Their alliances grew as their territory did. By the 1820s they had secured a partnership with the Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho, and together they fought the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara for control of the Missouri River in what is now North Dakota. European diseases had already devastated those river tribes: smallpox killed most of the Mandan and Hidatsa, and nearly half the Crow died of smallpox and cholera. The Lakota's military victories were real, but they were won in part against peoples already broken by epidemic. By the 1850s, the Lakota were acknowledged as the most powerful nation on the Northern Plains.

The United States began formalising its relationship with the Sioux through treaties as early as 1805, when the explorer Zebulon Pike negotiated with the Dakota for land at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, where Fort Snelling would be built fourteen years later. The Americans wanted military outposts; the Dakota wanted a reliable trading partner. The exchange seemed manageable at the time. It would not remain so.

The 1851 treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota were a different order of magnitude. The Eastern Dakota bands ceded roughly twenty-one million acres in exchange for money and a narrow reservation strip along the Minnesota River. The payment terms were disastrous: the United States kept more than eighty per cent of the funds, releasing only the interest over fifty years. The Dakota were left with a strip of land about thirty kilometres wide, no access to their traditional hunting grounds, and an annual payment they could not count on. When that payment was late, they had nothing.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, signed in September of that year, was meant to bring order to the Plains. It gathered representatives of the Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Crow, and several other nations, acknowledged that all the covered land was Indian territory, guaranteed safe passage on the Oregon Trail, and promised an annuity of fifty thousand dollars a year for fifty years. The treaty broke almost immediately. The Lakota and Cheyenne resumed fighting the Crow within two years. Then the Pike's Peak Gold Rush of 1858 brought a flood of miners into Colorado, onto treaty-protected land, and the government did nothing to stop them.

The situation grew uglier still in 1854 when a detachment of United States soldiers illegally entered a Sioux camp to arrest men accused of stealing a cow. A battle broke out, and a Sioux chief was killed. Meanwhile, government-sanctioned hunters were slaughtering bison at a rate of around a hundred thousand animals a year, with the army providing protection and sometimes ammunition. The tribes were being starved off their own land by design. By the early 1860s, the Eastern Dakota in Minnesota were in crisis.

By the summer of 1862, the Eastern Dakota were desperate. The crop had failed the previous year. The winter had been brutal. The treaty annuity payment had not arrived. The local traders at the agency refused to extend any credit. One trader named Andrew Myrick put it plainly: 'If they're hungry, let them eat grass.'

The payment finally arrived in Saint Paul on the sixteenth of August 1862, and was being transported to Fort Ridgely. It was too late. The day before, a small group of Santee men had killed a white farmer and most of his family. The incident cascaded. On the eighteenth of August, Little Crow, a leader of the Mdewakanton band, led an attack on the Lower Sioux Agency. The war had begun. When settlers found Myrick among the dead, his mouth was stuffed with grass.

It is worth being clear about what the war was and was not. The historian Mary Wingerd has called it 'a complete myth that all the Dakota people went to war against the United States'. Most of the four thousand Sisseton and Wahpeton band members opposed the fighting. It was a faction, driven to the edge by starvation and broken promises, that went on the offensive. The broader Dakota nation was not at war. But the United States government would not make that distinction.

Most of Little Crow's men surrendered after the Battle of Wood Lake in late September 1862. Little Crow himself retreated, briefly crossed into Canada, then returned to western Minnesota. He was shot on the third of July 1863, near Hutchinson, while picking raspberries with his teenage son. A settler fired on them to collect the bounty the state had placed on Dakota scalps. When Little Crow's identity was confirmed, his skull and scalp were put on display by the Minnesota Historical Society in Saint Paul. The state held them until 1971, when they were returned to his grandson. The state then increased the bounty paid to the man who had shot him to five hundred dollars.

A military tribunal convicted three hundred and three Dakota men of rape, murder, and atrocities against Minnesota settlers. Many were tried in under five minutes, with no attorneys and no defence witnesses. All were sentenced to death. President Abraham Lincoln reviewed the cases and commuted two hundred and eighty-four sentences. On the twenty-sixth of December 1862, thirty-eight Santee Dakota men were hanged simultaneously in Mankato, Minnesota. It remains the largest mass execution in United States history on American soil.

The men whose sentences Lincoln had commuted were sent to a prison in Iowa, where more than half died. Then the United States Congress annulled every treaty with the Eastern Dakota. By the Forfeiture Act of February 1863, all Dakota lands and all annuities were seized. The Eastern Dakota were expelled from Minnesota entirely. Some fled to Canada. Others were forced to Crow Creek Reservation on the Missouri River, in conditions so poor that the population collapsed. By 1867, fewer than fifty Eastern Dakota remained in Minnesota. The diaspora scattered people to Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and across the Canadian border, where their descendants now live on nine small Dakota reserves in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

The Western Dakota, the Yankton and Yanktonai, had tried to avoid this fate by accommodating American demands earlier. In 1858, Yankton chief Struck by the Ree had told his people: 'The white men are coming in like maggots. It is useless to resist them.' His band ceded their Minnesota lands and moved to a reservation in south-eastern South Dakota. Their treaty preserved one significant right: the Yankton were allowed to remain the caretakers of the Pipestone Quarry, the sacred site where the stone for ceremonial pipes had been quarried for generations. It was a small concession, but they held it.

The Lakota watched the fate of the Eastern Dakota and drew conclusions. They fought back. From 1866 to 1868, a prominent Lakota chief named Red Cloud led the Sioux in a war against United States encroachment into the Powder River country of Wyoming and Montana, a conflict known as Red Cloud's War. The Lakota and their allies closed the Bozeman Trail, the route settlers used to reach Montana, by attacking forts and supply lines with such effectiveness that the army could not keep the road open. It was a rare thing: the United States sued for peace.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 that ended the war was, on paper, a significant Lakota victory. It established the Great Sioux Reservation, which included the Black Hills. It designated additional unceded Indian territory in parts of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Nebraska. It required the army to abandon its forts along the Bozeman Trail. Red Cloud had won. The treaty lasted six years.

In 1874, a United States Army officer named George Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills and confirmed the presence of gold. Settlers poured in. The government failed to stop them, or chose not to try. When the Lakota refused to sell the Black Hills, the United States declared that Lakota bands not living on the reservation by January 1876 would be considered hostile and subject to military force. The Great Sioux War had begun.

The most famous battle of that war took place on the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth of June 1876, along the Little Bighorn River in what is now south-eastern Montana. A Lakota force, inspired by the visions of Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa spiritual and political leader, and led in the fighting by war leaders including Crazy Horse of the Oglala and Gall of the Hunkpapa, faced a regiment of the United States Army under Custer. The regiment numbered around seven hundred men. Five of its twelve companies were sent in a direct assault on the main Lakota encampment.

Those five companies were annihilated. Custer was killed. The total United States dead numbered two hundred and sixty-eight, with fifty-five more severely wounded. The Lakota called it the Battle of the Greasy Grass. The Americans called it Custer's Last Stand. It was the most overwhelming Native American military victory over the United States Army in the history of the Plains Wars. But it did not end the war; it intensified it. The United States mobilised national resources, attacked and destroyed Lakota encampments through the winter, and forced the bands to surrender one by one. The Agreement of 1877 officially annexed the Black Hills. The Lakota had won the battle and lost the territory.

The last act of the Sioux Wars came in the winter of 1890. A spiritual movement called the Ghost Dance had spread across the Plains reservations, promising that the ancestors would return and the old world would be restored. The United States government treated it as a military threat. Sitting Bull, by then living on Standing Rock Reservation, was arrested on the fourteenth of December 1890 by tribal police acting on government orders. He was shot and killed in the struggle that followed.

Two weeks later, on the twenty-ninth of December 1890, five hundred United States Army troops, supported by four rapid-fire artillery pieces called Hotchkiss guns, surrounded an encampment of Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. The soldiers had orders to escort the Lakota to the railroad for transport to Omaha. In the chaos that followed, shooting broke out. It remains unclear who fired first. The Hotchkiss guns opened up on the encampment.

When it was over, more than a hundred and fifty Lakota lay dead, including women and children. Twenty-five soldiers also died, some believed killed by their own side in the confusion of point-blank fire. Around a hundred and fifty more Lakota fled into the blizzard; many are believed to have died of cold. Three days later, after another blizzard passed, civilians were hired to bury the frozen dead in a mass grave on a hill above the camp. Four infants were found alive, wrapped in their dead mothers' shawls. The United States Army awarded twenty Medals of Honor for the action at Wounded Knee. Native American activists have called them medals of dishonor, and have pushed for over a century to have them rescinded.

The decades after Wounded Knee were a systematic attempt to dismantle what remained of Sioux life. The General Allotment Act of 1887, known as the Dawes Act, broke up the communal land tenure of the reservations and forced individual ownership on people whose societies had never organised themselves around private property. In 1889, just before North Dakota and South Dakota were admitted to the Union, Congress partitioned the Great Sioux Reservation into five smaller reservations: Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Lower Brule, Rosebud, and Pine Ridge. About nine million acres, half the former reservation, were opened for public purchase.

The assault on land was paired with an assault on culture. Boarding schools were built with the explicit goal, in the words used at the time, to 'kill the Indian to save the man'. Children were taken from their families, given English names, dressed in European clothing, had their hair cut, and were forbidden to speak their languages. Their ceremonies were outlawed. The schools were overcrowded and disease-ridden; many children ran away or died. Some graduates, including the physician and author Charles Eastman and the writer and activist Zitkala-Sa, managed to turn their education into tools for their people. Most did not have that option.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 reversed some of these policies. It ended land allotment, recognised tribal governments, encouraged tribal constitutions, and allowed Native peoples to manage their own resources. In Minnesota, it allowed the Dakota to reestablish their reservations and begin buying back lost land. But the federal government continued to take with one hand while offering with the other. The Flood Control Act of 1944 authorised the Oahe Dam on the Missouri River, which flooded the Cheyenne River reservation's best agricultural land and took tens of thousands of acres from Standing Rock as well. One visitor to the reservations later asked why there were so few older people, and was told that the old people had died of heartbreak after the flooding.

The tensions that had been building on the reservations since the allotment era came to a head in February 1973. On the twenty-seventh of that month, members of the American Indian Movement, a civil rights and activist organisation founded in 1968, seized the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The choice of location was not accidental. They were protesting the corruption of the local tribal government, the failure of federal authorities to address violence against Native Americans in border counties, and the broader injustice of reservation life. Thousands of Native Americans from across the country mobilised to join the occupation.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Marshals cordoned off the site. The standoff lasted seventy-one days. Twelve people were wounded during the siege, including an FBI agent left paralysed. In April, at least two people died of gunfire. Two others went missing and are believed to have been killed, though their bodies were never found. When the occupation ended, twelve hundred Native Americans were arrested. AIM leaders were tried in a Minnesota federal court; the case was dismissed on grounds of government prosecutorial misconduct. The event drew international attention to conditions on American Indian reservations in a way that nothing had since Wounded Knee eighty years before.

The legal battles ran in parallel with the political ones. After sixty years of litigation, the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that the federal government had illegally seized the Black Hills in violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. The court awarded more than a hundred million dollars in compensation plus interest to the Sioux tribes. The Sioux refused the money. They have continued to refuse it as it has grown, by 2018, to more than a billion dollars. The Black Hills, they have said consistently, are not for sale.

The twenty-first century brought new forms of the same old conflict. In the summer of 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and thousands of supporters, Native and non-Native, gathered to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, a project designed to carry crude oil from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota to storage facilities in Illinois. The pipeline's route passed just north of the Standing Rock reservation and was planned to run underneath the Missouri River, upstream of the reservation's water intake. The tribe argued it threatened their drinking water and desecrated sacred sites.

The protest camp grew into one of the largest gatherings of Native American peoples in modern history. Tribal governments from across the continent sent declarations of support. Environmental groups, civil rights organisations, and tens of thousands of individuals joined the encampment. The Washington Post called it a national movement for Native Americans. The protest was eventually cleared by authorities, and the pipeline was completed. But the mobilisation it represented signalled something: the Seven Council Fires had not gone quiet.

The struggle over children continued as well. In 2011, a National Public Radio investigation exposed South Dakota's practice of removing Lakota children from their families and placing them in non-Native foster care at rates far exceeding those for white children. Native children made up less than fifteen per cent of the child population in South Dakota but more than half of those in foster care. Activists including Madonna Thunder Hawk and Chase Iron Eyes worked through the Lakota People's Law Project to challenge these removals. In 2015, the Bureau of Indian Affairs updated its guidelines under the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 to give tribes stronger authority to intervene on behalf of their children, explicitly prohibiting courts from using poverty alone as grounds for removal.

In November 2022, a hundred and fifty sacred artefacts were repatriated to the Lakota Sioux from a museum in Massachusetts, where they had been stored for more than a century. It was a gesture of acknowledgement. But the source article notes that those hundred and fifty objects are a small fraction of around eight hundred and seventy thousand Native American artefacts, including nearly a hundred and ten thousand sets of human remains, still held by universities, museums, and the federal government. The accounting is not finished.

The Sioux today maintain separate tribal governments across reservations and communities in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Montana, and on reserves in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. More than two hundred thousand people reported Sioux ancestry in the 2018 American Community Survey. The population that had fallen to perhaps twenty-five thousand by 1890 has recovered, generation by generation, through everything the nineteenth and twentieth centuries threw at it. That recovery is itself the through-line of this story: not a single battle won or lost, but a refusal, repeated across two centuries, to disappear.

The name Sioux still carries the weight of an enemy's insult, borrowed from the Ojibwe and passed through French and English until it stuck. The people themselves prefer Dakota, Lakota, the Seven Council Fires, or the names of their own bands. Some tribal governments have formally reclaimed traditional names: the Rosebud Sioux Tribe also goes by the Sičháŋǧu Oyáte; the Oglala often use Oglála Lakȟóta Oyáte. In 2007, a group of activists declared the founding of the Republic of Lakotah and formally withdrew from all treaties with the United States, citing natural, international, and United States law. Most Lakota tribal governments did not endorse the declaration. But the impulse it expressed, the claim that sovereignty was never surrendered, only suppressed, runs through every chapter of this history.

The billion dollars sits uncollected in a federal account. The Black Hills stand in South Dakota, their granite faces carved with the likenesses of four American presidents. The Sioux have looked at those faces and at that account and made the same calculation every generation since 1877: the land is not replaceable. The money is not the point. What was taken was a world, and what remains is the demand, still standing, that the world be acknowledged for what it was, and that some portion of it be returned.

What the Seven Council Fires have carried through all of this is the concept they began with: thiyóšpaye, the communal bond that holds a people together across time and pressure and loss. The Eastern Dakota were expelled from Minnesota, scattered across five states and two countries, and came back. The Lakota were broken onto five separate reservations, had their children taken, their ceremonies banned, their land flooded, and they are still here, still refusing, still gathering. The fire was never put out.