Great Sioux Reservation

A large territory in present-day South Dakota and neighboring states reserved for the Sioux Nation by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Its boundaries and legal status were later altered through U.S. agreements and coercive policies.

Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868): An agreement between the United States and Sioux representatives that established the Great Sioux Reservation and recognized Sioux rights to surrounding territory. Its terms established the reservation and promised Sioux use of the unceded territory.
Black Hills: A mountain region sacred to the Lakota, located in western South Dakota and northeastern Wyoming. The treaty placed the Black Hills within Sioux territory, but U.S. seizure followed the discovery of gold.
Unceded Indian territory: Land Indigenous nations had not ceded to the United States, though federal officials often asserted authority over it. The 1868 treaty distinguished the reservation from surrounding Sioux hunting territory that remained unceded.
Lakota people: An Indigenous people of the Northern Great Plains whose communities include the Oglala, Sicangu, and Hunkpapa. Lakota communities were among the principal peoples whose lands the treaty recognized.
Red Cloud: An Oglala Lakota leader who resisted U.S. expansion along the Bozeman Trail and negotiated the 1868 treaty. His campaign helped force the United States to negotiate the treaty that created the reservation.
Black Hills Gold Rush: A late-nineteenth-century influx of miners into the Black Hills after gold discoveries in the region. The rush intensified pressure to take treaty-protected land from the Sioux.
Standing Rock Indian Reservation: A reservation in North Dakota and South Dakota inhabited chiefly by Hunkpapa and Sihasapa Lakota and Yanktonai Dakota communities. It became one of the successor reservations after the Great Sioux Reservation was divided.
Treaty rights: Legal rights retained by Indigenous nations under agreements with governments, including rights to land and resources. The reservation’s boundaries and surrounding hunting rights derive from treaty commitments.
Bozeman Trail: A route through Lakota hunting grounds that connected the Oregon Trail to Montana goldfields. U.S. forts along this route prompted the conflict preceding the treaty.
United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians: A 1980 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld compensation for the federal taking of the Black Hills. The ruling recognized an unlawful taking without restoring the land.

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