by Porter Fox
“We are spiritual beings here to have a human experience,” Jewell said through a scratchy PA system. He was dressed in black and looked like a sixty-year-old Johnny Cash. A line of pavilion tents and blue tarps tied to teepee poles framed the circle. On the left, the kitchen was crammed with folding tables, water dispensers, and aluminum trays. The last meal the cooks had prepared: an entire moose donated by Donald Soctomah and the Passamaquoddy tribe.
Fifty protestors, guests, tourists, facilitators, cooks, security, Lakota in full dress, and others who looked like they had simply stopped by to see what was up listened around the fire. Lakota women sat in camping chairs bundled in wool blankets, most holding children. “This is starting to feel like a real Indian visit,” Jewell said. “Arrive in October and don’t leave until March.”
He spoke about the 1950s, when fellow tribesmen went to prison for singing traditional songs or possessing eagle feathers and peyote—when Indian children were forced to go to boarding schools, dress like white children, and speak English. “Our elders had to practice their rituals in the woods,” he said. “They had to wait until the reservation agent was asleep or gone.” He spoke about broken treaties that took thousands of square miles from his tribe, and thousands more from the Sioux—some of which was now being excavated by ETP pipeline crews.
Jewell and many other tribes learned long ago that the only way to fight the US government is in court. Jewell got his law degree when he was in his early twenties. He is sixty now and has been fighting for tribal rights ever since. He’d walked with US senators and sat with presidents. He’d recently helped a coalition of northwestern tribes defeat the largest coal export facility ever proposed in America. An advantage that tribes had over fossil fuel companies, he said, was a history of treaty law. The US Constitution recognizes treaties as the “supreme law of the land,” and Indian treaties that have not been abrogated by Congress still have significant power. In an ironic twist, the agreements that the US government pushed on tribes in the 1800s, in exchange for their land, were coming back to haunt it.
“Our white brothers and sisters are lost,” Jewell said. “They are starting to remember they have a duty to the Earth. We’re fighting multibillion-dollar corporations with peanuts. We have to turn it around or your children will have nothing. We have always been the Earth’s protectors, and now we must help our brothers and sisters.”
Silhouettes of gulls glided a half mile above the fire circle. It was six in the evening, and the sun fell slowly over a low ridgeline behind the camp. Jewell gave the stage to his brother, “Uncle Doug,” who hunched over the microphone and sang a Lummi song. His voice was high-pitched and oscillated between octaves. Brown blades of prairie grass looked like gold tinsel sprinkled across the field. Eight teenage Lakota boys with long, black hair rode bareback down the road. They wore red and blue bandannas, and their bony frames jostled as the horses trotted. They gazed straight ahead, unaware of or uninterested in the crowd of two hundred watching them. Two raised their fists when they heard Uncle Doug’s song.
There was a feeling in the air that the protest had morphed into something larger. Things were not good on American reservations. Of the 4.5 million people from 565 federally recognized tribes in the US, 30 percent lived in poverty. Alcoholism and mortality rates were 500 percent higher than for the rest of America. (One in ten American Indians dies of an alcohol-related death.) Suicide rates were double the national average, with 40 percent of the victims between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. Only half of Indian youth graduate from high school, and 40 percent of on-reservation housing is considered inadequate. At Standing Rock, per capita income was $13,474 in 2016. Unemployment was over 80 percent.
Youth at Standing Rock were discovering a connection with their tribe and their ancestry. For many, it was the first time they had seen various tribes working together. The Sioux and Crow Nations, enemies for centuries, signed their first peace treaty at the camp. It was also the first time that the seven bands of the Lakota tribe had stood together since the Battle of the Little Bighorn, in 1876. The last Indian protest this large was the armed standoff at Wounded Knee in 1973, when two hundred Sioux protestors took over the South Dakota town—to bring attention to neglected Indian treaties—and fought federal agents for two months.
Doug’s voice reverberated around the field, and a college-aged white kid with a bushy beard threw more logs on the fire. The boys rode away. The wind died, and mosquitoes floated through the air. The temperature dropped from ninety degrees to fifty in an hour. Lights flickered in teepees, campers, and tents. A few elders placed their hands on the totem. There was an eagle with a twelve-foot wingspan on top, a wolf, a bear, and a white buffalo—symbols of leadership, cunning, and courage. The scent of woodsmoke and bug repellent spread through the camp. Doug finished his song and handed the microphone back to his brother. Jewell gave a Lakota representative a check for $10,000 to support the cause and $500 in cash to buy food. “This is the awakening we’ve been waiting for,” he said.
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THE SIOUX TRIBES WERE RELATIVE NEWCOMERS TO THE NORTH-land in the 1500s. Lakota “winter counts”—pictorial histories that the tribe records every winter—set the tribe’s spiritual and ancestral home in South Dakota’s Black Hills. Archaeologists say that their ancestors originally moved from the Southeast, near the Gulf of Mexico. Either way, they passed through northern Minnesota around the time the Ojibwe arrived. The two did not get along. The Ojibwe named their new enemy Nadowessi, or “little snake.” Early French traders who made first contact with the nation added “oux” to make it plural. The names merged into Sioux—a word that has no meaning in any language and, for two hundred years, referred to the most powerful nation in the northern plains.
Borders in the northland were more fluid then. They followed environmental and demographic shifts. Hunters in the northern plains in the 1500s followed herds of bison, while sedentary, agrarian communities, like the Mandan and Hidatsa on the Missouri River, stayed put. When Spanish horses arrived from the south, and French and English guns from the north, Plains tribes and their territory changed drastically. Sioux braves were natural horsemen and marksmen and became an efficient war machine in the 1700s. While epidemics annihilated stationary villages, bands of hunters roaming the plains avoided the worst of them. Many of the Sioux Nation’s enemies were wiped out without the Sioux raising a hand, allowing them to further expand their borders.
By the time the first white settlers arrived in the northern plains, Sioux tribes controlled 740,000 square miles—from Colorado through Nebraska, Minnesota, and Utah to the Canadian border. It was the largest territory ever amassed by a North American tribe. One day it would represent one-fifth of the United States. Traders, explorers, US Army expeditions, and a few frontiersmen who wandered into the northern plains came to respect and fear the Great Sioux Nation. They weren’t like other tribes that white men had met. They didn’t make art or ceramics. They didn’t keep wampum. They made war instead.
Sioux tribes considered battle the best means by which a brave could prove his courage, and courage was the measure of life. Children were given bows and arrows as young as three years old and told to compete in target practice and games like King of the Hill. The games were often violent, and the winner was allowed to keep the other kids’ weapons. Adult warriors rode dare rides, alone and often armed with only a war club, a few hundred feet in front of enemy lines. Crazy Horse, an Oglala Lakota, got his name after charging a band of Arapaho solo. He returned wounded and carrying two scalps. Years later, at Wyoming’s Fort Phil Kearny, he lured US war hero Captain William Fetterman and eighty-one of Fetterman’s cavalry into one of the greatest defeats the US Army sustained in the Indian Wars—by dismounting his horse within rifle range, lifting his breechclout, and mooning the soldiers as shots whizzed by. Red Cloud, a legendary Oglala Lakota chief, also dismounted his horse in front of a US Army skirmish line. He then sat down, lit his pipe, and smoked while lead shot from Sprin
gfield rifles and Colt .45’s hit the dirt around him.
Like the Ojibwe, the Sioux consider the Road of the Spirits—their name for the Path of Souls—a portal to the afterlife. The seven stars of the Big Dipper lift souls onto the road, making 7 a sacred number. The number 4 is also sacred, and the two numbers form the tribes’ numerical systems. Political and cultural divisions are made in sevens. The Sioux nation is divided into seven tribes. Each tribe is divided into seven bands. Bands changed their names so often in the 1700s that explorers ten years apart documented what they thought were completely different groups. The number 4 is associated with nature, people, and place. There are four divisions of time: day, night, moon phase, and year. There are four kinds of animals on land: creatures that crawl, fly, walk on four legs, and walk on two. There are four celestial entities: sun, moon, sky, and stars.
When settlers began showing up in the northland in the 1840s, the tribe looked on with indifference. Prairie schooners had been carrying white settlers south along the Santa Fe Trail for twenty years by then. Subsequent emigrant trails—like the California, Mormon, Oregon, and Bozeman—each angled a bit farther north. The last two, the Oregon and Bozeman, passed directly through Sioux territory for a thousand miles. Fort Laramie, Fort Phil Kearny, and Virginia City—a gold mine boomtown in the 1860s—were all located on the Bozeman Trail and set deep in Sioux country.
The tribe was impressed by the whites’ mystical inventions but thought little of the people themselves. They found whites smelly and were disgusted by their hairy bodies and balding heads. They considered them inferior simpletons. Sioux society is matriarchal, where a man moves into a woman’s home after marriage, and the woman is considered the head of the household. They were shocked at the way white men scolded and hit their women and children. Early explorers often wrote about how undisciplined Sioux children were, how they were allowed to stay up all night and were rarely punished. When a trickle of whites began to show up on Sioux land, tribes figured there were no more than a few thousand of the silly beings in the East—and that they would soon be gone.
THE JUNE 1850 US CENSUS calculated twenty-three million residents in America, a 36 percent increase from ten years before. Ninety percent of the population lived east of the Mississippi. When James Wilson Marshall, a New Jersey carpenter, discovered a flake of gold at John Sutter’s California sawmill in 1848—exactly nine days before Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ceding the entire Southwest and California to the US—a flood of white immigrants spilled over the Appalachians.
Ferries dropped homesteaders on the banks of the Missouri, where they could purchase and outfit a Conestoga wagon for about $400. It took three to six months to make it from the “Big Muddy” across an overland trail. Relocation was the norm among early-American families. Some settlers were escaping religious persecution or poverty, some were looking to get rich. In the late 1700s, four out of ten households moved every ten years. Most settlers had moved across state lines previously, and 30 percent had moved at least twice. Many had adopted a nomadic lifestyle, searching for opportunity on the frontier. In 1850 alone, fifty-five thousand Mormons, forty-niners, and homesteaders took to the trails. Between 1843 and 1869, five hundred thousand emigrants followed the Oregon, Mormon, and California Trails.
The shores of the Missouri, where buffalo had once scratched themselves on thick cottonwood bark, became crowded with stern-wheel steamboats, ports, farms, and small frontier towns. A stream of settlers marched along the Oregon Trail as thousands of Mormon handcart pioneers—hauling their possessions in hickory carts with steel wheels—filed along the Platte River to Salt Lake City. Mass migration along the trails transformed them into apocalyptic highways, littered with dead livestock and human corpses. Whites brought cholera, smallpox, and other European diseases that devastated western tribes. Hunters used .50-caliber Sharps buffalo rifles to fell up to a thousand buffalo a week. In sixty years, the population of buffalo in the West plunged from thirty million to less than a thousand. Statistically, it was the greatest slaughter of warm-blooded animals in human history, including the whaling years.
Settlers crossed Indian land in the northland, most illegally, and Sioux braves made sport of stealing their horses, guns, steel tools, and knives. If they caught a family of whites on their land, they treated them as they would any interlopers. Women were often beaten while braves gang-raped them. After the victim was dead, her private parts were cut off and laid in the grass. Couples were disemboweled, then tied together with their entrails and roasted over a fire.
The violent ways of Sioux warriors were not abnormal on the plains. Many tribes—and US soldiers—did the same. In 1864, volunteers in the Third Colorado Cavalry killed 163 Cheyenne and Arapaho, two-thirds of them women and children, in the Sand Creek massacre. Soldiers raped dead women in relays, used toddlers for target practice, and sliced off breasts, vaginas, and testicles, then displayed the body parts at Denver’s Apollo Theater and saloons in the city.
Starvation, weather, raids, and ignorance killed five thousand settlers on the trail in 1850. In the following years, one in eleven emigrants left this world between Saint Louis and Salt Lake City. The statistic did not go over well in Washington, DC. American politicians had learned from the British that to control the land, you had to occupy it. They also knew that the English were moving west and south quickly in British Canada, and that the first nation to settle the West would likely control it.
The War of 1812 and deteriorating relations with the South left Congress with little money and no confidence that they could defeat western tribes in battle. They had learned from several embarrassing losses that Plains Indians were more formidable warriors than others they had encountered. It would take too much time and money to beat them on the battlefield, so Congress resorted to an approach that had proved fail-safe in the past. They offered them gifts and money and convinced them to sign lengthy treaties that would eventually rob them of their land.
US INDIAN AGENT THOMAS FITZPATRICK was tasked with gathering Plains tribes to sign their first major treaty in 1851—the same that Standing Rock lawyers would reference 165 years later. He rode from the Arkansas River into the northland, asking headmen along the way to parlay at Fort Laramie and find a solution to the white emigrant problem. The invitees—Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone, Crow, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara—had fought one another for centuries. They had never convened as a group and had no intention of calling a truce. But they were intrigued by the trinkets, cash, firearms, alcohol, and gifts that Fitzpatrick promised. The former fur trader had been allocated a budget of $100,000 to give to tribes that attended the rendezvous.
Red Cloud, a thirty-year-old Oglala Lakota and the tribe’s head warrior, led his band in formation to a field outside of Fort Laramie in late summer. Red Cloud was six feet tall and towered over other braves. He had a wide forehead and hooked nose and adorned himself with eagle feathers and ribbons. At important meetings, he slicked his hair back with bear grease and braided in the wing bone of an eagle. Red Cloud was the son of a drunk and a fierce warrior who had fought his way to power. He did not drink and did not accept gifts from whites. Legendary acts of bravery and cunning had made him a supernatural figure to many. He was a shaman who practiced the sun dance—a four-day purification ceremony in which dozens of pieces of flesh are ripped from a warrior’s body. His followers said he could talk to animals, fly, and be in two places at once. They said he was also capable of casting spells and interpreting omens.
Red Cloud rode into the 1851 rendezvous on a paint with a few hundred of his three thousand warriors. Chiefs marching with him wore buffalo split-horned headdresses, feather trailers, painted buckskin capes, leggings, and war paint. Twenty-year-old Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota, marched in the ranks, as did an eleven-year-old boy nicknamed “Curly,” who would one day be called Crazy Horse.
The Sioux contingent camped alongside their Arapaho and Cheyenne allies and sang death songs when the S
hoshone, who had killed many of their kin, marched into camp. Fitzpatrick and US Army officials watched nervously as the gathering swelled to ten thousand. The next day, they moved it to a pasture on Horse Creek, where army engineers had built an amphitheater out of wood and canvas. Cavalry dragoons prepared to intervene when Sioux headmen surprised the Shoshone with a feast of boiled dog, then watched in awe as the two tribes danced and sang until dawn. In the morning, Fitzpatrick, who had lived among the Indians for years and earned their respect, paid homage to the Great Spirit and shared a three-foot peace pipe with the elders.
The rendezvous continued for two weeks, with brief negotiations interrupting celebrations, horse races, feasts, and dances. Government officials selected heads of each tribe to sign the treaty—though most had no authority or any idea what was in it. The headmen did not write, so they tapped the fountain pen the secretary held instead, and he signed for them. Their primary concession was to allow settlers to pass on the overland trails unmolested and for forts to be maintained on their territory. The other terms of the treaty forbade intertribal raids and defined the territory that each tribe controlled. It also recognized that the US did not claim any of that land, and it bound the US government to protect tribes “against the commission of all depredations by the people of the said United States.” Finally, it promised gifts equaling $50,000 a year for fifty years.
