The 1868 Treaty: What In Perpetuity Was Worth

The Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight was a federal contract. The United States Senate ratified it. It established the Great Sioux Reservation at approximately twenty-two million acres, including the Black Hills, and it guaranteed that territory to the Lakota people in perpetuity. Perpetuity means forever.

Six years later, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills, confirmed the presence of gold, and reported it to the Army. The gold discovery was public within months. The rush of prospectors that followed could not be legally stopped under the treaty terms.

The government's response was to demand that the Lakota sell the Black Hills. The Lakota refused. In the summer of eighteen seventy-six, after the Battle of Little Bighorn and the broader Sioux War, the Army tightened military control of the reservations and presented an agreement for Lakota leaders to sign. The agreement ceded the Black Hills. The legal process was not a treaty: it required the signatures of three-fourths of adult Lakota men under the terms of the eighteen sixty-eight treaty, and that threshold was not met. Congress ratified the agreement anyway. In eighteen seventy-seven, the Black Hills were effectively seized.

In nineteen eighty, the Supreme Court confirmed what the record showed. The taking had been unconstitutional. The court said: a more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history.

The eight nations of the Great Sioux Nation have been living with the consequence of that dishonorable dealing ever since.