off coyotes, wolves, and other scavengers—and sometimes starving Native people. Estimates place the precontact North American buffalo population at 25 to 30 million. It took settlers nearly a century to exterminate the herds in the east, forcing the survivors of the holocaust, much like their human kin, west of the Mississippi River. Annihilating the remaining 10 to 15 million in the Great Plains took just two decades.

These were acts of genocide. For genocide encompasses much more than merely acts committed during war, as most US historians believe. The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the intent of genocide as “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Examples include, but are not limited to, murder, torture, or the deliberate deprivation of resources needed for physical survival, like clean water, food (e.g., buffalo), clothing, shelter or medical services. This definition also includes actions targeting women specifically, like involuntary sterilization, forced abortion, prohibition of marriage, and long-term separation of men and women, all of which threaten the ability to produce future generations. (Another tactic is the forcible transfer of children.) United States policy has subjected Indigenous peoples to all of these genocidal acts. Some of which are historical, others are ongoing. “Settler colonialism is inherently genocidal in terms of the genocide convention,” writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Although the genocide convention is not retroactive (it only became applicable in the United States in 1988, the year the US Senate ratified it), it is a useful lens for studying Indigenous history.

The fur trading forts were rampant with sexual violence. White traders, low-level laborers, and soldiers often stopped by for a drunken “frolic,” which involved demanding the sexual services of Indigenous women’s bodies—with or without their consent. Access to whiskey, treaty annuities, and trade goods sometimes came with the expectation that Indigenous men should forfeit their daughters’, sisters’, and wives’ bodies to white men (as if Indigenous women’s bodies were theirs to give), and soldiers also frequently raped Indigenous women whom they had taken prisoner. “To celebrate victory, troopers often rounded up the prettiest girls to be passed around among the officers, leaving the enlisted men with the less attractive, older women,” wrote Sicangu scholar Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve in her account, based on family oral histories of the well-known abuses against Lakota women at Fort Platte (in operation from 1840 to 1846). Many Indigenous activists today have identified “man camps,” the transient all-men communities of oil and gas workers, as hubs for the exploitation of Indigenous women through trafficking and sex work. In some ways, trading forts were the first man camps—the vanguards of capital that extracted wealth not only from the land, but also through the conquest of Indigenous women’s bodies. Later, these trade forts also became border towns, the white-dominated settlements that today ring Indigenous reservations.

The fur trade also violently transformed gender relations. As Driving Hawk Sneve recounts, Lakota society didn’t adhere to monogamous sexual values, possessed nothing on par with the puritanical Christian views of sexual conduct or marriage, and considered property in the home to be owned by the women. But Lakota women who married white traders were placed under the protection and control of a patriarch (a practice known as “coverture”). Descending from a society where women owned all the property in the home, losing control of their property, their bodies, and their children, and being placed under the dominion of a white patriarch was a harrowing, alien experience. Maybe this should come as no surprise. In white society women and children held little or no political authority and were little more than domestic servants. Diplomacy, trade, and war—the public sphere—were the sole privilege of men. This included the sale and trade of hides at European or US forts along the Missouri River, unlike the Indigenous systems they had replaced, in which trade, exchange, and the sharing of material wealth was intended to strengthen kinship relations, rather than a market economy and private ownership. During the fur trade, Indigenous women labored to prepare the buffalo hides, but they didn’t “own” the hides sold to whites because the hunting and sale of those hides was a male-dominated business. And white traders often owned or “married” multiple Indigenous women to increase their access to the women’s relatives—and their trade markets—or to sell her off to others. In this sense, the subordination of Indigenous women was lucrative for a trader and increased his social standing.

One of these men was the French Canadian trader Toussaint Charbonneau, who is famous for joining Lewis and Clark in November 1804, when the expedition camped among the Mandans at Fort Mandan. He offered up his services and those of his “wife,” a Shoshone woman by the name of Sacagawea, as interlocutors and interpreters for Indigenous peoples they would encounter upriver. Although Sacagawea has surpassed Charbonneau in fame for her aid to the expedition, little is known about her other than her services to white men. Captured by Hidatsas at the age of thirteen, Sacagawea was one of many women Charbonneau purchased throughout his life. Although she bore him children, Sacagawea was little more than chattel to Charbonneau—a piece of property he sometimes resented, and at others physically abused. And it wasn’t only Sacagawea whom he subjected to violence. In May 1795, while working for the Montreal-based North West Company, Charbonneau was sent to pick up supplies at a trading post near Lake Manitou. According to the journal of John Macdonell, a North West Company clerk, an elder Ojibwe woman caught Charbonneau “in the act of committing Rape upon her Daughter.” Furious, the woman stabbed Charbonneau with a canoe awl, “a fate he highly deserved for his brutality.”

Like Charbonneau, white traders, explorers, soldiers, and settlers believed they possessed the right to trespass freely across Indigenous territory, and they also believed they possessed unrestricted access to Indigenous women’s bodies and their children. Muscogee jurist Sarah Deer argues that rape “can be employed as a metaphor for the entire concept of colonialism” because it is not only experienced individually but is also part of an ongoing structure of domination—one with a beginning, but no end. More so than Indigenous men, the subordination of Indigenous women was about realizing profits in the fur trade. Violence against Native women undermined their customary political authority and used their bodies to create profit. As noted above, unlike their white counterparts, whose bodies were used for sexual reproduction, Indigenous women’s bodies increased white traders’ access to new markets through their kin—and by extension, land, capital, and political and economic influence. Thus, while Indigenous women did bear children for white men, their main use was for securing the future of white settlement. As Athabascan scholar Dian Million puts it, “Gender violence marks … the evisceration of Indigenous nations.” White traders and trappers appropriated Indigenous women’s bodies as much as they had appropriated the wealth of the land by harvesting and selling the skins of animals. The two practices went hand in hand.

But this was only one component of settler society’s attack on Indigenous women’s political authority. With women already shut out of the fur trade, the treaties, which barred Indigenous women from participation in this specific realm of diplomacy, offered an externally imposed means to recognize Indigenous men’s political authority. From 1805 to 1873, the United States made thirty-five treaties and agreements with various political divisions of the Oceti Sakowin—or, as they became known in treaty parlance, “the Sioux Nation of Indians.” Not one woman was allowed to “touch-the-pen,” place an “x-mark,” or formally consent to any land cessions, peace agreements, or political relationships with the United States. By the time the Oceti Sakowin had been forcefully confined to reservations in the 1890s, Indigenous women had been completely confined to the domestic sphere, while Indigenous men occupied the primary roles in the reservation political economy, including as reservation police, political leaders, and traders. Gender divisions were sometimes enforced by military rule, and the boarding school system, which was controlled by the military like the reservations, further entrenched these divisions, ripping children from their families and educating young girls and boys on their proper places in a “civilized Christian society”: homemaking for the girls, and wage labor for the boys. Finally, in 1924—after Indigenous peoples had achieved a relative degree of “civilization”—the United States granted them citizenship, annexing both Indigenous lands and lives into the US nation-state. It was not only within the home that Indigenous women’s political authority been domesticated, but also in the settler nation as a whole.

This upheaval of gender relations significantly undermined the political traditions of the Oceti Sakowin. After all, it was a woman who formalized the first compact—or treaty—with the human and other-than-human world. Pte Ska Win, White Buffalo Calf Woman—the most significant historical figure in Oceti Sakowin history—established not only the basis of customary and ceremonial laws of humans, but also how humans would exist in correct relations to the Pte Oyate and the nonhuman world. In his earliest entry on his winter count, the Sicangu historian Brown Hat depicts White Buffalo Calf Woman as a white buffalo arriving in the center of a camp circle in the first decade of the tenth century. Above her are the Calf Pipe, a yucca plant, and a cornstalk. To the right, in English, Brown Hat lists the various animal nations the White Buffalo Calf Woman brought into formal relations with the Oceti Sakowin: elk, deer, antelope, buffalo, beaver, and wolves. Corn kernels fall from her udders into water, making the connection between humans, plants, animals, the earth, and water. Therefore, no one had the right to cede these relations to the land, water, plants, and animals—because those relations were grounded in the first compact, the first treaty with Pte Ska Win. (This is why Arvol Looking Horse, the nineteenth-generation keeper of this Calf Pipe, led the prayer marches at #NoDAPL to honor those original instruction and the Oceti Sakowin’s first commitments.)

To gain access to Indigenous lands, white men had used Indigenous men to break communal land practices and undermine Indigenous women’s political authority. As a result, Indigenous women are largely absent from early historical narratives. Yet their power posed an obstacle to US annexation of Indigenous lands. It should come as no surprise that #NoDAPL was led primarily by Indigenous women, from youth leaders, such as Bobbi Jean Three Legs, Zaysha Grinnell, Tokata Iron Eyes, and Jasilyn Charger; to women like LaDonna BraveBull Allard, Phyllis Young, and Faith Spotted Eagle.

Zaysha Grinnell, a fifteen-year-old citizen of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation, the descendants of Sacagawea, successfully petitioned her tribal council in March 2016 to oppose DAPL. She described the scene faced by her nation during the oil boom as similar to the one confronted by her ancestors during the fur trade, two centuries ago:

When these oil companies come in, they bring in the men … These men bring with them the man camps, and with that comes violence and sex trafficking. Indigenous women and girls near the camps are really affected by this and we are not going to put up with it. Making more girls into leaders, because we witness it firsthand, is so important.

As the first entry of capitalism in the Upper Missouri, the fur trade, spreading through existing Indigenous networks, brought with it apocalypse in the form of smallpox. By the time Lewis and Clark arrived, the European disease had already devastated the Missouri River Indigenous peoples several times, most likely being introduced by French and British traders. The advent of steamboats greatly increased the spread of smallpox. In 1824 Congress authorized the Army Corps of Engineers, a construction branch of the military, to regulate the navigation of rivers and harbors. By 1838 Congress had assigned the Army Corps to pull snags and clear the river for steamboat traffic coming from Saint Louis. The federal government assumed its authority over navigable waterways under the Constitution’s commerce clause—the same clause that also regulated trade with Indigenous nations. Indian affairs, under the supervision of the War Department, was tasked with the creation and management of federally subsidized trading posts to undercut British, Spanish, and French trade and bolster US influence over Indigenous nations. The increase in steamboat traffic intensified the fur trade; and the fur trade in turn intensified commerce and, therefore, US authority over the river. As R. G. Robertson points out, the fur trade “was the primary means by which smallpox reached the Indians in the interior.” In other words, the spread of smallpox and other diseases coincided with an intensification of colonial invasion.

Steamships transporting treaty annuities, ammunition, Indian agents, traders and soldiers to Missouri River forts and trading posts also brought disease and death. The consequences of their passage brought pure horror to Indigenous nations. In the summer of 1837, an American Fur Company steamboat, the St. Peter’s, traveled from Saint Louis transporting trade goods and Indigenous treaty annuities; it was, in turn, to collect Indigenous-harvested buffalo hides. It also knowingly carried, in its human cargo, the smallpox virus.

At Fort Clark, where the Mandans lived, along the Missouri River, the deadly virus arrived on June 19, 1837, via the St. Peter’s. As early as April, the crew had seen signs of the disease among themselves, but they nevertheless unloaded treaty annuities and loaded buffalo robes onto the ship that day. Smallpox, too, was unloaded, as the infected crew embarked on a drunken “frolic” with the Mandans. Within twenty-five days, the Mandans showed the first signs of infections. The only ones spared were elders who had built up an immunity, and who were already scarred from previous outbreaks. Children and adults writhed and stung from intense fevers. Putrid, hideous sores filled with pus, scarring them for life—if they survived. Francis A. Chardon, a fur trader at the fort, stopped counting the dead “as they die so fast it is impossible.” To end the suffering, parents killed their children; friends, relatives, and lovers killed each other; and some committed suicide. The smell of decaying corpses was discernable from miles away.

Many have speculated that Indigenous peoples were incapable of understanding infection and the spread of disease. What is clear from Chardon’s journals is that Indigenous peoples knew the source of their affliction—the fur trade and the trading forts—and sought retribution against the traders and the fur trade itself. “We are badly situated,” wrote Chardon, “as we are threatened to be Murdered by the Indians every instant.” Indigenous peoples knew traders and explorers sometimes carried smallpox or cowpox with them in vials for inoculations. George Catlin, a white painter and traveler of the American West, recounted a story he heard among the Pawnees that a trader threatened unleashing smallpox upon them if they didn’t submit to his will: “He would let the smallpox out of a bottle and destroy the whole [lot] of them.” “The Sioux had it in contemplation … to murder us in the spring,” Lewis wrote while he and Clark wintered with the Mandans in 1805 and 1805, “but were prevented from making the attack, by our threatening to spread the smallpox, with all its horrors among them.”

Accurate Indigenous population data does not exist, but some studies suggest that Indigenous nations with closer contact to the whites had increased exposure to diseases. These nations, such as the Mandans at Fort Clark, had positioned themselves as brokers in the fur trade, often settling near trading forts or allowing trade posts in or near their villages. Diseases were quick to spread in these intimate river communities, making quarantine or flight nearly impossible. Some calculations estimate that from 1780 to 1877, Indigenous river nations lost around 80 percent of their populations, with the Mandan, Caddo, Wichita, and Pawnee experiencing almost 90 percent population loss. Buffalo-hunting nations on the Northern Plains from 1780 to 1877 experienced a 40 percent population decline overall; among them, this figure approached 80 percent for the Assiniboine, Atsina, and Comanche. While smallpox epidemics arrived again and again to the Plains nations—1778, 1781, 1801—the 1837 outbreak was the most devastating for those along the Missouri River, nearly wiping out the Mandans and forcing them to join together with the Hidatsas and Arikaras. (The Lakotas and Dakotas, however, largely escaped the outbreak because of prior inoculation and by avoiding trading posts after learning of the epidemic.) In 1849 cholera killed about one-fourth of the Pawnees, along with many Lakotas. The last major smallpox epidemic in the region occurred in 1871, killing thousands of Assiniboines and Blackfeet.

Turning the river into profit required little capital investment in Indigenous lives, as long as the trade goods and annuities continued to flow. But it did require the continual extraction of furs. The employment of Indigenous societies as trappers, hunters, and patrons was the first effort at turning the river into a source of wealth. But the Missouri River wasn’t a “middle ground” scenario where all parties were equals, even when the British and French dominated trade. A popular convention in US history, the “middle ground” thesis posits that in some cases, such as the fur trade, Indigenous and white people found common ground in forms of trade where one group was not allowed to assert too much control or influence over the other. Lost in these imaginary and ahistorical situations, however, is the simple fact that early European and US colonization, in all its forms, was fundamentally extractive and imperial. Lakotas and Dakotas did actively compete with other Indigenous nations for control over the river trade, but such conflict never approached the holocaust brought by disease and the calculated violence of the US military and traders.

The Oceti Sakowin had good reason to despise the imposition of white traders and US forts. As the fur trade peaked, the Oceti Sakowin east and west of the Missouri began to wage defensive wars to expel the invaders whom they rightfully blamed for the disappearing buffalo and other animal kin. Foremost among their grievances was the devastation inflicted by white traders, emigrants traversing the land, and the increasing US military presence. Each was a foreboding sign of white encroachment. Instead of justice, however, what they got was a “peace” through the permanence of war.

3. War

The whole world is coming.

A Nation is coming,

A Nation is coming.

The Eagle has brought the message to the Nation …

Over the whole earth they are coming.

The Buffalo are coming,

The Buffalo are coming.

—“Maka Sitomaniya Olowan,”

Lakota Ghost Dance Song, 1890

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism—the specific form of colonialism whereby an imperial power seizes Native territory, eliminates the original people by force, and resettles the land with a foreign, invading population. Unlike other forms of colonialism in which the colonizers rule from afar and sometimes leave, settler colonialism attempts to permanently and completely replace Natives with a settler population. The process is never complete, and the colonial state’s methods for gaining access to new territories change over time, evolving from a program of outright extermination to one of making Indigenous peoples “racial minorities” and “domestic dependent nations” within their own lands, and of sacrificing Indigenous lands for resource extraction. But even if elimination strategies evolve to appear more humane or ethical, “the question of genocide,” writes anthropologist Patrick Wolfe, “is never far from discussions of settler colonialism.”

Indigenous elimination, in all its orientations, is the organizing principle of settler society. Unlike the European Holocaust, which had a beginning and an end, and targeted humans alone, Indigenous elimination, as a practice and formal policy, continues today, entailing the wholesale destruction of nonhuman relations. Today’s state violence and surveillance against Water Protectors is a continuation of the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that the law enforcement agency that led the siege against the #NoDAPL camps in order to protect DAPL construction, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, inherited the legacy of the infamous Indian fighter and Seventh Cavalry general George Armstrong Custer. Present-day Mandan, North Dakota, a white-dominated border town to Standing Rock and the county seat of Morton County, is seven miles north of Fort Abraham Lincoln, where Custer was stationed to secure the passage of the Northern Pacific Railroad across the Missouri River and through Oceti Sakowin territory.

Bloody wars of conquest defined the period following the United States’ assertion of control over the river trade, lasting for nearly half of the nineteenth century. Its goal was to control the river, and then the entire Missouri River basin (especially the fertile buffalo hunting grounds in the western Powder River country). Following the Civil War, the Oceti Sakowin’s relationship with the Missouri River was increasingly defined by avoidance, because the river had since been enflamed by invasion: violence, death, and disease. The escalation of the river trade brought unwanted changes, such as an increased US presence through the construction of military and trade forts, and an intensifying assault on rapidly thinning buffalo herds.

Initially, Indigenous subsistence hunting, gathering, and agriculture had provided the means to effectively resist settler encroachment. But by separating Indigenous producers from the land and attempting to make them dependent on treaty annuities or cash economies, the colonizers waged total war on Indigenous life. The Oceti Sakowin were not the first to confront US total war. Haudenosaunees, for instance, call every US commander in chief “town destroyer”—a title bestowed on the first US president, George Washington, who ordered a bloody, punitive campaign that burned forty Haudenosaunee towns in New York during the Revolutionary War. Haudenosaunee cornfields were also burned to thwart the reclamation of the land and impose starvation. To consummate possession by mixing blood and soil, the troops responsible for razing the Haudenosaunee towns were afterward rewarded with title to Indigenous lands.

In a very real sense, the founding of the United States was a declaration of war against Indigenous peoples. But to formally declare war would have been to acknowledge Indigenous peoples’ status among the “civilized” or “Christian” nations. On the other hand, an undeclared war was a “savage war,” in which the rules of “civilized war” were suspended. US army historian Andrew Birtle reports that the military academy at West Point studies US Indian Wars only in its course on the law, and in “the same manner as it did the treatment of guerrillas and actively hostile civilian populations in civilized warfare.” The implication was “that soldiers were free to employ the harshest measures necessary to subdue them.”

In other words, the US Indian Wars developed the tactics and strategies that would inform US counterinsurgency operations abroad. As Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd argues, “the United States propagates empire not through frontiers but through the production of a paradigmatic Indianness.” As the US military became professionalized following the Civil War, these lessons were passed down informally, though most never became written doctrine. And as anthropologist Laleh Khalili argues, they “became the necessary, if unwritten, manual for subsequent overseas asymmetric warfare, in the Philippines, the Caribbean, and Latin America.” These included techniques like the use of native scouts, the establishment of reservations to control and monitor native fighters and civilians, and attacks on villages to undermine native economies.

But because Indigenous peoples are not seen as full sovereigns under US or international law, Indigenous resistance to colonialism—even if for self-defense—is considered criminal, much as it was in places throughout the Americas, Africa, and more recently in Palestine. Libraries have been filled with volumes written by armchair historians, colonial apologists, and scholars of all stripes—too many to name here—on Northern Plains Indigenous warfare. Very few researchers, however, have actually questioned the premises of waging just wars on the part of Indigenous nations against US empire. A question that many historians have entertained—did the Oceti Sakowin have a right to defend itself with armed force?—is not posed here. The simple truth is that Indigenous nations, like all nations, possess the right to defend themselves, and how a people choose to defend themselves cannot be placed neatly into categories of “right” and “wrong.” Survival by any means necessary is an act of resistance.

It was through war and self-defense that the Oceti Sakowin made their most historic agreements with the United States: the 1851 and 1868 treaties of peace. In 1849 Congress transferred the Bureau of Indian Affairs from the Department of War to the Department of Interior, a newly created federal bureaucracy dedicated to the management of wildlife, public lands, and the conservation of natural resources. Indian affairs have remained there ever since. The shift marked a new direction in Indian policy that emphasized “peace” while explicitly promoting the “civilizing mission.” “Peace and friendship” treaties had already placed the various divisions of the Oceti Sakowin exclusively “under the protection of the United States of America, and of no other nation, power, or sovereign” (in 1805, 1815 and 1825), but they never ceded large amounts of territory or drastically diminished Oceti Sakowin political authority.

The Oceti Sakowin possessed significant military and political power, so it is unlikely this Indigenous nation viewed treaties with the United States as acquiescing to a superior sovereign power. This began to change after decades of the fur trade and diseases exacted their toll on the Northern Plains ecology and Indigenous nations. By the time of the peace policy, thousands of Lakotas had already withdrawn west of the Missouri into the Powder River country to avoid the unfolding apocalypse brought on by the river trade. In the east traders had swindled the Dakotas out of land and treaty annuities, reducing them to starvation and creating the conditions for an Indigenous uprising. In some areas, the once-numerous buffalo nations that blackened the Missouri River valley had been all but wiped out, and elsewhere they had been totally exterminated. Infectious disease—cholera, measles, and smallpox outbreaks—arrived with the white invasion of the West, which swept through Pawnee, Crow, Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho hunting grounds and into Oregon Territory.

In 1847 Brigham Young led an exodus of tens of thousands of Mormons to settle Indigenous lands in Utah, while the discovery of gold in California in 1849 and later in Montana in 1853 added to the westward white flood. In 1846 a group of Sicangus and Oglalas in Powder River country demanded payment for the damages that the increased overland travel had inflicted on the land: the depletion of game, the clearing of scarce timber, and the spreading of disease. They got escalated military occupation instead. The US military found it impossible to control the waves of white settlers and mounting Indigenous indignation. The year the peace policy was declared, the United States established a fort at the confluence of the North Platte and Laramie rivers to address the problem. Fort Laramie thus became the site for them to pursue “peace” by means of increased military occupation in Powder River country. Strategically positioned at the point where the overland trail trespassed through the territory of the last remaining large buffalo herds, the fort was a symbol of increasing US presence and authority.

The vision for the military outpost came from the Upper Platte Indian agent Thomas Fitzpatrick, a leading advocate of peace by military occupation. As part of his vision for peace, Fitzpatrick hoped to advance US interests by securing a wide-ranging inter-Indigenous peace treaty to definitively establish Indigenous territory, guarantee safe passage for overland travelers, and secure land cessions. The Plains nations called a mass council. For three weeks in September 1851, tens of thousands from the Arikara, Mandan, Hidatsa, Crow, Gros Ventre, Blackfeet, Assiniboine, Shoshone, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakota, and Dakota nations met with US treaty commissioners at Horse Creek, thirty-six miles downriver of Fort Laramie. The first Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 was signed by all parties, ensuring the right of the United States to build wagon roads and railroads, and payment of $50,000 for fifty years for damages caused by the overland emigrations. Perhaps demonstrating the commitment of the United States to this “peace” policy, the Senate limited the period of treaty annuities to ten years, with the possibility of a five-year renewal. The amendment was sent back to the Plains nations for approval, and then back to the Senate, where it was never ratified. Regardless, the United States paid the $50,000 in annuities for the next fifteen years. The spirit of peace, however, was short-lived and the treaty was deeply flawed.

Six headmen of the Oceti Sakowin signed the treaty, presumably with the understanding that the emigrant depredations would cease and that the United States would live up to its commitments. The Oceti Sakowin representatives, however, protested over having to select a single “head chief” to represent all the nations in the treaty negotiations because it contradicted the decentralized political structure more familiar to them, which allowed each division to select its own representatives. This configuration offended the autonomy previously possessed by each political division. Mato Wayuhi (Conquering Bear), a Sicangu, was arbitrarily chosen by the Oceti Sakowin councils as a representative of the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, but he protested his appointment because of his own young age—he was fifty years old, not yet an elder—and lack of experience. The selection of “treaty chiefs” to represent entire Indigenous nations was an age-old settler tactic to exert influence and concentrate leadership, while cleaving political factions. Most Indigenous leaders were more committed to diplomacy than to armed resistance, though the two strategies sometimes worked in tandem. Some wanted to give up the Powder River country and remove to reservations to start a new life. “The hostiles,” as the Indian agents called them, wished to end treaty making altogether and keep their lands free of reservations and restrictions. Although the two divisions both agreed with the premises of the 1851 Treaty, the western divisions demanded that the reservation groups cease accepting annuities and remove themselves from the negative influence of the trading forts, where the annuities were distributed.

In 1853 Fitzpatrick criticized the outcome of the 1851 Treaty, calling it a temporary fix to coming war. “Either an inducement must be offered to them greater than the gains of plunder, or a force must be at hand able to restrain them and check their depredations. Any compromise between the systems will only be liable to all the miseries of failure,” he argued. Neither was agreeable to the Oceti Sakowin. Annuities meant submission and land cessions, while an increased military presence meant violence. To the Oceti Sakowin, treaty making became more and more a zero-sum game, in which all roads led to diminishing independence and increasing relations with the United States.

Three years after the treaty signing, in August, a lame calf belonging to an emigrant Mormon wandered into a camp of near-starving Sicangus. Believing the calf was abandoned, it was killed, butchered, and almost immediately consumed. The Mormon owner called for retribution, and John L. Grattan, a young West Point graduate stationed at the nearby Fort Laramie, answered. Although Indigenous peoples at first allowed the overland emigrants to travel through and hunt freely within their territories, under US law the killing or theft of a domestic animal, such as a lame calf, was considered a property crime. Private property held more sanctity than the Indigenous treaties or lives. Grattan descended on the camp, demanding that Conquering Bear relinquish the guilty party. As the “treaty chief” of the 1851 Treaty that was committed to maintaining peace, Conquering Bear offered restitution to the Mormon and pled for a peaceful resolution. Grattan’s men responded by shooting Conquering Bear. The Sicangus descended on Grattan and his soldiers, killing him and all twenty-eight of his men. Six days later, Conquering Bear died, and with him the spirit of the 1851 peace treaty. The Sicangus, quick to seek revenge, robbed a mail coach near Fort Laramie, making off with a large amount of money and killing three white men.

Tensions remained high. While treaty annuities continued to arrive on time, white traders preyed on the Lakotas and Dakotas collecting their annuities at Missouri River trading posts. In the winter of 1853 to 1854, Sihasapas and Hunkpapas refused treaty annuities and began to wage war on white traders. Traders (and even contemporary historians) have mistakenly called treaty annuities “gifts.” Annuities were not gifts, but contractual treaty obligations. Although their intended purpose was to guarantee peace, they were often withheld to pay trade “debts” or used to coerce “hostile” groups into submitting to a trader’s will. White traders were welcomed for their seemingly endless supply of highly prized commodities such as guns and cloth, for which the Oceti Sakowin called them “Wasichun,” or “people who possess a mysterious power.” Now, it was clear that this power also brought evil, earning them a second name, which played on the first: “Wasicu”—the “fat taker,” the settler, the colonizer, the capitalist. To be called “Wasicu” was the highest insult. It meant that a person behaved selfishly, individualistically, with no accountability, as if they had no relatives. Such behavior was normally punished by alienation or banishment. “Wasicu” became synonymous with the United States, a nation that behaved as if it had no relatives.

For this reason, Little Bear, a leader of the Hunkpapa, waged a bitter campaign against the white traders on the Upper Missouri. According to American Fur Company employee Edwin Thompson Denig, in 1853 when the fur company attempted to construct a trade fort in Hunkpapa territory without their consent, Little Bear’s akicitas (soldiers) “cut up the carts, killed the horses, and flogged the traders and sent them home.” Little Bear first earned his status as a leader when he killed a despised white trader from the American Fur Company in the trader’s own home, for which Denig assumed he sought the “destruction of all traders in the country.” According to Denig, the Sihasapas and Hunkpapas under Little Bear’s command

cut off every white man they meet and pillage or destroy all property outside the forts at the Yellowstone. They declare war to the knife with the Government of the United States and all whites in the country, threaten to burn up the forts, make no buffalo robes except what they want for their own use and wish to return to their primitive mode of life.

Some Missouri River Lakotas and Dakotas revolted against the fur trade and the profit motive by eschewing alcohol, boycotting the fur and river trade, and actively sabotaging the trading forts—the primary source of their affliction. These efforts, along with the return to subsistence buffalo hunting, allowed Indigenous nations to resist the encroachment of capitalism.

Later that year Indian agent Alfred J. Vaughn traveled the Missouri River, meeting with various divisions of the Oceti Sakowin to distribute annuities and gather reports on the recent hostilities against traders. When he arrived at the Sihasapas and Hunkpapas’ camp, they firmly refused Vaughn’s annuities. And in an encounter with the Ihanktonwannas, the headman, Red Leaf, cut open all the bags of the Indian agent’s provisions, scattering the contents across the prairie. The akicitas then threw the remaining gunpowder keg in the river, shooting it until it exploded. The more militant divisions among the Oceti Sakowin resented what the trading posts and the treaty annuities symbolized: nonconsensual occupation and an attack on the land. The frequency of these acts of resistance should put to rest any claims that the Oceti Sakowin had become helplessly dependent and devastatingly transformed by the fur trade, thus leading to their inevitable defeat and collapse. However, this strident refusal depended upon maintaining access to a crucial resource: the buffalo herds. Like a good relative, the Pte Oyate initially provided the means to confront invasion; however, this dependency would soon be exploited as a weakness when the military targeted the buffalo nations for extermination. An attack on the land and the buffalo was an attack on Indigenous subsistence practices and the ability to resist encroachment.

The military and traders were quick to claim victimhood following Grattan’s defeat and the war on the Missouri River trade. In response the War Department sent 600 soldiers under the command of General William S. Harney up the Platte River. On September 5, 1855, Harney engaged 250 Sicangus camped at Blue Water Creek. The leaders, Tukiha Maza (Iron Shell), and Wakinyan Cikala (Little Thunder), asked for peace, telling Harney their camp was peaceful and mostly made up of women and children. Harney ordered his men to raze the camp, killing eighty-six—half of them women and children. They took another seventy women and children as prisoners, holding them at Fort Laramie. According to one account, the soldiers seized an infant from her wounded mother and used the child as target practice. At Fort Laramie, the officers raped the Sicangu women, who, according to the testimony of Susan Bettelyoun Bordeaux, “became the property of their captors.” In a letter accompanying Bordeaux’s testimony, Hunkpapa historian Josephine Waggoner writes, “There were many war babies born after Harney left Laramie.” That day Harney earned his Lakota name—“Woman Killer.”

Woman Killer intended to terrorize the Lakotas into submission, but this had the opposite effect. A young man, who would later earn the name “Tasunka Witko” (Crazy Horse), returned from a hunting trip to find his relatives’ mutilated bodies scattered across the prairie. That day Crazy Horse committed his life to fighting the Woman Killer’s nation. Crazy Horse’s uncle Sinte Gleska (Spotted Tail) had attempted to stop the massacre. Although unarmed and surrounded by soldiers, Spotted Tail grabbed a soldier’s knife and killed ten of Woman Killer’s men before being taken down, wounded but not killed, by two bullets. Crazy Horse and Spotted Tail came to represent two traditions of Indigenous resistance; one would follow a path of armed struggle, the other the path of diplomacy. Despite these divergences, the two remained good relatives to each other in the trying years to come, a testament to the strong bonds of kinship that held the nation together as their world was taken from them. While Crazy Horse and Spotted Tail were accomplished warriors and leaders, their highest virtue was their commitment to the defense of their human and nonhuman relations. The events of that day forever shaped their resolve for self-defense and survival; this did not always mean picking up the gun, but sometimes it did. At that moment, however, for both Crazy Horse and Spotted Tail, preserving a grounded authority in the land was the theory, and the gun was the practice. Both were necessary for the survival of human and nonhuman relations. It was from settler colonialism’s nightmarish scenario of fight, flight, or accommodate that Indigenous heroes were made and immortalized—some known, and many more unknown. Heroes of Indigenous resistance didn’t just make history. History made them.

While in the west the Lakotas confronted the punitive campaigns of the US peace policy, in the east the Dakotas faced increased settler encroachment. White settlements depleted nearly all the game, and the treaty annuities were meager and slow to arrive—when they arrived at all. Starvation set in. To make matters worse, Minnesota Territory organized in 1849 and began its path toward statehood, which meant the expulsion of Indigenous peoples. In 1857 Inkpaduta, a Wahpekute leader, led a retaliatory campaign against white settlers at Spirit Lake and Springfield after settlers wantonly murdered his brother and forcefully exiled the Wahpekutes from their homelands in 1856. In total the Wahpekutes killed twenty-eight settlers and sustained minimal casualties. Inkpaduta, whose body was badly scarred from the 1837 smallpox scourge, which he survived as a child, became a veteran of many major engagements with the US military and died in exile Canada in the 1880s. His attacks on settlements earned him the reputation as a frontier bogeyman. He was so hated and feared by whites that his name was never translated into English unlike his more celebrated and well-known contemporaries. Nevertheless, Inkpaduta’s legacy is now widely revered for his evasion of capture and death, refusal to surrender, and rejection of reservation life.

The Wahpekute’s attacks were also partly in response to the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux and the Treaty of Mendota. Together these treaties, signed in 1851 by all four Dakota nations, ceded all Dakota land claims except for a narrow twenty-mile strip. There is no doubt that the Dakota leaders were coerced into making such disastrous concessions. To force signatures, treaty commissioners threatened military force and the withholding of rations. White traders got first access to any treaty moneys, which they used to pay outstanding debts allegedly accrued by the Dakotas. When the treaties went through the Senate for approval, amendments were attached that left the Dakotas without any legal title to the land, essentially making them homeless or trespassers in their own homelands.

In August 1862, when Taoyateduta (He Loves His Red Nation), also known as Kangi Cistinna (Little Crow), and his warriors began to expel white settlers from their Dakota homelands, most of the Dakota communities were starving, horseless, unarmed, and living on reservations. With the outbreak of the Civil War, treaty annuities arrived late or not at all—and were sometimes intentionally withheld by traders. Andrew Myrick, a notorious white trader responsible for distributing treaty annuities and rations at the Lower Sioux Agency, put it bluntly: “So far as I’m concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass or dung.” The Dakotas, facing the real possibility of starving to death, came to the Lower Agency, and, some stories say, killed Myrick while he was running away; according to these accounts, his body was found with grass stuffed in his mouth. The criminal acts of the traders and agency officials had led to the uprising. But the United States’ theft, mass killing, starvation, and punishment of all Dakotas remained “lawful.”

The Dakotas waged deadly battles, killing more than 800 white settlers, traders, and soldiers. By late September most Dakotas had surrendered, ending the brief thirty-seven-day war. The captured Dakotas were not treated as prisoners of war but instead faced a military tribunal created by Henry Sibley, Minnesota’s first governor, and colonel of the state militia. Military officers who had just fought Dakotas were appointed to oversee the trials. By November the military tribunal tried 392 Dakotas for “murder and outrages,” convicting 323 of them, 303 of whom they condemned to death. More than 2,000 Dakotas were also imprisoned at Fort Snelling in a large concentration camp, where many died. Whether or not they participated in the war mattered little; all Dakotas became targets for collective punishment. President Lincoln, though he commuted most of the Dakota death sentences, maintained an iron fist to crush Indigenous resistance—one he wielded not only against the Dakotas, but others too. In 1864 in the Southwest, a similar policy of collective punishment and removal targeted Navajo and Apache resistance, resulting in the Hwéeldi, or the Long Walk. The removal, forced march, and imprisonment at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico killed more than 2,000 Navajos.

On December 26, 1862, a week before signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln ordered the hanging of the thirty-eight Dakota men at Maka To (or “Blue Earth”—present-day Mankato, Minnesota) as retribution for the 1862 US–Dakota War. The execution of the Dakota thirty-eight remains the largest mass execution in US history. Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey, who helped negotiate the 1851 Treaty with the Dakotas, then ordered the extermination or complete banishment of remaining Dakotas from the state. Settlers were encouraged and rewarded to take their own revenge with government-issued $25 scalp bounties, which later increased to $200. When the Civil War came to an end, very few confederate officials and soldiers were sent to prison, and only one was hanged for war crimes. After surrender, many confederates went back to holding public office. General Sibley ordered that the Dakotas were to be treated as criminals, and not as prisoners of war. The aftermath of the war to maintain slavery, which cost half a million lives, was profoundly different from the aftermath of the Dakota uprising—and rarely are the two stories told side by side.

In punishment for his part in the uprising, in 1863 Minnesotan settlers murdered Little Crow, collecting $500 for his scalp and decapitated head. Little Crow’s scalp, severed head, and the rest of his body were collected and put on public display by the Minnesota Historical Society until 1915, a grim trophy to remind settlers exactly how they “won” the land. Little Crow’s remains were only returned to his family in 1971. Nearly a thousand Dakotas fled to Canada, and 2,500 remained at large, fleeing into Dakota Territory to join their relatives on the Missouri River. In 1863 in Minnesota, General John Pope organized “columns of vengeance” to punish and capture fugitive Dakotas. Instead of recognizing their own criminality for outright land theft and state-imposed starvation, they would force Dakotas to pay with their lives. Facing scalp bounties and the harsh imprisonment of their relatives, surrender usually meant death and was simply not an option. To survive—to resist—meant to flee.

Pope sent two columns, led by brigadier generals Henry Sibley and Alfred Sully, to halt the fleeing Dakotas from crossing the Missouri River and joining their western relatives. The campaign had three goals: crush the fleeing Dakotas, secure the Missouri River for steamboat travel, and eliminate remaining Indigenous opposition to the settlement of eastern Dakota Territory. By 1863, overland travel on the Oregon Trail had greatly subsided. But the 1862 Montana gold rush drew throngs of miners and settlers who traveled overland on the Bozeman Trail, which cut through 1851 Treaty territory and up the Missouri River via steamship. Sibley’s mounted cavalry headed south, then traveled north up the eastern shoreline of the Missouri, encountering little opposition. Sully commanded more than 2,000 soldiers, and the skirmishes they engaged in were minor and inflicted minimal casualties—all except for one.

On September 3, 1863, Sibley’s men attacked 4,000 peaceful Dakotas and Lakotas in a summer camp after a buffalo hunt at Inyan Ska (Whitestone Hill). Standing Rock historian and Sacred Stone Camp founder LaDonna Bravebull Allard recounts the events of that day through the oral history of her ancestor Mary Big Moccasin:

It was a time of celebration and ceremony—a time to pray for the coming year, meet relatives, arrange marriages, and make plans for winter camps. Many refugees from the 1862 uprising in Minnesota, mostly women and children, had been taken in as family. Mary’s father, Oyate Tawa, was one of the 38 Dah’kotah hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, less than a year earlier, in the largest mass execution in the country’s history … As my great-great-grandmother Mary Big Moccasin told the story, the attack came the day after the big hunt, when spirits were high. The sun was setting and everyone was sharing an evening meal when Sully’s soldiers surrounded the camp on Whitestone Hill. In the chaos that ensued, people tied their children to their horses and dogs and fled. Mary was 9 years old. As she ran, she was shot in the hip and went down. She laid there until morning, when a soldier found her. As he loaded her into the wagon, she heard her relatives moaning and crying on the battlefield. She was taken to a prisoner of war camp in Crow Creek where she stayed until her release in 1870.

The dogs returned to camp with babies still tied to them, where they were shot by the soldiers. In all, the soldiers slaughtered more than 400 Lakotas and Dakotas, most of them women and children. They destroyed half a million pounds of dried buffalo meat and razed more than 300 lodges. Thirty-two men and 124 women were taken prisoner and transported to Fort Pierre to be shipped to Crow Creek, where the remaining survivors of the US–Dakota War were held.

The massacre had a profound psychological impact on the Dakotas and Lakotas. The scorched-earth campaign against the Dakotas and the “columns of vengeance” were intended to deter a military alliance among the Oceti Sakowin; and indeed, the tactic may have worked on some. On the other hand, it also encouraged many to risk everything to repel the invaders. The success of armed resistance, in fact, would be measured not in the annihilation of the United States as an enemy nation, but in the resilience of the political alliances that formed.

Immediately following the punitive campaigns waged against the Dakotas, in November 1863 Colonel John M. Chivington and his soldiers massacred more than 200 peaceful Cheyennes at Sand Creek in Colorado Territory, taking scalps and severed genitals as souvenirs. Enraged at the growing brutality, the Cheyennes, Lakotas, Arapahos, and some Dakotas formed a political alliance under the leadership of Mahpiya Luta (Red Cloud). Believing the United States had violated the spirit of the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty with the construction of the Bozeman Trail, the historic alliance vowed to expel them from the buffalo hunting grounds. The alliance successfully defeated the US military in hit-and-run battles from 1866 to 1868. In December 1866, most famously, Crazy Horse, a rising military leader, drew one hundred soldiers under the command of Colonel William J. Fetterman from Fort Kearney into a trap, killing Fetterman and all his men. The fort had been established along the Bozeman Trail to protect white miners heading to the Montana goldmines. Facing an undefeatable, highly mobile guerrilla force, in 1868 the United States once again sought peace.

In the summer of 1868, a mass council was called at Mato Paha (Bear Butte) to discuss a treaty of peace, and Red Cloud was selected to lead any negotiations with the United States. Since 1857 most of the Oceti Sakowin had been gathering annually at Mato Paha, at the northeast fringes of the Black Hills, to discuss the peace treaties and mounting resistance. Some historians and scholars have challenged the idea that the “Sioux Nation,” or the Oceti Sakowin, ever existed, or that such gatherings took place in the Black Hills prior to US invasion. What is known is that all seven political divisions met at these annual summer councils, and that all were represented in the most famous battles. But it is true the Oceti Sakowin had not gathered in quite this way since 1857, when they were joined by allied nations such as the Arapaho and Cheyenne in considering “taking the fight to the wasicu” (in other words, to US imperialism)—by marching all the way down to Saint Louis and wiping out every white settlement—as Sicangu historian Edward Valandra has asserted.

Previously, the Oceti Sakowin more often gathered at Mato Paha for peace, including for the Wiwang Wacipi, the sun dance. The Oceti Sakowin war councils, however, have drawn more scrutiny and attention than the ceremonial celebrations of life. In fact, most political divisions chose to avoid armed resistance altogether and, as the buffalo became scarce, slowly began to accustom themselves to living near the agencies. Soldiers and fellow Indigenous peoples pejoratively termed these people “loafer bands” for hanging around the forts. Others who were willing to break policy and sell land, which they were not authorized to do, were called Maka Utacipi, or “earth eaters.” Many Oceti Sakowin disapproved of these individuals’ behavior, but they were still considered relatives, though pitied for “eating” the land for the annuities and food rations they received for selling it. Political custom dictated that families and larger political divisions were allowed to disagree with or decline to follow a course of action set out by others. If the disagreement was serious, individuals or entire nations were allowed to leave. Just as easily as they could leave, they could also rejoin their relatives. Force or coercion never compelled others to action, or to stay. But when the entire Oceti Sakowin was confined to the reservation, this harmony was disturbed because differing factions could not depart each other’s company. In other instances, “agency chiefs” were selected to represent an entire Indigenous nation, breaking down internal democratic processes. Whatever these competing views, the war on the Bozeman Trail drew the United States to the negotiation table once again.

By 1865, the 1851 Treaty had expired with little consequence, having failed to bring about the peace it promised. Another costly military campaign in the Northern Plains was not an option. Most of the US military was stationed in the South to oversee Reconstruction, following the conclusion of the Civil War. As an effort to make freed Blacks into citizens, W. E. B. Du Bois called Reconstruction “a splendid failure”—one that offered only a temporary vision of a free society, because absolute equality demanded too much of a departure from the white supremacist status quo. The same could also be said of its contemporaneous US–Indigenous treaties. Allowing Indigenous peoples to live in peace and respecting their political autonomy proved too much to ask of a settler state. So why did it make Indigenous treaties in the first place?

Treaties are the central agreements among sovereigns and the primary instruments of international relations. After all, a sovereign nation does not enter into international relations with internal or domestic peoples. But despite the 1831 Supreme Court decision that found Indigenous nations to be “domestic dependent nations,” the United States entered into international relations with the Oceti Sakowin. This is the fundamental paradox of federal Indian law: it takes international agreements and attempts to determine their validity in the realm of domestic federal law—that is, in the courts of the colonizers.

Patrick Wolfe argues that “domestic dependent nations” was less a legal redefinition than a “manifesto” for settler colonialism. The intention behind the treaties was not to recognize the inherent political sovereignty or self-determining authority of Indigenous nations, but to facilitate land cessions and eventual incorporation. Justifying what would otherwise be a criminal act—invasion—the treaties were really an instrument for affirming US design over all lands, and especially lands that could not be taken by force. And to carry out the land cessions, the US government needed settlers to hold private property in perpetuity. Private ownership (or “fee simple”) is seen, under US law, as the highest possible form of ownership, while Indigenous occupancy is seen as temporary; thus, collective Indigenous ownership and use could be dissolved for private ownership, but not the other way around. But because private property is exclusive, the two systems of land tenure fundamentally could not overlap. The confinement and removal of Indigenous peoples to reservations was racial segregation, and Indigenous peoples were the original “Red Scare.”

It was from this belief of political superiority that the United States sued the Oceti Sakowin for peace. As a token of good will, the United States abandoned several forts along the Bozeman Trail, and Red Cloud and his followers set fire to the deserted buildings. The forts on the Missouri River, however, remained untouched and became the new bases of operations for corralling the Oceti Sakowin closer to the influence of the United States, and away from the Powder River country which more and more represented freedom. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty established a 32-million-acre “permanent reservation,” which encompassed the entirety of the present-day West River region of South Dakota. To appease those who refused agency life, a vast expanse of hunting grounds was set aside at nearly the same acreage of the permanent reservation, making the total territory more than 70 million acres, or about the size of the present-day state of Nevada. Article 11 of the treaty, however, stipulated that the Lakotas surrendered “all right to occupy permanently the territory outside their reservation as herein defined,” but retained the right to hunt in the Powder River country “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers to justify the chase.” General William Tecumseh Sherman, a member of the peace commission, at first opposed this provision, fearing that sustained resistance through buffalo hunting over a vast region would make it impossible to reign in the militant divisions. Fellow peace commissioners, however, assured him the treaty’s clause was “merely temporary” because once the buffalo were vanquished so too would the millions of acres of hunting territory.

In 1903 Red Cloud recalled what Lakotas said to treaty commissioners regarding the hunting lands: “We told them that the country of the buffalo was the country of the Lakotas. We told them that the buffalo must have their country and the Lakotas must have their buffalo.” The Lakotas didn’t believe the United States had the authority to simply “give” them back land that already rightfully belonged to them and their buffalo kin. Red Cloud made clear that the 1868 Treaty was not just an agreement between two human nations, but also an agreement among the nonhuman ones as well—including the buffalo nations. His interpretation, that Lakota territory began and ended with the buffalo nations’ territory, was not a “mystical” reading, but a simple fact of Lakota life—and, at the time, a fact linked to pure survival.

For example, the most significant figure in Oceti Sakowin history descended from the Pte Oyate. It was a woman, Pte Ska Win (the White Calf Buffalo Woman), who made the first treaty with the human and nonhuman worlds. To be a good relative is to honor that original instruction. Lakotas often viewed treaties with the United States and other nations as commitments not just to human relations, but also to nonhuman ones. And such agreements were not the sole domain of men, as was the tradition of white society. Most important, pte means “female buffalo,” and the Pte Oyate was alternatively known as “her nation.” When Red Cloud spoke of the Pte Oyate, he spoke of their true leaders—of the women, not the bulls (men), and of the original covenant with the White Buffalo Calf Woman. The future of the Oceti Sakowin was bound to the future of the Pte Oyate.

For its part, the military began to take seriously this vital connection with the buffalo as sustaining continued Indigenous resistance. The frontier army’s operations turned toward exterminating Oceti Sakowin kin—the Pte Oyate—as defeating highly mobile Plains nations in conventional battles was near impossible. From 1865 to 1883, the frontier army sanctioned the mass slaughter of buffalo to shatter the will to resist by eliminating a primary food supply and a close relative. Russia’s Grand Duke Alexie Alexandrovich even joined a buffalo hunt in 1872 near Denver with the frontier army, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and General Philip Sheridan. As they descended upon a herd, the hunters and soldiers acted as if the buffalo slaughter was also a massacre of Indigenous peoples, with a guide, Chalkley M. Beeson, recounting that they even called the buffalo “redskins.”

The extermination of the buffalo was incredibly effective and efficient. In two decades, soldiers and hunters had eradicated the remaining 10 to 15 million buffalo, leaving only several hundred survivors. The “Indian problem” was also a “buffalo problem,” and both faced similar extermination processes, as much connected in death as they were in life. The destruction of one required the destruction of the other. The treaty clause “so long as the buffalo may range” was effectively a warrant to kill millions of buffalo, which translated literally into the killing of Indians and the seizure of millions of acres of 1868 Treaty territory—a direct attack on Indigenous sovereignty.

Another contentious aspect of the 1868 Treaty was the granting of the right to construct railroads through Oceti Sakowin territory. By the time the Northern Pacific Railroad began building its line through the Yellowstone Valley connecting Duluth, Minnesota, to the Puget Sound, Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and their followers had accepted the terms of the peace treaty. Most took it to mean that if they refrained from attacking the railroads, stage coaches, and overland emigrants, they would in turn be free from the threat of attack if they stayed within the reservation boundaries. The hunting grounds remained open, and so they thought that they could go on living as they always had, with little change. But railroads threatened that precarious peace and the provisional space of the hunting grounds that came with it. They provoked another fight and hardened the resolve of the remaining militants to stay off the reservations. Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull), a powerful political leader of the Hunkpapas, refused the conditions of peace specifically over the question of rail lines and began making war on the railroad surveyors as they trespassed into Yellowstone territory. The military sent two expeditions of thousands of men in 1871 and 1873 to secure the passage of railroad engineers. But Sitting Bull and his followers halted construction of the Northern Pacific across the Missouri River at Bismarck, and the 1873 economic crisis further imperiled the Northern Pacific’s progress westward. Nevertheless, the military now had a sizeable standing army at Fort Rice downriver, under the command of Custer, a less well-known veteran officer of the Civil War who history would only remember because he was killed by the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho alliance in 1876 at the Battle of Greasy Grass (Battle of the Little Bighorn). Custer and his men were stationed at the northern border of the “Great Sioux Reservation” to prevent the Hunkpapas and Sihasapas from leaving the reservation, waging war on the railroad surveys, and joining their off-reservation relatives in the west.

Soon, those living off the reservation were considered outlaws, renegades, hostiles, and criminals to be hunted down, summarily shot, hanged, or imprisoned. Those on the reservation were considered “peaceful,” and as “friendlies” who were not to be disturbed. Either way, soldiers and settlers could hardly distinguish between the two; when it came to collective punishment, all were at fault.

Since 1865, transcontinental railroads began lurching from east to west. With the Panic of 1873, US capitalists and politicians sought a new form of currency and a new national project that would pull the country out of recession. Relief would come in the form of gold, more railroads, and continuous westward expansion—in other words, through the acquisition of more Indigenous land, and more Indian Wars. The discovery of gold in the Black Hills in 1874 triggered a massive push to quickly end the Indian problem on the Northern Plains. From the military’s perspective, reformers had failed to secure peace with the 1868 Treaty. Prior military campaigns in the West and the South were also coming to a close. The wars of conquests against the Apaches, Arapahos, Cheyennes, Comanches, Kiowas, and Modocs from 1869 to 1873 had largely ended. Meanwhile, in the South, Radical Reconstruction had lost political backing from a growing conservatism in the North, and as the United States began withdrawing federal troops, freed Blacks were left to fend for themselves against the white Southern elites who sought to violently recapture political and economic power. Facing the squeeze of economic recession, labor in the industrial east also began agitating. As historian Richard Slotkin argues, depictions of Black lawlessness in the South, relentless Indigenous criminality in the West, and growing labor militancy in the east provided the moral justification for the seizure of the Black Hills as a way to prioritize national economic development. To contain the “threat” on its western frontier, in an 1871 Indian appropriations bill the United States abolished treaty making with Indigenous nations (although the treaties themselves were never abolished). Meanwhile, the nationalistic military campaign to seize the Black Hills and continue westward expansion was a much-needed pressure valve for anxieties of social unrest and economic uncertainty. An order to the US military went out to notify all the Lakotas and Dakotas to return to the reservation by January 31, 1876, or face military action. Because it was issued during winter, both the US military and the Oceti Sakowin largely ignored the impractical command.

By spring 1876, the majority of the Lakotas lived on reservations and were horseless, unarmed, and starving. Nevertheless, several groups had refused reservation life, and the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho alliance had evaded army capture for several years. Crazy Horse, no longer a military leader at this point, led several small groups into the Black Hills, killing numerous white miners. But the imposition of reservation borders combined with the cutting off of British-Canadian and US traders made ammunition scarce and sustained armed resistance increasingly impossible. General Sheridan and Brigadier General George Crook had decided to stop evicting gold miners, in hopes of making real what could only be imagined at this point: the takeover of the Black Hills, the settlement of treaty lands, and the final surrender of the Oceti Sakowin. Allowing the trespass of settlers and miners was a clear violation of the 1868 Treaty, which forbade whites from entering the permanent reservation encompassing the entirety of the Black Hills. A violation of the treaty, as an international agreement, would have meant conditions reverted to pre-treaty terms. Therefore, the Oceti Sakowin, at this point, could have suspended their obligations—such as allowing the passage of settlers, roads, or railways, or the cession of certain lands. However, instead of curbing the criminal behavior of the white trespassers and living up to their treaty obligations, the army mobilized to the enforce the “peace” of the 1868 Treaty by making war against the Cheyennes, Lakotas, and Arapahos who refused to stay on the reservation.

On June 25, 1876, Custer and Brigadier General Marcus Reno led a group of 650 men against a camp of thousands of Lakotas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos. Among them were Sitting Bull, Pizi (or Gall), Inkpaduta, Crazy Horse, Pretty Nose, Left Hand, Two Moons, Wooden Leg, and many more who would be remembered as among the heroic armed resisters of the Cheyennes, Arapahos, Dakotas, and Lakotas. Custer led the first assault on the large camp, which was supposed to be a surprise attack. Custer’s men were quickly halted and forced to retreat uphill. Despite popular myths, Custer and his men never mounted a brave last stand but were instead taken down as they ran away from the Indigenous warrior men and warrior women. For his courage, Custer was promoted to the rank of general after his death.

Hunkpapa warrior woman Moving Robe Woman, who fought against cavalrymen, later remembered that historic day. A young woman at the time, Moving Robe Woman was harvesting tinpsila, or prairie turnips, when the cavalry stormed the camp. After hearing her brother was killed in the initial attack, she recalled, “I ran to a nearby thicket and got my black horse. I painted my face with crimson and braided my black hair. I was mourning. I was a woman, but I was not afraid.” Among Plains nations, it was common for warriors to be women. In fact, according to Northern Cheyenne histories, Buffalo Calf Trail Woman is credited for knocking Custer from his horse before he was killed. Indigenous women also knew what defeat meant—if they were not killed, their bodies would be forced over to the desires of their captors. They fought back not because they wanted to, but because they had to.

The defeat of Custer’s Seventh Calvary and the killing of 268 of his men was a major victory. But according to Moving Robe Woman, no one “staged a victory dance that night. They were mourning for their own dead.” About four dozen Indigenous warriors were killed during the fight. Many popular accounts of the Battle of Greasy Grass and histories of the West over-romanticize the extreme violence and wanton slaughter of what became known as “the Great Sioux Wars.” Each victory against the invaders also resulted in immeasurable casualties in later battles, and armed resistance was a calculated risk that was not undertaken carelessly. Either way, the Oceti Sakowin was in constant mourning over the theft of their lives, their world, and so many countless relatives—ancestors both present and future. Armed Indigenous resistance has always been a future-oriented and life-oriented project, and it is because of this fearless struggle that we survived and that we can remember.

After Greasy Grass, the military sought retribution. Unable to sustain long, drawn-out resistance, the Plains alliance dispersed and Sitting Bull and his followers, including Inkpaduta, fled to Canada. In May 1877, Crazy Horse surrendered himself and his followers at the Red Cloud Agency near Fort Robinson in Nebraska, and he was imprisoned there by the reservation authorities. On September 5, 1877, Crazy Horse was led to Fort Robinson to be formally arrested on the charge he was planning an uprising. While attempting to flee, one of the guards stabbed Crazy Horse in the back with a bayonet, killing him. He was thirty-seven. In 1881 Sitting Bull finally surrendered himself and his followers and was taken to Fort Yates on the Missouri River at present-day Standing Rock. The battleground had shifted: Christian missionaries, boarding schools, and military discipline and punishment were the new vanguards of white civilization.

The design and development of the carceral reservation world was well under way by the time Cheyennes, Lakotas, and Arapahos made Custer and his Seventh Cavalry famous. In 1876 Indian Commissioner John Q. Smith envisioned US Indian policy as having three central goals: to concentrate remaining Indigenous peoples onto fewer reservations, to allot remaining lands, and to expand US laws and courts’ jurisdiction over reservations. Although the number of reservations didn’t decline, the latter two goals were achieved through the disintegration of political and social structures, and the carving up of the remaining communally held lands. The fur trade may have introduced the capitalist market, but it never made the Oceti Sakowin truly individualistic, and communal land practices and social customs still prevailed. This was the final frontier.

First came the assertion of US law. In 1881 an ongoing dispute between Spotted Tail and Kangi Sunka (Crow Dog) on the Rosebud Reservation led to Crow Dog murdering Spotted Tail, a reservation leader and “agency chief.” Crow Dog made amends with Spotted Tail’s surviving family, paying restitution for the slain relative according to customary law. Internal harmony was quickly and effectively restored. Nevertheless, federal and territorial officials demanded Crow Dog’s arrest and prosecution. With little legal authority to do so, the case wound up at the Supreme Court, where it was ruled federal courts had no jurisdiction on reservation lands. As a result, Congress passed the 1885 Major Crimes Act, authorizing federal jurisdiction over certain crimes committed in Indian Country—including murder, larceny, rape, arson, and burglary. Congress used Crow Dog’s case as an opportunity to extend plenary power—or complete or absolute power—over Indigenous nations and assert criminal jurisdiction, further eroding and defining the parameters of Indigenous sovereignty.

The creation of the modern-day reservation system had a significant impact on both Indigenous and settler societies. Military and trading forts grew into either white settlements or reservation agency towns. As a new spatial arrangement of apartheid, the confinement of Native people to diminishing reservation lands made it simpler for settlers to assume ownership over “unused” land. Among the most highly prized possessions were the gold-rich Black Hills. To secure title to the land, Congress passed the 1877 Black Hills Act, which stole the Black Hills from the Oceti Sakowin and opened it to white settlement. A clause of the 1868 Treaty stipulated that any future land cessions, including the Black Hills, must “be signed by three-fourths of all the adult male” members. Its passage was thus a clear case of fraud and theft, as the United States was able to obtain only 10 percent of the needed signatures.

Agency towns, which were often located at military forts or near them, were established to control and surveil the movements and the behaviors of Indigenous peoples, both on and off reservation. Reservations thus became sites where social engineering was used to break communal organization. In 1878, to administer law and order, the first reservation police forces were formed, drawing from Indigenous ranks to enforce the new social order dictated by federal agents and church officials. In 1883 the Bureau of Indian Affairs created the Court of Indian Offenses to compel “civilization.” Punishable offenses included sun dancing, ceremonial dancing, customary giveaways, owning guns or weapons, owning ponies, men wearing long hair, polygamy, large feasts not organized by the church, Indigenous funerary rites, leaving the reservation, and honoring ceremonies. A violation brought punishment through starvation by withholding rations or imprisonment. These “offenses,” also known as “the civilization regulations,” were enforced until their repeal in 1935. The use of coercive force by an armed body of the state, such as the police or the courts, to control behavior was relatively unknown to the Oceti Sakowin. “No Lakota chief,” writes Luther Standing Bear, “ever dreamed of using the power of a judge in court, or a policeman on a street corner, for it was not a tenet of his society that one individual should account to another for his conduct.”

As punishment for the defiant political leadership, their children were taken from them and sent to far-off boarding schools, where many died. Although leaders such as Red Cloud and Spotted Tail voluntarily sent their children to boarding schools, they protested the military-like discipline and corporal punishment. The system, however, was as much about taking the children hostage as it was using them as leverage to coerce the behavior of reservation leadership. Richard Pratt, a former Indian fighter who marched under Custer against the Oceti Sakowin, was the main architect for the modern off-reservation boarding school system. The idea first came to him when in charge of Indigenous prisoners of war at Fort Marion in Florida. Assigned to oversee the confinement of Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne inmates, Pratt experimented with assimilation through education. To his military mind, the Indian War would no longer be waged on the battlefield but in the classroom. Pratt’s vision won him the backing of Indian reformers, and in 1879 he founded the Carlisle Boarding School in Pennsylvania.

The success of the Fort Marion experiment, however, could only be reproduced in similar prison-like and militarized conditions because it was impossible to “recruit” and “retain” students without the use of force. Complete removal from their parents, it was believed, was the only way to prevent relapse to Indigenous ways. Taken and then returned to their communities, the children were sometimes alienated from their parents and relatives because they could not speak their languages or had no bonds to their kin. At Carlisle, Indigenous students were subjected to a highly regimented routine. Although founded on military principles of discipline and order, the boarding schools didn’t train Indigenous students to fight; rather, they taught them docility, compliance, and submission—the necessary ingredients for indoctrinating US patriotism and citizenship. “The Indians are destined to become absorbed into the national life,” one Indian commissioner advised in an 1889 memo entitled “Inculcation of Patriotism in Indian Schools,” “not as Indians, but as Americans.”

To many the US flag, which flew above the soldiers as they killed, raped, and pillaged Indigenous peoples and lands, was a detested symbol of growing US authority. It was one of the first means used to signify US supremacy at reservation headquarters. When soldiers attempted to build the first flagpole to fly the “Stars and Stripes” at the Red Cloud Agency in 1874, outraged Oglalas took hatchets and chopped it down. The troopers rebuilt the flagpole and proceeded to take the population count of the reservation agency—wielding two highly symbolic instruments of growing colonial rule: a flag and a census. With armed struggle mostly abandoned, Indigenous resistance changed from military resistance to a strategy of challenging the reservation system by continuing to refuse to sell land or to cooperate with reservation officials.

On the heels of a five-year recession, from 1878 to 1887 the desire for cheap or “free” Indigenous land in Dakota Territory infected white settlers like a fever. The decade, during which the white population in the region nearly doubled, was known as the “Great Dakota Boom.” In 1887, under increasing pressure to open more of the remaining 1868 Treaty lands, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, signaling a new assault on Lakota and Dakota lands. Dawes sought to disintegrate collective Native identities and communal land practices by allotting private plots to Native families and opening millions of acres of “excess” land for white settlement. The Plains nations began organizing against the Dawes Bill as soon as they learned of its dire consequences, and the Lakotas and Dakotas came to a consensus that they would refuse unconditionally to sell the land or to accept the terms of allotment. Achieving mass consensus and the consent of all divisions of the western Lakotas and Dakotas—under the ever-watchful eye of agency and church officials, and in conditions where most were half-starved—was a significant feat of political mobilization and discipline. In 1888 Pratt led a commission to convince the Lakotas to accept the terms of the Dawes Bill. While the United States had not followed 1868 Treaty protocol for the Black Hills Act, this time the Pratt Commission, as it was known, attempted to obtain the three-fourths male consent required to fractionate remaining reservation lands and open up millions of acres for eventual settlement.

In one instance the Pratt Commission came to the Standing Rock Reservation. All the commissioners needed were votes of either “yes” or “no” to accept allotment or not. Twenty-two million acres remained of the 1868 Treaty lands. If half were sold, the United States would sell land at 50 cents an acre, which would create a permanent fund of $1 million. Earning 5 percent interest per year, half would go toward education and agriculture, while the other half would be payed to those who accepted allotments. Under the leadership of Hunkpapa John Grass, the entire Standing Rock Reservation held council to discuss the conditions of the Dawes Bill. In all-night meetings, the Standing Rock council calculated the total distribution of money, which would amount to an insulting payment of $1 per year to each individual on the reservations. Grass had signed the 1877 Black Hills Act, which ceded the Black Hills, without understanding the terms. For him, the Dawes Bill was most likely another elaborate scheme to swindle lands. On the basis of the earlier act’s outright fraud and failure to address either past wrongs or ongoing depredations, Grass led Standing Rock’s opposition to allotment. In a speech enunciating his refusal to sign any paper—either the red for “no,” or the black for “yes”—Grass remarked,

The whole nation here that are located on this reservation have come to the conclusion that we will not sign that black paper. We say also that we will not sign the red paper. You know exactly how many there are of us. I do not see what further evidence you would want. Here is the whole nation, and we say: “We decline.”

The Pratt Commission, unable to acquire minimal consent to even vote on the Dawes Bill at Standing Rock, went to the remaining reservations and faced similar unified refusal. An utter failure, the bill received a mere 120 signatures.

The initial defeat of the Dawes Bill was but a momentary victory. In 1889 General George Crook, a veteran Indian fighter who was responsible for coaxing Crazy Horse to surrender, led another commission to secure “consent.” This time Crook lied about the bill, saying it would alleviate restrictions on dancing and generally improve reservation life without affecting prior treaty agreements. At first, when lies didn’t work, threats of violence and of the outright taking of the land, with or without Indigenous consent, pressured many to sign. When met with resistance, the Indian agent at Rosebud warned the opposition that their refusal to sign would jeopardize not just their standing with the United States, but also their entire legacy: “After you are dead and gone, and somebody reads … the names of the people who signed this treaty, I think you will want your names to be read out.” At Pine Ridge Agency, when Oglalas under the leadership of Red Cloud refused to sign, an Indian agent “read the riot act” to Red Cloud and his followers to criminalize those who refused to sign away land. Oglala leader Wasicu Tasunka (American Horse) had signed but regretted his decision later when beef rations were drastically cut, further imperiling an already-famished people. The commissioners previously stated that the bill would not affect rations or annuities. Cutting rations, combined with a whole host of other grievances that went unaddressed, according to American Horse, was like “cutting our heads off.” Among the unfulfilled promises were the failure to improve the poor quality of annuity goods such as clothing and farming equipment, and continued unexplained deaths of children at off-reservation boarding schools such as Carlisle.

Indeed, the new reservation political order had attempted to sever the heads of the Oceti Sakowin by taking children, usurping land, exterminating the buffalo nations, and diminishing Indigenous political authority. Having gained the necessary signatures to enforce allotment, the “permanent reservation” guaranteed under the 1868 Treaty was now open for white settlement. Crook’s commission had left the western divisions of the Oceti Sakowin deeply divided and in disarray after it destroyed the unified effort to resist the sale and further dissolution of remaining reservation lands. Now the Black Hills had been taken and 9 million acres of land opened for white settlement. What became known as the 1889 Sioux Agreement created the six modern reservation boundaries for the Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, Lower Brule, and Crow Creek Reservations.

During the late 1880s—disarmed, hungry, horseless, confined to concentration camps, the buffalo nearly exterminated, their land broken up and taken, and their children stolen from them—a new political movement spread like prairie fire across the West, promising Indigenous rebirth. Wovoka, a Paiute holy man, had a vision that assured the restoration of Indigenous peoples to their rightful place in a world taken from them. According to him, dead relatives and the buffalo nations would once again walk the earth. The Ghost Dance prophecy envisioned the end of the present world through the settlers’ erasure from the earth, and the return of human and nonhuman relations that had been vanquished by colonialism. It was foretold that, at some unspecified time in the near future, a cataclysmic event—such as an earthquake or whirlwind—would wipe the United States off the surface of the earth. Once the land was cleansed, life would be free of disease and colonialism, and correct relations among human and nonhuman worlds would be restored. Dakota anthropologist Ella Deloria recorded the following description of the Ghost Dance from the viewpoint of an unnamed Lakota man who participated in the dance at the Pine Ridge Agency as a young runaway from boarding school:

The rumor got about: “The dead are to return. The buffalo are to return. The Dakota people will get back their own way of life. The white people will soon go away, and that will mean happier times for us once more!” That part about the dead returning was what appealed to me …

Soon fifty of us, little boys about eight to ten, started out across country over hills and valleys, running all night … There on Porcupine Creek thousands of Dakota people were in camp, all hurrying about very purposefully … A woman quickly spied us and came weeping toward us. “These [children] also shall take part,” she was saying of us. So a man called out, “You runaway boys, come here.” They stripped our ugly clothes from us and sent us inside [a purification lodge]. When we were well purified, they sent us out the other end and placed sacred shirts on us … Everyone wore one magpie and one eagle feather in his hair, but in our case there was nothing to tie them to. The school had promptly ruined us by shaving off our long hair till our scalps showed lighter than our faces!

The people, wearing the sacred shirts and feathers, now formed a ring … All walked cautiously and in awe, feeling their dead were close at hand … The leaders beat time and sang as the people danced going round to the left in a sidewise step. They danced without rest, on and on, and they got out of breath but still they kept going as long as possible. Occasionally someone thoroughly exhausted and dizzy fell unconscious into the center and lay there “dead” … After a while, many lay about in that condition. They were now “dead” and seeing their dear ones. As each one came to, she, or he, slowly sat up and looked about, bewildered, and then began wailing inconsolably …

The visions varied at the start, but they ended the same way, like a chorus describing a great encampment of all the Dakotas who had ever died, where the buffalo came eagerly to feed them, and there was no sorrow but only joy, where relatives thronged out with happy laughter to greet the newcomer. That was the best of all!

Waking up to the drab and wretched present after such a glowing vision, it was little wonder that they walked as if their poor hearts would break in two with disillusionment. But at least they had seen! … They preferred that to rest or food or sleep. And so I suppose the authorities did think they were crazy—but they weren’t. They were only terribly unhappy.

The visions were not escapist, but rather part of a growing anticolonial theory and movement. Participants were transported to a forthcoming world where the old ways and dead relatives lived. It was a utopian dream that briefly suspended the nightmare of the “wretched present” by folding the remembered experience of a precolonial freedom into an anti-colonial future. Upon awakening, dancers were forced to relive the horrors of their current reality. Above all, the visions were a reminder that life need not always be this way, and the Ghost Dance anticipated nothing less than the utter destruction of the colonial relation with the United States. But this was no cultural revitalization movement—anyway, the Ghost Dance did not derive from Oceti Sakowin culture. Also, the Ghost Dance was fundamentally oppositional in spirit. Lakota Ghost Dancers, historian Jeffrey Ostler observes, “hoped to see the present world destroyed and a new one come into being.” Indigenous life could not be remade inside reservations, nor within a colonial system, but only through the complete destruction of both.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropologists and historians have often downplayed (or misconstrued) the revolutionary premises of the Ghost Dance. The most widely used text on the movement, The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee, written in 1896 by armchair ethnographer James Mooney, for instance, distorted the meaning of the Ghost Dance. Pandering to the sympathies of a US public in an attempt to make the Ghost Dance more palatable, Mooney used cultural relativism to justify its existence. In his mind, because Ghost Dancers followed a Christ-like messianic figure, Wovoka, the movement had largely embraced elements of Christianity and thus resembled modern Judeo-Christian religions. Further, he claimed, Lakota Ghost Dancers failed to properly adhere to Wovoka’s message of nonviolence and pacifism, warping it into a “hostile expression” and confirming the US military’s later characterization of the Lakota Ghost Dancers as “militants.” But in reality, Wovoka taught peace—not through perpetual harmony with white settlers, and certainly not through submission to Christian morality or dogmatic pacifism. Rather, his call for peace was pragmatic: under present conditions, armed Indigenous resistance was futile. Thus, the Ghost Dance’s mass appeal had less in common with Christianity than it did with earlier prophet-inspired pan-Indigenous movements. These include the 1760s Lenni Lenape prophet Neolin and his Odawa follower Pontiac (who fought British military occupation in the Great Lakes region); the 1800s Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa and his brother Tecumseh, who together fought US occupation of the Ohio River valley; the 1860s Wanapum prophet Smohalla and his follower, the Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph; and the 1870s Pauite prophet Wodziwob, Wovoka’s predecessor and the first practitioner of the Ghost Dance. Each of these successive prophets built upon the messages and doctrines of the others by calling for pan-Indigenous resistance—sometimes through armed struggle—to reject colonial occupation. Each drew upon an accumulation of historical experience, and all were united by a common desire for Indigenous liberation.

Public debate at the time over Lakotas’ adherence to the Ghost Dance’s alleged pacifism served only to divide people fighting for survival into two camps: “legitimate” nonviolent pacifists and “illegitimate” violent militants. Indeed, these divisions cater to the feelings of settler society more than they accurately portray the lived experiences of real Indigenous peoples. The categories of “good Indians” and “bad Indians” purposefully create criminal elements within Indigenous nations and movements, in order to obscure or hide the United States’ own criminal enterprise. But the Ghost Dance was not meant for the US colonizers, nor did its followers seek its recognition as a “legitimate” religion equivalent to Christianity. It was the US state’s criminalization of not only the dancers themselves, but all things defying the civilizing mission, that led the military to conclude that the dance was a “hostile expression.” All dancing—and practicing Indigenous lifeways, in general—was a criminal act punishable by imprisonment or the withholding of rations. To reservation officials, it didn’t matter if the dancers were militant or nonviolent: Ghost Dancing was inherently an oppositional, political act.

Nearly a third of all Lakotas—between four and five thousand—along with many Dakotas, participated in the Ghost Dance, a figure that demonstrates its mass influence. As a resistance movement, its tactics included complete withdrawal from reservation life; opposition to reservation authorities; the creation of resistance camps in remote areas far removed the influence of the agency; the pilfering of annuity distribution centers (and sometimes white settlers’ cattle and crops); the destruction of agricultural equipment; and the refusal to send children to school, to speak English, to participate in censuses, and to attend work, church, or agency and council meetings; their tactics also included the refusal to live on assigned allotments, to obey “agency chiefs,” to cut one’s hair, to quit dancing, to wear white clothing and attire, or to use metal tools. In short, the movement posed a comprehensive challenge to the colonial order of things. At first Indian police were sent to suppress the dances, which were illegal, but their resolve was shaken when they were met by armed guards willing to defend the dancers with violence if necessary. Upon meeting a strident refusal to quit dancing, some Indian police simply resigned, rather than face the prospect of killing their relatives or imprisoning them.

The widespread appeal of the Ghost Dance as an anti-colonial movement was in large part due to historical experience of its primary promoters and interlocutors: boarding school–educated Indigenous students. Two of its primary Lakota visionaries, Mato Wanahtake (Kicking Bear) and Tatanka Ptecela (Short Bull), used trains and writing to diffuse the message of the Ghost Dance to the Oceti Sakowin. Boarding school students who could read and write, often in both English and Lakota, transcribed Kicking Bear’s and Short Bull’s reports after the two men traveled by train to meet with Wovoka in Nevada. Ghost Dance prophesies, prayers, and songs were also transcribed and mailed to the various reservations, where boarding school students would read them aloud to fellow Ghost Dancers. Without this means of dissemination, the Ghost Dance would not have been so widespread—a fact Mooney admits in his ethnography. Letters conveying Ghost Dance songs and doctrines poured into Oceti Sakowin reservations from Indigenous nations in Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and Oklahoma.

When Ghost Dancing began among the Lakotas, it was reported in the press as troubling and unrelenting. The largest deployment of the military since the Civil War arrived on the Northern Plains to crush the movement, and National Guard units from the surrounding states were brought in as backup for the federal troops. The first target was Sitting Bull, the last remaining powerful leader who had never signed a treaty and who still resisted the imposition of reservation life. The Standing Rock Indian agent, James McLaughlin, feared Sitting Bull and his Ghost Dancers would leave the reservation. On December 15, 1890, under heavy surveillance for his role in spreading the Ghost Dance, Indian police attempted to arrest Sitting Bull. Roused from bed early that morning, Indian police dragged Sitting Bull from his log cabin and shot him in the head. A brief firefight ensued, in which Sitting Bull’s followers killed six Indian police and the Indian police killed seven of his followers. After Sitting Bull’s assassination, military arrest warrants were issued for other Ghost Dance leaders such as Mniconjou chief Hehaka Gleska (Spotted Elk). In an effort to diminish Spotted Elk’s standing among his own people, white soldiers derisively called him “Si Tanka,” or “Big Foot,” because he wore US government–issued shoes that were too small for his feet. Fearing further reprisals, Sitting Bull’s followers joined with Spotted Elk’s people at the Cheyenne River Reservation. The Ghost Dancers then fled to turn themselves in at Red Cloud’s agency in Pine Ridge, where they were detained at Wounded Knee Creek and surrounded by soldiers. The Seventh Cavalry, Custer’s old regiment, took command of the camp and began by demanding the group turn over all weapons and surrender. They conducted tipi-by-tipi raids, confiscating anything that could be construed as a weapon, such as hatchets and knives.

On the morning of December 29, 1890, Spotted Elk and all the camp leaders were called to council with soldiers to turn in the last remaining guns. Hotchkiss guns (mobile light artillery) were strategically placed on the hillsides and trained at the starving, surrendering, and mostly unarmed Ghost Dancers. A scuffle broke out and a shot was fired. The Seventh Cavalry massacred between 270 and 300 Lakotas that day, including Spotted Elk. More than two-thirds among the slain were women and children. The Ghost Dancers fought back against the soldiers, inflicting casualties; if not for their struggle, there is no doubt more would have been killed, and that others would not have been able to escape. In the course of several hours, the cavalry chased down and killed the fleeing Lakotas. When the soldiers administered the killing blows, often by point-blank execution, they were heard muttering, “Remember Custer.”

The military still refers to the massacre of half-starved and surrendering people as a battle against armed militants. Congress awarded twenty medals of honor to the soldiers involved in the massacre. In retaliation for the unprovoked slaughter, Ghost Dancers sought revenge. The story of a young Sicangu Carlisle boarding school graduate who returned to the reservation and joined the Ghost Dance movement is significant in this regard. Tasunka (Plenty Horses) was stripped of his language and culture at a crucial moment in his childhood, returning to his family and community with nothing to offer. “I found that the education I had received,” Plenty Horses recalled, “was of no benefit to me. There was no chance to get employment, nothing for me to do whereby I could earn my board and clothes, no opportunity to learn more and remain with the whites. It disheartened me and I went back to live as I had before going to school.”

His experience was not exceptional. The civilization experiment failed. Growing his hair long and donning pre–boarding school Lakota clothing, Plenty Horses joined armed resisters in the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Lieutenant Edward Casey went to meet with the resistance camp that had holed up in the Badlands. Angry at what he had experienced in boarding school, the starving conditions to which he returned on the reservation, and witnessing his people killed with impunity at Wounded Knee, Plenty Horses positioned himself behind Casey as he approached and shot him in the back of the head. Army officials charged Plenty Horses with murder, but he was later acquitted. Had he been guilty of murder, then so too were the soldiers who massacred his people at Wounded Knee, the court reasoned. At trial, the court concluded that a state of war existed, although not formally declared, and therefore that Plenty Horses was not at fault, and neither were the soldiers involved in the Wounded Knee massacre—thus suspending the criminal act of genocidal murder.

In the aftermath of the October 27, 2016, raid on the 1851 Treaty Camp blockading the Dakota Access Pipeline, a rancid smell permeated the camps. Police and private security had heaped the camp’s remnants—ceremonial items, such as eagle feathers, pipes, medicine bundles, and staffs, along with mangled tents, sleeping bags, clothing, and tipis—into a large pile near the entrance of Oceti Sakowin Camp. Cops and private security had urinated on the items before returning them.

One night, after it was decided to ceremonially burn the urine-soaked remnants, an Ihanktonwan elder gathered young Water Protectors around a fire. She was dressed in the regalia she wore the day of the raid. Hundreds of copper pennies hung by red ribbons from her dark blue trade cloth dress. She told of her ancestors who were killed during the 1862 US–Dakota War. Evicted from their homelands, they fled to present-day Standing Rock, crossing the Missouri River not far from the location of Oceti Sakowin Camp, after US cavalrymen massacred Dakotas and Lakotas in the Whitestone Hill buffalo hunt camp. This was, to the day, exactly 150 years before DAPL private security unleashed attack dogs on unarmed Water Protectors at a nearby pipeline construction site.

The day after Christmas in 1862, soldiers gathered up thirty-eight Dakota men and boys and imprisoned them at Fort Snelling in Mankato, Minnesota. Their medicine bundles were confiscated, heaped in a large pile, and burned as they were led to the gallows, singing their death songs. Their crime? Defending their nation and homelands. The same week that President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing Black slaves, he also signed the death sentences of the thirty-eight Dakota patriots. The copper pennies hanging from the elder’s regalia had holes drilled into Lincoln’s ears with red ribbon threaded through. “He didn’t listen,” she said of the Great Emancipator, “so we opened his ears.”

After the 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass, Lakota women used awls to carve holes in Custer’s ears so he would hear better in the afterlife. Now, it was President Barack Obama, North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple, and Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier who refused to listen. As singers began a prayer song, the elder reminded the younger ones that the tears flowing from their eyes were their “ancestors speaking through them,” and that they were not tears of trauma but of liberation. “We survived genocide after genocide.”

Then she danced, and the pennies swayed with the flickering fire and billowing smoke. Behind her, armed police were perched on a hill half a mile away, and their bright floodlights glared down on us. Our history is the future.

What continues to sustain Indigenous peoples through the horrors of settler colonialism are the recent memories of freedom, the visions enacting it, and the daring conspiracies to recapture it. The Ghost Dance was not a monolithic movement, but an accumulation of prior anti-colonial experiences, sentiments, and struggles that informed #NoDAPL. Each struggle had adopted essential features of previous traditions of Indigenous resistance, while creating new tactics and visions to address the present reality, and, consequently, projected Indigenous liberation into the future. Trauma played a major role. But if we oversimplify Indigenous peoples as perpetually wounded, we cannot possibly understand how they formed kinship bonds and constantly recreated and kept intact families, communities, and governance structures while surviving as fugitives and prisoners of a settler state and as conspirators against empire; how they loved, cried, laughed, imagined, dreamed, and defended themselves; or how they remain, to this day, the first sovereigns of this land and the oldest political authority.

4. Flood

When our land is gone, our way of life is gone, our tribes are destroyed. The bottom lands the Corps of Engineers want to take are the very best on the reservations. They are our heart lands. They can never be replaced. No similar lands are for sale. We depend on land for our livelihood, it furnishes us our income. To take our land is to take our homes and income, and a part of our history and heritage.

—J. W. “Jiggs” Thompson, US Senate Subcommittee

on Public Works, Washington, DC, 1959

After Wounded Knee, spectacular armed struggle would not come again until the 1970s. In the meantime, nevertheless, the fight for land, life, and self-determination continued. Over the course of the mid twentieth century, the United States increasingly used its powers of eminent domain to seize Indigenous lands for large public works projects, especially for Army Corps of Engineers dams. For the Oceti Sakowin along the Missouri River, dispossession through eminent domain emerged in the form of floods and dams. The Pick-Sloan Plan, a joint water-development project designed by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation in 1944 with the input of Missouri River states, called for the construction of large multipurpose earthen-rolled dams for flood control, reclamation, and irrigation that, as its promoters claimed, promised to make otherwise-arid grasslands bloom. Four of the five Pick-Sloan dams flooded seven Missouri River Lakota and Dakota reservations—Santee, Yankton, Rosebud, Lower Brule, Crow Creek, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock. But unlike during the previous century, when Indigenous land was coveted for its endless bounty, for the Pick-Sloan Plan in the twentieth century, Indigenous land was desired merely so that it could be wasted—covered with water. All of the risks, and none of the rewards, of cheap hydroelectricity and irrigation, were imposed on generations of Indigenous people who depended upon their relations to the land and water for life. And floodwaters provided the physical means to terminate Indigenous nations and relocate people—a violent severing of those relations—to end the “Indian problem” once and for all.

The Pick-Sloan dams were a twentieth-century Indigenous apocalypse, inflicting an immeasurable amount of loss that is still experienced today. When the river trade increased violence in the nineteenth century, the Oceti Sakowin escaped invasion by following the buffalo onto the plains. When the US Army annihilated the buffalo, the survivors were forced onto reservations, where they found refuge once again in the lush river bottomlands where food and game abounded, subsistence agriculture flourished, and fresh water was plenty. When the reservation cattle boom came in the early twentieth century, river bottomlands provided shelter for livestock and prime ranchland for small-scale, Native-owned cattle enterprises. A mixed economy consisted of subsistence hunting and gathering, along with small-scale agriculture and small-scale reservation cattle enterprises. Virtually all reservation timber was concentrated along shoreland, providing the necessary materials for home construction, shelter, and fuel for heating and cooking. What could not be produced by the sale of livestock was replaced with the harvest of wild game, fruits, and vegetables that flourished in the river valley. Those less fortunate avoided starvation in winter months, when employment was scarce, through total dependence on “the free goods of nature” that the river provided.

All of this was destroyed by the Pick-Sloan Plan, setting the stage for the #NoDAPL movement half a century later. The Army Corps’ discretion to plot the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2014 rested on power they assumed under the Pick-Sloan Plan, following which the Army Corps have continually asserted—but never been officially granted—jurisdiction over the Missouri River flowing through Oceti Sakowin reservations. This was a direct violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which delineated treaty territory as encompassing the entire channel of the river flowing through it, including the eastern shoreline. According to US law, only Congress had the power to alter treaty boundaries or extinguish Indigenous jurisdiction, and the Pick-Sloan Plan authorized the Army Corps to do neither; it merely authorized them to build dams on the reservations. However, the assertion of jurisdiction didn’t just happen with the stroke of a pen. Rather, it arrived as a wall of water brought on by the dams—extinguishing life and Indigenous jurisdiction along with it. And because reservation life had imposed starvation conditions on the Oceti Sakowin in the earlier half of the twentieth century, by the mid twentieth century when the Pick-Sloan dams were built, it was hard to assemble a formidable resistance against the Army Corps and its allied federal agencies. The results were nothing short of genocide: by destroying the land—and with it the plants, animals, and water—the dams targeted and destroyed the very nations of people who reproduced themselves upon the soil. In this way, taking land and water also took away the possibility of a viable future.

Pick-Sloan also dovetailed with federal policies of termination and relocation, which liquidated federally recognized Indigenous nations and removed people from the reservation to far-off urban centers. In 1953, Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108, which called for the immediate termination of the Flathead, Klamath, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribes—opening millions of acres of Indigenous lands for privatization. The bill adopted a perverse logic: only through the destruction of Indigenous nations could they “be freed from Federal supervision and control from all disabilities and limitations.” That same year, Public Law 280 authorized states to assume criminal and civil jurisdiction over Native lands. Together, the bills promised to end federal trust protections and transfer payments guaranteed by treaties and agreements, extinguishing what little Indigenous political authority remained after close to a century of genocidal policies. In tandem with this termination legislation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began busing Natives off reservations to cities like San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Cleveland as part of the federal relocation program. Between the 1950s and 1960s, an estimated 750,000 Native people moved off reservation. Termination, in the words of Edward Valandra, “made legal the overthrow of Native governments, the stealing of their lands, and the extermination of Native Peoples and cultures.”

Termination marked a dramatic shift in policy from the gains made during the Indian New Deal, which, despite its flaws, had ushered in a new era of tribal self-determination under the 1935 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). The dramatic reforms overhauled years of collective punishment that the Indian Bureau had inflicted on whole nations held captive on reservations. The year of the Wounded Knee Massacre, the US Census concluded that the western frontier was officially “closed.” With it, the centuries of war, famine, disease, and genocidal policy brought the American Indian population to its lowest point in the history of North American settler colonialism. In 1928, in response to American Indian activists’ demands, an extensive study, The Problem of Indian Administration, also known as the Meriam Report, found the Indian Bureau incompetent, corrupt, and murderous. Among its most egregious acts was mass starvation across reservations, as what little land remained for Natives to eke out a living was sold off to white settlers. Because of the disastrous Dawes Act, between 1887 and 1932 allotment—and the “surplus” land sold to whites—devoured 91 million acres of Indigenous lands, leaving just 48 million acres for reservations. In order to limit the number of individual American Indians who could receive an allotment and become landowners, a racist federal “competency commission” issued patents based on racial mixture, disallowing “full-bloods” from becoming private owners, and instead keeping their lands in trust. This created conflict between landless “mixed-bloods” and “full-bloods” who kept allotments because they were deemed too “incompetent” to sell them to whites. Oklahoma tribes were hardest hit; for instance, the Osage lost 70 percent of their allotted lands during the oil boom of the 1920s. By contrast, the Oceti Sakowin lost 30 percent of their allotted lands overall; among them, Rosebud and Lower Brule experienced the greatest hit, losing 40 percent of their lands.

The IRA provided a temporary reprieve to the onslaught by making three important reforms: First, it ended the catastrophic allotment policy. Second, it ended the draconian prohibition on dancing, improved Indigenous freedom of religion and speech, improved the reservation criminal justice system, and provided monies for land reacquisition and economic development. Lastly, it imposed Western-style governance through a BIA model constitution, which required reservations to adopt a constitution based on the US Constitution and pledge fealty to the United States. The last point was the most contentious. While Indigenous peoples desired increased political autonomy, they didn’t want to replace existing governance, based on consensus and kinship, with colonial institutions. They also feared the competitive Western-style electoral system would further intensify political factionalism and create a class of reservation elites whose allegiance lay not with community councils but with an external authority—the US government—and whose political power would be kept in check by the BIA and the Department of the Interior.

In fact, the IRA’s primary architect, Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, saw the IRA as part of a global design of colonial administration. Collier drew inspiration from Lord Lugord’s early-twentieth-century model for British colonial administration. Under this system national independence was prevented through its permanent suspension. In 1947 Collier even compared the US colonial administration of Indigenous peoples to its imperial annexation and colonial management of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska, the Pacific Islands, the Panama Canal, and the Virgin Islands. The IRA was a New Deal program, but it was also part of global imperialism; the view that Indian policy is only “domestic policy” fails take this fact seriously, and normalizes colonialism by reproducing the notion that Indigenous peoples are domestic US subjects. Indian affairs were thus removed from the realm of international relations—from treaty making and diplomacy—and relegated to domestic, territorial rule, a process that should be challenged rather than reproduced.

National independence for colonized peoples was never the goal for US imperial endeavors. Nevertheless, the IRA lifted the Oceti Sakowin “from absolute deprivation to mere poverty, and this was the best time the reservation had,” as Standing Rock Sioux scholar and activist Vine Deloria Jr. observed. And for all its flaws, the IRA enshrined certain principles of self-government for Indigenous peoples and provided them with a federally recognized government. Not all reservations accepted the IRA, but those that did possessed a distinct advantage in years to come. For example, the Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Lower Brule, and Crow Creek Reservations created IRA tribal councils. The Yankton Reservation adopted the IRA but never formally adopted a model constitution or tribal council. With no federally recognized government, the Yankton reservation and its trustee, the Secretary of the Interior, were completely bypassed by the Army Corps, which proceeded to seize Native property by right of eminent domain in order to construct the Fort Randall Dam. Yankton Reservation members had little to no recourse. In the end, while IRA governments were deeply flawed, without them the Oceti Sakowin would not have been able to negotiate Army Corps damages—nor to ultimately resist termination. But it was a false choice to begin with: adopt the colonizers’ model fully; accept “self-determination” with permanent tutelage; or perish.

During this era, treaties were broken by statute rather than by brute force. In the Missouri River basin, the Pick-Sloan Plan destroyed more Indigenous lands than any other public works project in US history, affecting twenty-three different reservation communities. The project, writes Deloria, “was without a doubt, the single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States.” The land taken and destroyed was the best land on the reservation: riverfront bottomlands that were heavily wooded on otherwise treeless plains, and full of wildlife and plants, including animals on which many Indigenous peoples still depended for sustenance. A third of the residents of Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Lower Brule, Crow Creek, and Yankton reservations were removed to marginal lands on the open prairies or were forced to leave the reservation entirely; in either case, they could not reproduce the lives they lived in the lush river bottoms. In total, the United States took 550 square miles of Indigenous lands, an area half the size of Rhode Island.

During the nineteenth century, treaty making was deployed as a way to ensure Indian title over lands so they could later be ceded to the United States. D’Arcy McNickle, a Flathead scholar and Indian Affairs employee at the time of the Pick-Sloan Plan, argued that under eminent domain, Indian tribes became categorized as private landowners “against whom the state could proceed.” In other words, the identity of entire Indigenous nations became nothing more than a dollar sign. “The process, in time,” McNickle argued, “can only lead to the extinction of the Indian people.” Unlike white farmers and landowners, who could easily reproduce their businesses and lifestyles elsewhere, Indigenous peoples and the favorable river environment upon which they depended could not be replaced.

This was a cruel reward for those returning from the Second World War. In every war from the First World War to present, Indigenous peoples have served and volunteered at rates higher than the US population. The US military has also purposely distorted Indigenous warrior culture for its own ends, often enlisting Indigenous names and motifs, such as the “Lakota” helicopter or the “Tomahawk” cruise missile, for imperialist endeavors. Natives have served not so much as “national minorities” but more often as separate, sovereign nations. During World War I, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, for example, independently declared war on Germany in 1917, choosing to send their soldiers to fight for their own nation. They did the same during World War II, independently declaring war on the Axis powers. Initially, Native military service had much to do with the maintenance of Indigenous sovereignty, with Native soldiers fighting alongside an empire in which they were not citizens. Although widely resisted by Indigenous nations, American Indian citizenship would not be granted until 1924.

The Oceti Sakowin held similar views toward military service, maintaining an understanding with the United States that their military service was for the protection of their own homelands, and nothing more. They understood their service would not require deployment overseas against enemies named by the US empire that didn’t directly threaten Indigenous livelihoods. “There was an agreement between the [US] Government and the Indian people,” Lakota holy man Fools Crow explained in 1978, regarding Lakotas’ volunteerism during World War I, “that they will only fight within their own country, in defense. They send him [Lakotas] overseas which is contrary to the agreement that was made. It is something unusual for an Indian to fight in a foreign country … When they come back they are not the same boys. They drink. They destroy themselves.”

When thousands returned home after the Second World War, the enemy threatening their homelands was the very military they fought for. A country that demanded Natives sacrifice their lives in war now demanded the sacrifice of their best lands and their governments. What was coming up the river was a new round of dispossession, a new round of enclosure, that used the most precious resource—water—as its weapon to eliminate and destroy nations and the land on which they depended for life. However, the struggle for control over the river began not with the Army Corps, but with states like South Dakota, whose political elite became staunch advocates for termination. But like termination, river development met resistance.

By 1910 the state of South Dakota, barely two decades old, was at the forefront of the movement to develop the Upper Missouri. Other states such as Montana and North Dakota had their own plans, but none compared to the scale and organization of those in South Dakota. Early attempts had failed to garner federal support, especially from the US Army Corps of Engineers, who had final say over any river improvement projects. In 1924 the state designated Big Bend, the largest oxbow bend on the Missouri, as the site for a hydroelectric plant. A large multipurpose dam, according to this plan, promised cheap electricity and irrigation for the exclusive benefit of the nearby white-dominated border towns of Pierre, Winner, Chamberlain, White River, Mitchell, Huron, Redfield, and Murdo. Ignored were the very people most impacted: the Lower Brule and Crow Creek reservations. Although the dam targeted their lands and threatened their water rights, neither Indigenous nation was consulted, and both were disregarded entirely during the initial planning of the project. And when South Dakota’s river development projects failed to gain the necessary federal support, the Upper Missouri Valley Development Association formed in the spring of 1933 to take up their campaign.

The Big Bend site was just miles south from where the Lakotas first discovered the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804, attempting to trespass through their territory unnoticed. So too did boosters of river development attempt to bypass the scrutiny of the Oceti Sakowin. Like the expedition, their plan was soon discovered. On May 16, 1937, Lower Brule Tribal Chairman Ruben Estes wrote to South Dakota Republican Congressman Francis Case expressing support for a hydroelectric plant at Big Bend that could provide “labor and relief,” and electricity to the Lower Brule town site. But Estes also expressed concern at the tribal council’s exclusion from plans for the development of Lower Brule lands and water, invoking the new powers Lower Brule was willing to exercise under the IRA to challenge a state project initiated on tribal lands without their consent. Ultimately, he questioned if the state or the federal government had the right to develop water within reservation boundaries “without the consent of the people” of Lower Brule and Crow Creek, or perhaps any Indigenous nation living on the river.

By 1935 the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe adopted the IRA, becoming the first tribe among the Oceti Sakowin to do so, and the second in the United States. They did so for pragmatic reasons: to counter attempts by state and federal agencies to lay claim to and develop the Missouri River. Without an IRA council, the Lower Brule had little power to halt river development, to apply for federal loans, or to employ legal counsel to defend its lands. In the first instance, the Lower Brule did not support the development of the river without their consent. But they did support plans in which they could determine what that development would look like, and to what extent it would provide much-needed relief in the form of employment, and electricity during the Great Depression.

On June 1, 1937, Case responded to Estes agreeing that the Big Bend site “is right there in your reservation and you are entitled to first consideration.” Lower Brule followed suit, passing a resolution seeking federal loans from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to develop a small-scale hydroelectric plant. While the tribe had planned a smaller project for the immediate benefit of their community, Case had bigger ideas, in which the Indigenous communities were not considered or were minor players. Case claimed that the Big Bend site “could mean much to national defense, to Indian rehabilitation and to the general welfare of central South Dakota.” From 1937 to 1940, the Lower Brule requested approval for developing the site, and the secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, favored the plan as a BIA-led project to increase the Department of Interior’s influence and control over the river. But the Army Corps rejected both the BIA and Lower Brule proposals, basing their decision on a “cost-to-benefit” analysis and the simple fact that they didn’t want to relinquish any authority to tribes or the federal government. On the surface, it may have seemed like bureaucratic conflict or a lack of political will. What South Dakota, the Army Corps, and BIA did agree on, however, was that river development would happen—with or without Indigenous consent.

Lower Brule’s initial opposition was consistent with other Indigenous nations’ earlier attempts to protect their water rights. In the 1908 Winters decision, the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Fort Belknap Reservation’s claim to water rights over a white farmer’s effort to control the flow of the Milk River, a tributary of the Missouri River in Montana. The court ruled that even if Fort Belknap had given up its fertile former lands in exchange for arid ones—which were, according to the court, adequate for “nomadic uncivilized people”—that their occupancy of those lands was inconsistent with the federal government’s desire to have them “become a pastoral and civilized people.” Put simply, Indigenous peoples retained quantifiable water rights if, and only if, the water was used in accordance with the civilizing mission of the federal government. The decision became known as the Winters Doctrine. The doctrine holds that, however diminished current reservation boundaries may be, tribes retain senior, reserved rights to water flowing through the originally defined boundaries established by treaty, statute, or executive order.

Neither the Lower Brule or any Indigenous nation challenging Missouri River development had ever invoked the Winters Doctrine. But they still possessed the power to do so. The doctrine’s intended use illustrates limits to Indigenous water rights under settler law; nevertheless, state or federal alteration or disruption of the flow of the river for any reason without the consent of the tribes, such as through the construction of dams, violates the spirit of the Winters Doctrine.

The 1944 Flood Control Act, which authorized the Pick-Sloan Plan, permitted the Army Corps only to construct dams—not to expunge Indigenous jurisdiction, treaty rights, or water rights. In less-than-precise language, Section 4 of the act opened the river for “public use” and “recreational purposes.” It didn’t strip Crow Creek, Lower Brule, Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Yankton, Fort Berthold, or any Indigenous nation, for that matter, of their political authority over their river. Regardless, from the 1950s to the 1960s the Army Corps condemned reservation lands under eminent domain and Congress awarded compensation to the affected reservations. Neither the Flood Control Act (which took the land) nor the congressional acts addressing damages (which rewarded compensation for taking the land) explicitly extinguished Indigenous jurisdiction; and neither authorized nor provided any compensation for the Army Corps’ taking the Missouri River itself. Compensation was provided only for taking the land, but not for the water. Since then, the Oceti Sakowin have contended that the Missouri River and its shoreline were never legally ceded. And, according to statute, they are right: the Army Corps’ alteration of the flow of the river by damming it directly violates both the Winters Doctrine and the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. But, regardless of treaty rights and sheer legality, the Army Corps proceeded anyway.

For Dakotas and Lakotas, water rights are defined by treaty. For example, Article 2 of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty delineated the eastern boundary of “Sioux territory” as beginning at the “low-water mark” of the east bank of the Missouri River. In contrast, the tribal constitutions for the Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, and Lower Brule Reservations delineated reservation boundaries according to the 1889 Sioux Agreement. The agreement divided West River tribes into five distinct reservations (Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Cheyenne River, Lower Brule, and Standing Rock) and defined the eastern boundary of the three reservations bordering the river (Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and Lower Brule) as beginning at “the center of the main channel of the Missouri River.” Regardless of the 1889 Agreement’s diminishment of reservation lands, all these reservations and the Oceti Sakowin still possess powers under the Winters Doctrine to the Missouri River according to the original 1868 Treaty boundaries, as long as the water is used in a “civilized” manner.

Winters rights take effect on the date reservations are created by federal authority and are considered unquantifiable or, according to the court decision, “uncircumscribed,” allowing for the perpetual benefit and use for a permanent Indigenous homeland. According to Diné scholar Melanie K. Yazzie in her analysis of the 2012 Navajo-Hopi Little Colorado River water settlement, subsequent Supreme Court decisions have interpreted this “uncircumscribed” quality to mean a “minimal need” required by the reservation. In other words, Indigenous nations are only entitled to water they can use for “civilized” purposes. Those purposes are quantified—or, put another way, Indigenous sovereignty is quantified according to water usage and degrees of “civilized” usage. Anything falling outside these qualifications is considered surplus, unused, or wasted. The rest can be measured and siphoned away to meet the need of non-Native interests. After each party quantifies their needs, water that flows through reservation or treaty lands is then, by no small feat of the imagination, not entirely “owned” by Indigenous nations. The result is that Indigenous nations can only use a restricted amount—in some instances, a fraction of a percentage—of the water flowing through their territory.

Settler agricultural interests in water, because they are so insatiable, have always outweighed the bare survival of Indigenous peoples. On the plains of the Missouri River basin, irrigation is necessary for agriculture, which as a mode of production personifies settler colonialism: it’s sedentary and mostly permanent; it reproduces itself; and it always needs more land and water. As it expands, it eats away at Indigenous territory, destroying fauna and flora and annihilating Indigenous subsistence economies. This is not to say Indigenous peoples were not pastoralists, farmers, or ranchers before and during colonization. (Prior to colonization most Indigenous societies were agricultural, not “hunter-gatherer,” with great affinities to domesticated plants such as corn.) Indeed, by the time the Pick-Sloan Plan was proposed, Missouri River Indigenous nations had already developed successful Native-run cattle ranching enterprises and small-scale agricultural projects, often reflecting communal practices. These small-scale economies allowed Indigenous nations to resist and challenge the further diminishment of their reservation lands by preventing the need to sell it off to feed themselves.

Lanniko L. Lee, a Lakota writer and a citizen of Cheyenne River Reservation, remembers the river bottomlands before the floods. Drawing on memories of her childhood, she recalls what life was like before the Oahe Dam took her lands:

I see a river shoreline of men and women, young and old, carrying water, picking berries, gathering firewood, fishing from the shore, wading in the sloughs for cattail root, gathering teas of so many kinds, making toys for children from the fallen leaves and branches, telling stories of how we came to be a people, making furniture, women telling river stories to their grandchildren, children learning the gifts of the river. I hear men singing; I hear women, old and young, singing as they work and live among the trees. I hear children’s laughter, too.

Pick-Sloan’s massive dam projects, for instance, quite literally snatched the food from the mouths of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous sovereignty could be felt through the hunger in one’s stomach, as was the case for the Oceti Sakowin who had their most productive lands taken. In this sense, Indigenous sovereignty can be calculated according to their water rights, which, according to Yazzie, face “unlimited limitations” in federal courts. That is, settler law has never expanded the material basis of Indigenous sovereignty—land and water; it has only eroded it by placing upon it endless restrictions. When it comes to water rights, it is not just the legal character of “Indians” that is defined. “Settlers,” too, become legal subjects with a vested interest in the taking of Indigenous water. Put differently, in cases where Indigenous peoples possess water rights according to federal statute, executive order, or treaty, settler communities, to fulfill their needs, are dependent on diminishing those rights—with or without Indigenous consent. Thus, Indigenous water rights are calculated first and foremost according to settler needs.

The undercurrents of the Pick-Sloan Plan also originated from the centralization of the power of the federal government to imagine and enact theories of space through land policy. The practice began as early as the 1785 Land Ordinance and continued into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as federal authorities worked to know, map, reorganize, and manage land as territory. Water management was vital to these policies, as westward expansion and the taking of Indigenous lands confronted the problem of creating irrigation systems to make settler life possible in arid environments. After removing Indigenous peoples, the first task was to induce colonization. Federal policies such as the 1862 Homestead Act encouraged agricultural settlement on dry western lands unsuitable for settler farming techniques developed in the east. Pushed by the railroad lobby to spur settlement and therefore the need for railroads to transport agricultural goods, the 1877 Desert Land Act amended the Homestead Act and provided federal money for western irrigation projects. The Northern Pacific Railway, for example, also opened colonization offices in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and England to entice European immigrants to settle the Northern Plains and, therefore, to create a demand for railroad transportation. Conservation policy, influenced by President Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the century, led to the creation of the Bureau of Reclamation in 1902 to provide for the irrigation of arid lands in the West. Land policy was the legal justification for the sometimes-unwilling shock troops of colonization—white European settlers. Settlement and settlers literally made “legal” and operational contemporary water law that depends so heavily on the theft of Indigenous water.

“Public land” for “public good” was a highly subsidized federal endeavor for private enterprise, racial exclusion, and Indigenous elimination. One and a half million white families gained title to 246 million acres of Indigenous lands—an area nearly the size of California and Texas combined—under the Homestead Act, with the added value of federally subsidized irrigation. A quarter of adults alive today in the United States are direct descendants of those who profited from the Homestead Act’s legacy of exclusive, racialized property ownership and economic mobility, a legacy that categorically excluded Black, Indigenous, and other nonwhite peoples. Access to Indigenous water was crucial for securing the ownership of Indigenous lands and generating wealth from these lands over generations. Thus, a single land policy has had a profound lasting political and economic legacy. It informs present disparities, which boil down to a single axiom: land is wealth and water is wealth. The Pick-Sloan Plan is part and parcel of this massive settler-colonial agricultural machine that greases its gears with water. Today, agriculture in the western United States accounts for three-quarters of all water usage. Water is settler colonialism’s lifeblood—blood that has to be continually excised from Indigenous peoples.

To meet incessant demands for irrigation, the Pick-Sloan Plan was made to appear inevitable. But it was not a dream manifested in a dusty federal office building in Washington, DC, to be handed down to unwitting agricultural communities. States, local governments, the Army Corps, and other federal agencies all pushed for Missouri River development in various ways, in spite of the consequences for Indigenous communities. Although most of the power was concentrated in federal authorities by 1944, “grassroots” organizations continued to play a significant role. By 1941, the Upper Missouri River Valley Development Authority had dissolved. In its place formed the Missouri River States Committee, an organization of governors from Missouri basin states. It is rather telling that the first states to enthusiastically join the committee (South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska) encompassed thirteen Indian reservations whose lands either immediately included or bordered the Missouri River (the Omaha, Winnebago, Santee, Rosebud, Ponca, Yankton, Lower Brule, Crow Creek, Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, Fort Berthold, and Fort Peck Reservations). Later, Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa would join the committee. Representation ranged from federal, state, and municipal agencies and officials to businesses and community organizations. The channelization of the river benefited mostly downriver states, while upriver states would bear the heaviest burden by taking on the majority of the dams and reservoirs. Since most of the land to be flooded was Indigenous, this was a “burden” South Dakota and North Dakota politicians were willing to assume. In 1951 during an appraisal hearing, Standing Rock Chairwoman Josephine Kelly challenged this aspect of the Pick-Sloan Plan, and especially the Oahe Dam’s appropriation of Standing Rock lands. Someone asked why the dams were not built in the lower basin states, who benefitted the most from flood control, to which Kelly responded bluntly, in front of Army Corps and federal authorities: “Because there are no Indians down in that country.”

At no time did the state committee solicit the attendance or input of a single Indigenous representative from the affected reservations. The committee would work closely with the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps, in the words of its chair M. Q. Sharpe, “for the general development [of the Missouri River] for the multiple purposes of flood control, power development, irrigation, navigation, soil conservation, [and] wildlife and recreational development.” As he went on to explain, “the Missouri River States Committee had really become the general over-all supervising, coordinating, steering and representative committee for the development of the Missouri River basin on a valley-wide, over-all plan, representing all the sovereign states of the basin in their sovereign status and in a semi-official way.” Thus, states’ interests didn’t lay solely in river development; they also proposed the total liquidation of Indigenous political authority through termination.

The construction of the Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River in Montana in 1933 set a precedent for the way the Army Corps would ignore Indigenous communities, treaties, and water rights. After destructive floods in 1927, the Army Corps conducted an exhaustive four-year hydrological study on the Missouri River. The findings were published in what was called the 308 Report, which became the go-to manual for all future developments in the basin, including the 1944 Pick-Sloan Plan. The report also designated Fort Peck (not to be confused with the Fort Peck Indian Reservation) as the best site for a massive reservoir. The project fell in line with New Deal labor relief and public work projects, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt quickly authorized the Fort Peck Dam under the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act. The Army Corps built what was at the time of its construction the largest dam on earth, in the process providing much-needed employment for about 10,000 workers. Regional histories celebrate the dam as a historic engineering masterpiece, and it is considered instrumental in pulling Montana and the region out of the Great Depression. The successes of the Fort Peck Dam secured Army Corps control in planning and constructing future massive multipurpose dams on the main stem of the Missouri and, according to historian Michael Lawson, “greatly expanded its powers and functions beyond its constitutional limits.”

While the dam’s history is well publicized and well remembered as an economic boon and engineering marvel, missing from these popular accounts is the largely untold and undocumented history of the removal of 350 Nakota, Dakota, and Assiniboine families on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation and the flooding of earlier Indian Affairs irrigation projects that had benefited Native farmers. The Fort Peck project paved the way for the 1944 Pick-Sloan Plan and Flood Control Act, and a similar process would repeat itself: postwar employment and river development projects would come primarily at the sacrifice of Indigenous lives and lands.

In anticipation of the need for postwar employment, and on the heels of massive flooding, in 1944 the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps, with the input and guidance of the Missouri River states, called for the construction of five earthen rolled dams that would create massive reservoirs on the river’s main stem. In South Dakota and North Dakota, the dams flooded 611,642 acres of land. Just over a half of this land—309,584 acres in all—belonged to the Yankton, Lower Brule, Crow Creek, Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, Rosebud, Santee, and Fort Berthold reservations. Oahe Dam flooded the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock; Fort Randall Dam flooded the Yankton and Rosebud Reservations; Fort Randall and Big Bend Dams flooded the Lower Brule and Crow Creek reservations, while Garrison Dam flooded Fort Berthold and Gavin’s Point Dam flooded the Santee Reservation. As a result, from these five reservations alone more than 900 Native families, one-third of their overall populations, were forced to relocate. Entire communities were forever submerged. Indigenous communities were well aware of the Pick-Sloan dams but had little idea where they would be built and how much it would affect them. Some communities were even flooded twice and experienced two dislocations, such as Crow Creek and Lower Brule. Seventy-five percent of wildlife and plants, and 90 percent of all commercial timber on these reservations lands were destroyed. By design, the Pick-Sloan Plan was a destroyer of nations.

The Garrison Dam inundated the Fort Berthold Reservation, composed of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations, taking 152,360 acres of their land. Thirty percent of the community populations from Lower Brule, Crow Creek, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock would be removed. Although less land was taken by the Garrison Dam than by the Oahe Dam, Fort Berthold lost a quarter of its entire land base, including its agency at Elbowoods. Because of its smaller size and the greater concentration of its residents in the river valley, approximately 80 percent of its people (325 families) were removed and 94 percent of its agricultural lands were destroyed. No care was exercised to minimize the damage to Indigenous lands. To protect the majority-white border town of Williston, North Dakota, from losing its land, however, the Army Corps modified the Garrison Dam. The dam was also built safely upriver so as not to flood Bismarck, a white-dominated border town and the state capital of North Dakota. (Such were the considerations the Army Corps made when planning the Dakota Access Pipeline: minimization of damage to white settlements was prioritized.) The reservoir that sits atop Fort Berthold lands was named “Lake Sakakawea,” after the Shoshone woman, captured and sold by the Hidatsas, who gained notoriety for her services to the Lewis and Clark expedition and US empire. According to historian Michael Lawson, the Pick-Sloan dams “destroyed more Indian land than any single public works project in the United States.”

Lanniko Lee remembers teary-eyed women and men, young and old, gathering near the shorelines to watch as Mni Sose, the Missouri River, slowly widened and the flood waters crept up the rolling gumbo hills. “Some of them were singing the ancient songs for mourning,” she recalled. “They sang of the coming death to the river life that the people had known.” To Lee, it was an existential question about Indigenous identity grounded in land and water: “Would we still be able to call ourselves Minnecoujou, planters by the water?”

While Indigenous peoples mourned the loss of their river, US President John F. Kennedy celebrated the Oahe’s construction. At a dedication ceremony for the dam on August 17, 1962, held in Pierre, South Dakota, Kennedy spoke to a crowd of thousands, including businessmen, politicians, and the very Indigenous peoples whose lands were sacrificed. His message was one of salvation—the triumph of lightness over darkness, civilization over savagery. “This dam and the rest of the dams on this river,” he said, “which 30 years ago would have provided only floods and darkness, now provide irrigation and light.”

Although the Army Corps proclaimed before Congress that they would negotiate with the affected reservations, they never did. White landowners were dealt with on an individual, case-by-case basis, and Missouri River tribes were dealt with as separate reservations. In contrast to the treatment of white landowners, the entire tribe received compensation, rather than the individual tribal members whose allotments were directly flooded or condemned. The creation of separate reservations had already severely weakened national unity for the Oceti Sakowin. Allotment emphasized individualism, breaking up the tightly knit family units of direct kin and extended relations called the tiospaye, isolating them on different plots of land in distant parts of the reservation. Tiospayes were the fundamental political unit of Oceti Sakowin governance, and they were where each family collectively selected its own representatives for general councils; though individuals once identified by political affiliation (for instance, as Hunkpapapa or Sicangu), they now identified by reservation (as Standing Rock or Rosebud). Now, Pick-Sloan, by negotiating with separate reservations rather than individual allottees, further fomented disunity between reservations, individual tribal members, and their tribal governments.

Indigenous nations were, nevertheless, awarded more money per acre than their white neighbors; this was to better enable tribes to “throw off the shackles of Federal supervision,” as South Dakota Congressman E. Y. Berry declared during a debate on the Cheyenne River settlement in 1954. In other words, Berry wanted to terminate the reservations and extinguish treaty obligations, and the dams provided the perfect opportunity. The initial negotiations for taken lands and relocation resulted in a $34 million award to Lower Brule, Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Yankton, and Standing Rock. But this came with strings attached—namely, that these tribes would eventually give up their political authority.

As early damages were still being calculated, on November 2, 1949, BIA Superintendent Frell M. Owl wrote to the Lower Brule and Crow Creek Tribal Councils advising them, perhaps for the first time, of the inevitable flooding of their lands. The two tribes no doubt knew about Pick-Sloan, but none fathomed the catastrophe it would bring. Owl told them Congress transferred to the Army Corps all the lands “required” for the Big Bend and Fort Randall Dams. Emphasizing Lower Brule and Crow Creek had no say in the matter, Owl wrote that the proposal to take their lands “is submitted to you not as a document that you should adopt but it, more or less, points out the events to come in the future.” Owl later conveyed the convoluted negotiations process: the Army Corps would condemn the land and negotiate directly with Crow Creek and Lower Brule legal counsel. The BIA would then approve and submit estimates of damages, but Congress would hold final approval over all the negotiations and pass legislation awarding monetary compensation. This lengthy back-and-forth process resulted in the tribes negotiating with three different entities—the Army Corps, the BIA, and Congress—often causing such a backlog in hearings and proceedings that tribes received their relocation money only after their lands were flooded.

In 1946 the BIA sponsored a two-year fact-finding mission, known as the Missouri River Basin Investigation (MRBI), to estimate damages to Missouri River tribes and estimate monetary awards for relocation, taken lands, and “intangible damages.” In the process, they saw “opportunity” in Indigenous “removal,” “relocation,” and “rehabilitation,” words that were synonymous with “termination.” This would sever Native people from the one thing keeping them from “merging with the total population” and evolving beyond their “primitive status”: the reservation and the land. Put plainly, the dams would speed up termination and relocation. Indigenous culture, a “self-contained and ingrowing” culture of poverty, the BIA investigation concluded, wanted for benevolent state intervention and the civilizing project. Indigenous nations had achieved a relative degree of autonomy under the IRA, but it was only through the liquidation of Indigenous political authority and federal trust responsibilities—undergoing destruction as nations—that they could receive the “gift of democracy.”

Most Indigenous river communities, as the MRBI put it, still depended on the “free goods of Nature”—such as hunting, trapping, and gathering—in the lush bottomlands where many Lakotas and Dakotas historically camped, and taking those lands would “force [Indians] into seeking cash income to make up for the substantial portion of income now represented in their use of natural resources of their present environment,” the BIA concluded. In other words, Indigenous peoples could only attain democracy once they were destroyed as nations.

The BIA made it sound like flooding agencies, the reservations’ headquarters, constituted liberation from dictatorial rule. “Our Indian agencies are growths descended from the frontier,” the report claimed. It called the towns “undemocratic” and stated that their end “might take the course of transferring most of the Federal Government’s services to the States.” The transfer of treaty obligations (federal services such as healthcare and education) to the states is termination in line with Public Law 280. The “wiping out” of the agencies, the MRBI concluded, was a “rare opportunity” that “may lead to significant discoveries which will have wide application to the conduct of Indian affairs in the United States.” In other words, it was an experiment in democracy.

“It takes the very heart out of these Indians,” one congressman said, speaking candidly about the legislation. “When you take reservation land, you destroy not only the land that is taken, but you destroy the community life, [the] religious and civil life of the people. You destroy nations, as a matter of fact.”

Agencies were the heart of these nations. Hospitals, health clinics, schools, and administrative offices—the very institutions necessary to continue on as a sovereign nation—were all located in agency towns. The damages are worth reviewing in full.

The Oahe Dam entirely inundated Cheyenne Agency, Cheyenne River’s largest community. The agency had to reestablish sixty miles inland at the isolated prairie town of Eagle Butte. More than 180 families, about 30 percent of the population of the agency, were forced to leave their homes. Fort Yates, the Standing Rock Agency, remained above the Oahe Dam flood waters, but the land below it, where most of the community’s population lived, was flooded. As a result, Fort Yates was made into an island that had to be connected by a bridge, and 170 families were forced to relocate—25 percent of the reservation population. At Crow Creek, the Fort Randall Dam flooded Fort Thompson, the agency headquarters for Lower Brule and Crow Creek and the largest community, dislocating eighty-four families from Crow Creek, thirty-five families from Lower Brule, and twenty families from Yankton. The combined agency headquarters from Crow Creek and Lower Brule were relocated to Pierre, the small capital city of South Dakota some sixty miles north of both reservations. Indian health services were relocated to Chamberlain, a notoriously racist, white-dominated border town twenty miles to the south.

Beyond the agencies, the damage to the rest of the reservations was no less diffuse. The Oahe Dam, the most destructive, destroyed 160,889 acres of Standing Rock and Cheyenne River, including 104,420 acres of Cheyenne River lands and 55,994 acres of Standing Rock lands. Nearly all the Cheyenne River lands taken were grazing lands; 75 percent and 60 percent of Native ranchers were displaced at Cheyenne River and Standing Rock, respectively. The most expensive and largest of the Pick-Sloan dams, the Oahe project cost $346 million, is 245 feet high, and generates 595,000 kilowatts of hydropower. The Oahe reservoir (Lake Oahe), stretching 250 miles from Pierre to Bismarck and storing 23.5 million acre-feet of water, is as deep as Lake Eerie and longer than Lake Ontario.

The second-largest, Fort Randall Dam, rises 160 feet high and destroyed 21,497 acres of Indigenous land. Crow Creek lost 9,418 acres of land in the flooding and had eighty-four families removed; Lower Brule lost 7,997 acres and had thirty-five families removed; Yankton lost 2,851 acres and had twenty families removed; and Rosebud lost 1,231 acres of land. The Fort Randall generates 320,000 kilowatts of hydro-power and cost $200 million. The reservoir it created, Lake Francis Case (named after a South Dakota congressman and early river-development advocate) is 107 miles long and has a storage capacity of 5.7 million acre-feet.

In an incredibly stupid and cruel engineering calculation, the Big Bend Dam, the third-largest of those constructed under Pick-Sloan, flooded and dislocated Crow Creek and Lower Brule lands to which communities had been already relocated from the previous Fort Randall flooding. Both reservations would have to relocate twice. Ninety-four feet high and producing 468,000 kilowatts of power, the Big Bend Dam was built directly on the now-inundated Fort Thompson town site and directly on Crow Creek and Lower Brule lands, flooding 20,478 acres of each and destroying the Lower Brule Agency headquarters. Lower Brule lost 14,299 acres and had sixty-two families, more than half its population, removed. Half the remaining Lower Brule farms not destroyed by the Fort Randall project were destroyed by Big Bend. Crow Creek lost 6,179 acres and had twenty-seven families removed. The reservoir behind Big Bend, Lake Sharpe, was named after the appointed Lower Brule and Crow Creek attorney M. Q. Sharpe, who represented the two tribes during the Pick-Sloan negotiations. For his lifelong commitment, not to Indigenous peoples, but to the taking of their lands by flooding it, Sharpe is immortalized by the water that sits atop Lower Brule and Crow Creek lands.

The smallest and southernmost dam, Gavin’s Point, took 593 acres of Santee lands. Gavin’s Point created Lewis and Clark Lake, named for the two US explorers who famously branded the Oceti Sakowin as “the vilest miscreants of the savage race.”

As much as the Army Corps already viewed the Missouri River as a technical problem to be managed and administered, the MRBI reduced Indigenous relocation and the trauma it inflicted to a set of technical questions and problems to be sorted out by the administration of federal and state services. Each of these problems had a solution, followed with a cash payment. By all accounts most of the Indigenous river communities, as the MRBI put it, still depended on the “free goods of Nature”—such as hunting, trapping, and gathering. This relationship was viewed as preventing full integration into the market economy. The BIA argued that taking the bottomlands would “force [Indians] into seeking cash income to make up for the substantial portion of income now represented in their use of natural resources of their present environment.” “Income” calculated not only cash income from wage labor, but also what was harvested from the land for consumption, rather than for profit. The assessment of “intangible” and “tangible” resources would force Indigenous people to begin thinking in terms of the cash economy, rather than relying upon goods that were otherwise considered “free” and, if properly managed, naturally replenishing. “Substitutes for native products destroyed by the reservoirs will be commercial products acquired through cash payments,” reasoned the MRBI.

During a 1958 congressional hearing on the Oahe Dam, Standing Rock member Louis Thief compared the catastrophic impact of “intangible damages” to the delayed explosion of an atomic bomb—unfolding gradually over time and space rather than in a split second—forever destroying the land, and whose consequences could only be fully understood by future generations. The bomb killed the “little things” that had no market value, such as mice or mouse beans, which had prevented many Indigenous peoples from starvation on the reservations. Mouse beans, or makatomnica in Lakota, are ground beans that are highly revered in Indigenous culture. Lakota and Dakota women would sing special songs in which they asked the mice for permission to take their beans, promising to leave appropriate gifts. The beans were a major source of protein for many families and today remain nearly extinct. Thief explained how the previous winter a man had dug up some of these mouse beans and had “enough to tide him over two weeks and [save] his family from starving.”

The loss of wildlife and plant life and the gardens also had a deleterious health impact. Prior to the dams, there was no diabetes. After the dams, diabetes rates soared. US Department of Agriculture commodity foods, such as canned meats and vegetables, white flour, and white sugar, replaced healthy foods. “Civilizing” the river landscape replaced a healthy diet of vegetables and lean meats with a high carb, sugar, and fat diet, causing generational health issues.

Thief’s testimony evoked the idea that Missouri Indigenous communities were also “energy sacrifice zones,” a term that the Nixon-era National Academy of Sciences used to describe the Shoshone and Paiute lands that were taken for nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. With no small irony, the US Department of Energy created a 1,360-square-mile “reservation” where 928 nuclear bombs were detonated, making it the most heavily nuclear-bombed area in the world. The only difference was that while the Nevada Test Site sought to transform atoms into nuclear energy, Pick-Sloan sought to transform water into hydropower. Both made the landscapes uninhabitable. Despite MRBI attempts to calculate the costs of damage, the value of the land could never be replaced.

Also at stake was the future realization of life that sustained Indigenous lives, that kept families from starving to death. In this sense, the dams reached into the future to take human and nonhuman life, and literally drowned its potential reproduction. Calculations were not for immediate damages but future damages, demonstrating the MRBI’s inability to realize relations with other-than-human life. For the Oceti Sakowin, the attempt at compensation for taking their future was not a new phenomenon. During the illegal annexation of the Black Hills, a federal official offered Red Cloud and his people $6 million for the Black Hills. When Red Cloud refused, the official asked him the value of the Black Hills. “The Black Hills [are] worth seven generations to me,” Red Cloud responded. In other words, it was not about money but about a viable future, something entirely unquantifiable. It was not merely about surrendering one’s lands, but also surrendering one’s future relations to that land. As Lower Brule Tribal Council member Richard LaRoche Jr. testified before Congress in 1955,

We doubt if any group of strangers to this land, even though they may have some skill as appraisers[,] could come on to it and find all of the real values of it and appraise them accurately. We who have lived with it and owned some of it and worked it all of our lives, we think, are better able to tell you its true value.

The BIA, seeking to account for the loss of “intangible” things like mice beans, wild plums, chokecherries, buffalo berries, wild game, plant medicines, and a bountiful timber supply, was estimating the “value of wild products” to be equivalent to “the grocery of food to replace the loss of wild products.” But many of the “wild products” lost also played central roles in seasonal ceremonial practices. One such practice involving women’s coming of age required the use of buffalo berries, which would never again grow on Lower Brule land after inundation, thus ending the ceremonial practice. LaRoche was outraged at having to explain this and place a monetary value on the loss of ceremonial rites: “Well, the white man, he never cared about these things; he didn’t even know what it was.”

In a 1958 congressional hearing on the Oahe relocation and rehabilitation program for Standing Rock, Josephine Kelly, no longer the chairwoman, expressed disgust at the way the United States government and the Army Corps ran roughshod over treaties. Frustrated congressmen told her in patronizing tones that the settlement would provide agricultural and community development loans. “We don’t want loans,” Kelly shot back. The congressman compared the loan to a gift from Santa Claus, as if Kelly was an entitled child. “We have been Santa Clauses, too, the Sioux Indians. We gave up our Black Hills and gave up our land,” she replied, “and now we are down to bedrock, just like a bunch of beggars, and that is really sad.”

No matter. Human and animal life, BIA officials harshly explained, would “have to reestablish on the open upland plains where a less hospitable and more rigorous climate prevails.” And compensating land loss at “fair market value” was next to impossible because this sudden rise in demand for hospitable lands drove up real estate prices and market competition for prime ranchland. As a result, many families had to subsist on a monetary compensation that arrived only after their homes had been flooded, “with the result that they run the real risk of ending up penniless and homeless.” And many did. Michael Lawson describes an all-too-familiar scene that unfolded at Standing Rock, which was also experienced by the Lower Brule and Crow Creek Reservations:

In January 1960, when the Corps of Engineers finally delivered the settlement funds to Standing Rock, it also served the tribe with an immediate eviction order. In the midst of a fierce Dakota winter, with temperatures falling as low as thirty degrees below zero, tribal families who lived within the Oahe reservoir taking area were forced to gather all their possessions and to leave their land. Because the federal government had not yet made funds available for either the construction of new homes or the relocation of old dwellings, these people were crowded into cold and cheerless trailer houses, which they had to maintain at their own expense until permanent housing could be prepared.

Although the dams promised to hasten the death of Indigenous nations by destroying the land, they failed to accomplish this task, thanks to the Oceti Sakowin’s ability to mobilize, unite, and defeat termination legislation—not once, but twice. However, it was an enormous task. During early Pick-Sloan negotiations, most of the politicians “advocating” for the Oceti Sakowin were also ardent terminationists and Pick-Sloan supporters, like South Dakota congressmen Karl Mundt, E. Y. Berry, and Francis Case; the Lower Brule and Crow Creek legal counsel M. Q. Sharpe; and the commissioner of Indian Affairs, Dillon Myer. From the time Myer took over as commissioner of Indian affairs, he was intent on overturning the progressive legacy of his predecessor, John Collier, who introduced the IRA. Myer was also the perfect man for overseeing the overthrow of Indigenous nations. Appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt as director of the War Relocation Authority, Myer earned his credentials, imprisoning more than 100,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II.

If facing imminent flooding were not a bleak enough situation for the Lower Brule and Crow Creek, they also had an enthusiastic Pick-Sloan advocate and terminationist representing them in the negotiations process. In June 1951, the consolidated agencies of Lower Brule and Crow Creek appointed M. Q. Sharpe as their legal counsel because his law practice was located near the reservations and he had political connections in Congress and within federal agencies—and, above all, because he was the most affordable lawyer. Indian Commissioner Dillon Myer had also refused to allow Crow Creek to hire separate legal counsel after they selected Lakota attorney Ramon Roubideaux. When the failure to select a legal counsel for both reservations delayed negotiations, Myer intervened and made the decision for them. In the course of the negotiations, Myer, as well as the South Dakota politicians, consistently tried to steer the conversation toward termination.

The issue arose of relocating the agency headquarters—the seat of the tribes’ IRA government—off the reservation to nearby white-dominated towns, a move which would fulfill the dual purpose of providing a model for termination while also beginning the process of Indigenous relocation into surrounding white communities. Berry and Myer claimed that the leaders of the white-dominated border town Chamberlain offered up their town as a potential site for Lower Brule. This move, wrote Myer to Berry on August 31, might “result in some inconvenience to individual Indians,” but in the longer-term, “many of the Indians who now take all their problems, great and small, to the agency superintendent might through necessity have to start taking care of some of them for themselves.” The completion of Fort Randall Dam, Myer continued, might “become the starting point” for pushing them toward “more assimilation and integration”—and away from the “narrow and inbred way of life” that was “customary of reservation living.”

Local white leadership reacted virulently. Because Chamberlain was the seat of Brule County, the county commissioners adopted a resolution to thwart an effort by the BIA and Congress to force the members of Lower Brule and Crow Creek into integration at the public schools and into the community at large, claiming it “would place an intolerable financial burden on Brule County, South Dakota.” Chamberlain Mayor Herschel V. Melcher took an even more threatening tone, in a March 30, 1954, letter to Case and Berry, reminding them that carrying the “relief load for Indians” was the job of the federal government. “We do not intend to let an Indian light around here at all. We do not want to live with them, we don’t want them in our schools,” he wrote. Impatient, he sent another letter just two weeks later, threatening racial violence. “Anybody who rents them any property will have to change his address and I would not want the insurance on his building. We do not feel that this town should be ruined by a mess like this and we do not intend to take this lying down.”

Crow Creek and Lower Brule also opposed the proposed relocation, adopting a resolution that barred Commissioner Myer from further obstructing the tribe’s requests for legal counsel and to open negotiations with Congress and the Corps of Engineers. But Myer refused to halt the proposed relocation, to allow the tribe to select its own legal counsel, or to open immediate negotiations for Fort Randall claims. This rebuff highlighted a larger failure of termination, and a persistent feature of settler colonialism’s “Indian problem”: white settlers want Indigenous lands, but they don’t want Indigenous peoples. Federal agencies adopted a hands-off approach when dealing with tribes once their land bases were destroyed, with the BIA and Congress recommending a course of action, then standing back, leaving already hard-pressed Indigenous communities to fight for themselves against powerful federal bureaucracies and violently hostile white settlers. It was a tactic of neglect. The Pick-Sloan Plan created an opportunity to experiment with forced Native relocation and assimilation as a way of relinquishing federal wardship responsibilities. Ultimately, the experiment failed, but termination remained on the table.

In 1957 the South Dakota legislature introduced a bill to assume criminal jurisdiction over Dakota and Lakota lands, but the Oceti Sakowin fought back. The majority of the Lakotas and Dakotas whose lands were circumscribed by the state resoundingly rejected state jurisdiction in a 1958 reservation-wide referendum. But the victory was short-lived. In 1963 South Dakota again introduced legislation to attempt to overthrow tribal governments under the auspices of Public Law 280, which did not immediately require Indigenous consent but mandated states to assume all the financial burdens of taking over Indigenous authority. Within weeks the Oceti Sakowin formed United Sioux Tribes (UST) and collected more than 20,000 signatures to put the legislation up for a statewide referendum. In 1964 UST mobilized both Native and non-Native communities with a savvy media and publicity campaign appealing to the “fairness” of state jurisdiction, which had been imposed without consent. Although they had never participated in large numbers in state politics, because of South Dakota’s history of anti-Indian hostilities, nearly 90 percent of Natives in South Dakota turned out to vote. The referendum won in a landslide victory, with nearly 80 percent in favor (and therefore against termination) statewide. South Dakota, which was deeply anti-Indian, wanted to take reservation land but could not fathom taking care of Indigenous peoples once they were “liberated” from federal rule, as the financial “burden” of termination and state jurisdiction was too much to bear. Nevertheless, the victory of the plebiscite killed the state’s terminationist agenda, demonstrating the resiliency of the Oceti Sakowin.

Yet the Pick-Sloan dams endure, remaining disruptive structures on the riverscape whose longer-term impacts are hard to ascertain. Rob Nixon argues that environmental devastation, much like climate change, is difficult to understand because it unfolds over such a long duration. Violence is often viewed as immediate, explosive, and spectacular, like the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century. But Nixon sees environmental degradation as a kind of “slow violence”: a violence that is neither “spectacular [n]or instantaneous.” Pick-Sloan might not have been an explicit attempt to overthrow tribal governments, but it nevertheless perpetuated “slow violence” on Indigenous people as sovereign nations—not simply as cultures. These are nations of people who need food, shelter, warmth, safety, and care, without which the nations cannot reproduce themselves or live as they choose. And this is far more than a question of cultural survival; cultural revitalization, while important, cannot bring back the stolen lands that once offered up food, clothes, materials for shelter, and medicines. Any cultural and spiritual connection to Mni Sose was also accompanied by a material connection: the river kept people from starving or freezing to death.

Indigenous peoples are more than cultures, they are sovereign nations. Thinking purely in terms of culture as a form of historical agency tends to neglect the concrete reality of Indigenous life. While Nixon’s framework of “slow violence” as a steady accumulation—a gradual buildup—of violences through environmental contamination is useful for understanding the lasting impact of the Pick-Sloan Plan, there is also another kind of accumulation, one that is not always spectacular, nor instantaneous, but that nevertheless makes the endgame of elimination an impossibility: the tradition of Indigenous resistance. This accumulation is a radical consciousness and political practice, deeply embedded in history and place, and cannot be simply overturned by colonial fiat or by inundation with water. It cannot be killed. It endures the long game of colonial occupation. With the Pick-Sloan dams and the failed project of termination, a new generation of young people, thrown from their reservation homelands and shipped off to the city, took up the mantle of Red Power in the spirit of their ancestors and demanded freedom and justice in the face of this history of dispossession.