Fort Laramie Treaty: The Paper the United States Ignored

In the spring of eighteen sixty-eight, United States military commissioners and representatives of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho nations gathered at Fort Laramie, in what is now southeastern Wyoming. The treaty they signed on April twenty-ninth was specific. The United States granted the Great Sioux Nation, in the treaty's own language, the permanent and undisturbed use and occupation of a defined territory, including the Black Hills to the east. The document bore the signatures of United States generals. No citizen or settler was to enter the territory without Lakota consent.

Six years later, the United States violated every material provision of that treaty.

In the summer of eighteen seventy-four, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer led a military expedition into the Black Hills. The expedition was not authorized under the treaty. Two miners accompanied the column. The discovery of gold was announced in August. By the following spring, thousands of prospectors had entered treaty land, and the federal government's attempts to stop them were, by its own admission, ineffective. Pressure mounted on the Lakota to sell the Black Hills at prices determined by the government, not the Lakota. When the negotiations failed, the Army declared that any Lakota not on reservations by January thirty-first, eighteen seventy-six, would be treated as hostile. The Great Sioux War of eighteen seventy-six followed.

In nineteen eighty, the United States Supreme Court ruled in United States versus Sioux Nation of Indians that the taking of the Black Hills had been illegal: a direct violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty. The Court awarded compensation that has grown, through accrued interest, to over one billion dollars.

The Lakota nations have refused to accept the money.

Their position has been consistent: the Black Hills are not for sale. The Oglala Sioux Tribe, the Rosebud Sioux, the Cheyenne River Sioux, and other Lakota bands have maintained that position across decades. They want the land returned, not compensated. The money sits in a federal account, unclaimed.

The treaty room at Fort Laramie is open to visitors. The document it produced is still in force, under American law, and still unmet.