The Indians must conform to the "white man’s ways" peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. They must adjust themselves to their environment, and conform their mode of living substantially to our civilization. This civilization may not be the best possible but it is the best the Indians can get.
—(Bureau of Indian Affairs Report, 1889)
On December 15, 1890, the U.S. Indian agent at Fort Yates of the Standing Rock Agency in North Dakota ordered 40 Native police to go to the Lakota medicine man Sitting Bull’s cabin and arrest him. The fear was that the old leader was going to leave the agency with the Ghost Dancers, whom the government viewed as acting to renew fighting that had mostly ended on the Northern Plains a dozen years before. Together with family members, Sitting Bull—Tathanka Iyotake in the Lakota language—resisted. In the ensuing fight, six Native policemen and seven men of the Hunkpapa Lakota, including Sitting Bull, were killed.
Fearing reprisals, most of the Hunkpapa fled to join Spotted Elk’s Minneconju Lakota. Later known as Big Foot, Spotted Elk decided to move his people to Pine Ridge and live under the protection of Red Cloud. On December 29, hundreds of troops of the 7th Cavalry arrived at Spotted Elk’s camp near Wounded Knee and began disarming the Indians. In the process, a rifle was discharged and a slaughter ensued that took the lives of as many as 300 Lakota, many of them women and children. Days later, their frozen bodies were buried in a mass grave. Except for minor skirmishes as late as 1918, the massacre marked the end of the Indian Wars.
The year that ended so badly for the Lakota, with consequences that still affect them today, hadn’t started off so well either.
On February 11, 1890, half the land on the five reservations making up the remnants of the Great Sioux Reservation was opened up to the public, continuing what was by then a 40-year process that would continue to shrink Lakota tribal lands well into the 1960s. Both the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 and the later Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 reduced the area in which the Lakota (and other tribes) were allowed to live. But everything from the Missouri River west to what is now the boundary between Wyoming and South Dakota, including the sacred Black Hills, was to be theirs forever. And non-Indians were supposed to stay out.
But when a thousand soldiers under George A. Custer confirmed the presence of gold in the Black Hills in 1874, a deluge of miners staked claims on reservation land. This led to repeated conflict. The clashes and the refusal of thousands of Lakota to keep to the reservation ended in the Battle of the Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn River) of Montana on June 25, 1876, a Pyrrhic victory for the Lakota. Just four months after Custer and his men died in Medicine Tail Coulee, Washington imposed the Treaty with the Sioux Nation of 1876. Under the provisions of the 1868 treaty, terms could only be changed with the approval of three-fourths of Lakota adult men. Nowhere near that number signed in 1876. But the treaty was imposed anyway, stripping away a 50-mile-wide swath of land in what is now western South Dakota, including the Black Hills.
A dozen years later, preparing for statehood, Dakotans lobbied Washington for a cutting-up of what was left of the Great Sioux Reservation into smaller reservations, grabbing nine million acres and opening land to homesteaders. In 1888, a federal commission sought to collect signatures from three-fourths of Lakota adult males. They were unsuccessful. The next year, they stepped up the pressure, but still the Lakota refused to assent. Spokesmen John Grass, Gall, and Mad Bear opposed it, and though not chosen by his people to speak, Sitting Bull did speak, and urged everyone not to be intimidated into signing away the land.
But enough signatures were obtained and, in 1889, Congress passed the Sioux Bill, opening the reservation to non-Indians and making acreage allotments to individual Indians with the intent of breaking up tribal land held in common and ending reservations and tribal identity entirely. Non-violent resistance continued after the law took effect in early 1890. After Sitting Bull was killed and the people camped at Wounded Knee slaughtered, all resistance ended. More land was taken in 1910.
Many non-Lakota homesteads were abandoned in the 1930s, but instead of restoring these lands to the tribes, Washington turned them over to the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Even more land was taken for the Badlands Bombing Range during World War II. When the Air Force declared that that land was unneeded, in the 1960s, it too was transferred to the NPS instead of being returned to communal tribal ownership.
Sources:
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown
Powder River: Disastrous Opening of the Great Sioux War, by Paul L. Hedren
The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America, by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground, by Jeffrey Ostler
American Indian Treaties: The HIstory of a Political Anomaly, by Francis Paul Prucha
Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations, by Charles Wilkinson
American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, by David E. Stannard
Voices of Wounded Knee, by William S.E. Coleman