Lakota Sioux Nation

A plains nation that reinvented itself twice and defeated the United States in a war before losing everything. The Lakota were woodland people from around the Great Lakes who moved west in the eighteenth century, acquired horses, and became the dominant power of the northern plains - a transformation from farming and gathering to mounted bison hunting that took roughly two generations. By the 1850s they controlled a territory larger than several European countries. The Fort Laramie treaty of 1868 guaranteed them the Black Hills, sacred ground, in perpetuity. Gold was found there in 1874 by an expedition Custer led, and the government's attempt to buy or seize the hills produced the war in which Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull destroyed Custer's command at the Little Bighorn in June 1876 - the most complete indigenous victory in the plains wars, and the reason the campaign that followed was pursued to the end. The bison were deliberately exterminated, the nation confined to reservations, and Sitting Bull killed by police in 1890. Wounded Knee followed two weeks later, where soldiers killed around three hundred people, mostly unarmed. The Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that the Black Hills had been taken unlawfully and awarded compensation. The Lakota have refused the money, which sits accruing interest, because accepting it would confirm the sale. The Black Hills are in present-day South Dakota. Lakota is one of three closely related Sioux dialects. The Sun Dance was banned by the government for over fifty years and is practised again. Pine Ridge remains among the poorest counties in the United States. The compensation fund has grown past two billion dollars unclaimed.

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