The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground (review)

In 1980, more than a hundred years after the Native American tribe called the Lakotas were removed from the Black Hills, the US Supreme Court found that this land had been taken without just compensation. The case had been making its way through the courts for fifty-seven years, but rather than celebrate this victory and accept the offered compensation, the Lakotas rejected the payment. They want their land back. Jeffrey Ostler, professor of history at the University of Oregon, documents the intimate relationship between the Lakotas and the Black Hills with 320 endnotes and great attention to detail. Ostler avoids explicitly advocating for the return of the Black Hills to the Lakotas, but the attentive reader may find a tinge of this throughout the text. The first hint may be in the dedication, "For the next generation."

After a brief introduction highlighting the white man's stamp of ownership on the Black Hills—the faces carved into Mount Rushmore—Ostler begins by sketching the archaeological findings of human inhabitants of the Black Hills and relating the scant written evidence. The Lakotas were the westernmost Sioux tribe encountered by French explorers in the mid to late 1600s. The Seven Council Fires that comprised the Lakotas (Oglalas, Brulés, Minneconjous, Hunkpapas, Two Kettles, Shiasapas, and Sans Arcs) migrated westward to avoid conflict with other tribes or to tap richer hunting grounds. By the 1750s there is evidence that the Lakotas were established in villages along the Missouri River and hunted on the plains east of the Black Hills. By 1804 Lewis and Clark encountered Lakotas on their ascent of the Missouri and noted the conflict between the Lakotas and other Native American tribes occupying the southern Black Hills. By the 1820s and early 1830s the Lakotas dominated the Black Hills, abandoned their presence on the Missouri River, and were contending with other tribes for hunting grounds west of the Black Hills.

When did the Lakotas "discover" Paha Sapa, their name for the Black Hills? Perhaps more importantly, at what point in their history did the Paha Sapa become sacred to them? Ostler does not reach a definitive conclusion but does suggest that the link between the people and the land may be deeply anchored in history. The voices of those who contend that the sacredness of the Black Hills was a late invention of the Lakotas in the 1970s designed to strengthen their land claim are presented along with a rich discussion of detailed evidence suggestive of a more ancient tribal connection to the Black Hills. Ostler gathered evidence from conflicting interpretations of the rawhide pictographs called "winter counts," brief retellings of the Lakota legends that are intricately linked to sites in the Black Hills, evidence from Lakota cosmology, summer Sundance sites, first-person accounts from the few white men to spend time with the Lakotas in the nineteenth century, and even twentieth-century accounts of Lakota visions.

In the second chapter, Ostler's historical account is less speculative. Beginning with the first white American "overlanders" crossing Lakota territory on their way to Oregon in 1841, the southern Platte River trails to the Denver and Pikes Peak gold mines, and the northwestern Bozeman Trail to Montana's gold, Ostler describes the period from 1941 to 1865 as a time of increasing encroachments on Lakota land. The Fort Laramie Treaty (1851) had recognized approximately 70 million acres that included the Black Hills as Lakotan, but the ecological decimation of the summer grasses necessary to sustain the buffalo herds jeopardized the tribe's way of life. The Fetterman Massacre (1865) stands as a pointed example of their increasing desperation.

In the third chapter Ostler turns his attention to the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Though rather quickly violated by the US seizure of the Black Hills in 1876-77, this treaty has strong warrant among the Lakotas even today and was the primary legal foundation for the successful legal efforts of the twentieth...