You’re Being Lied to About the Little Bighorn | The American Spectator

The leading narrative about the Black Hills, a range stretching across the border of South Dakota and Wyoming, most famous for Mount Rushmore, is as simple as it is compelling.  

As typically told, the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota nations together form the Sioux people. They held the Black Hills from time immemorial as the center of their civilization. The United States guaranteed it to them via treaty, tried to steal the land, and was initially defeated at the heroic 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn until finally overwhelming the Natives. 

The above story is patently false. The Battle of the Little Bighorn wasn’t an American invasion into Native land; it was an American intervention to protect a tribal ally from a power far more expansionist than the United States.

Lakota Sioux activist Jesse Short Bull produced a documentary several years ago titled Lakota Nation v. United States. Co-produced with Mark Ruffalo, it purports to tell the story of a fight to win back their rightful heritage through a case that made it to the Supreme Court in 1980. There, justices ordered a financial settlement. The Sioux refused, as it would legally end their land claims. 

The documentary and its reception were emblematic of the misunderstanding of the situation by mainstream media. CNN glowingly wrote of the director that “the ground [Short Bull] was stepping on was once soaked with the blood of his ancestors.” If the claim is true, that blood is more likely to have been shed in self-defense. 

Oglala Lakota Poet Layli Long-Soldier described the Black Hills as “our cradle of civilization.” This theme has been echoed by countless media outlets, and even the ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s. 

The Sioux were not the original inhabitants of the Black Hills. Their people were originally from the Northern Great Lakes and moved westward. Beginning in the early 18th century, the Sioux engaged in rapid military expansion from Wisconsin and Minnesota to the modern-day Dakotas.

The Black Hills had been the territory of a number of groups prior, including the Arikara, Crow, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne from at least 1500 onwards. Of these, the Cheyenne held the Hills in the highest renown, giving them the same sacred status that the Sioux later did. 

French traders François and Louis de La Vérendrye explored the Black Hills in 1743, forming particular ties to the Arikara people. The Lakota conquest began 30 years later. By 1776, as the United States declared its independence from the British, the Lakota decisively defeated the Cheyenne and began to center their culture around the Black Hills.

This was not the “cradle” of Sioux civilization. In fact, Sioux control of the Black Hills lasted only 101 years. In comparison, it has been American territory for 146 years.

Conflict between the United States and the Sioux began in 1851, but the usual narrative misses that the Sioux were an expansionist force for the entire period of their control of the Black Hills. Before, during, and after the initial 1851–1868 period of American-Sioux conflict, Lakota and Dakota warriors launched raids on neighboring tribes.

Activists are correct when pointing out that the U.S. bequeathed the territory in perpetuity to the Sioux in 1868 with a Sioux victory and the ensuing Treaty of Fort Laramie. They are, however, missing the rest of the story. 

The Sioux victory in 1868 was not an anti-imperialist triumph against an invading United States; it was expansion into the historic lands of the Crow (Apsáalooke) people. In the following 1868 treaty, the United States “in effect betrayed the Crows” and ceded their land to the actual imperialists, the Lakota.

Immediately afterwards, the Sioux began a bloody campaign of expansion westward against the tribes of Wyoming and Montana.  In one notorious 1873 incident, Lakota warriors massacred at least 100 women and children from the Pawnee tribe, with some estimates closer to 200. Victims were mutilated, sexually assaulted, scalped, and burned alive.

The treatment of those captured was so brutal that the Pawnee leader, Sky Chief, went down fighting the invaders. He took his own son’s life rather than let him fall into the torturous hands of the Lakota. This was the most infamous raid among years of attacks by Sioux warriors on Pawnee innocents and local pacifist Quaker communities. 

The greatest force pushing for a United States war against the Sioux was the Crow tribal chief, Blackfoot. He sought an American intervention to guarantee the Crow their own historic land that had been legally guaranteed by treaties with the United States, as the Sioux perpetrated raids and massacres against his people.

The flow of American miners into the Black Hills finally brought federal attention to the issue. Lakota and Dakota leaders refused their attempts to buy the land and proceeded to form an alliance with their old enemies, the Arapaho and Cheyenne, to counter the United States and their Native allies.

Thus began the Great Sioux War of 1876. 

Chief Plenty-Coups led the Crow for a half century, during which he chose to protect their culture through peace with the Americans and eventually even converted to Catholicism. From his perspective, the Sioux-Cheyenne-Arapaho alliance meant “the three worst enemies our people had were combined against us.” From the Crow’s point of view, the Great Sioux War was actually an American fulfillment of their treaty obligations to protect Crow reservations, not an expansionist conquest. 

American involvement lifted the spirits of their besieged nation. Hundreds of Crow scouts joined the U.S. Army, enlisting with a zeal to join their American allies to finally defeat the Sioux after decades of bloodthirsty expansion. For the Arikara and Crow, the Great Sioux War was “a war for survival.”

Most of the battles in the ensuing conflict would actually be fought on lands the Sioux had taken from the Crow within the two preceding decades. This includes the famous Sioux victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, directly located on the Crow reservation, where American soldiers had moved at the behest of Crow leaders to repel the Sioux invasion. 

Two hundred and sixty eight Americans, Crow, and Arikara under the command of General George Armstrong Custer were killed. They were traditionally seen as heroes and have always been one of the most enduring stories of Americana. Every child of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains heard the story growing up.

The cultural revolution of the 1960s brought the false narrative that Americans at the Little Bighorn had arrived as conquerors. This false revision of history was widely popularized as the theme of the 1970 film Little Big Man. 

Take it from Crow Chief Plenty-Coups again. He remembered bitterly the despair felt across the Crow Reservation when they and their American allies met defeat against the Sioux invasion, recounting that “there were none in this horrified nation of forty millions of people to whom the tidings brought more grief than to the Crows.”

Future Crow medicine woman Pretty Shield remembered that when her village learned about the American defeat, it cried for both the dead Crow scouts “and for Son-of-the-morning-star [Custer’s Indian name] and his blue soldiers.”

The Crow would celebrate with other Americans as later engagements routed the Sioux. The Great Sioux War concluded after less than a year with a military victory for the United States and the diplomatic efforts of anti-war Lakota leaders Spotted Tail and Red Cloud. Included in this victory was the seizure of the Black Hills, only 101 years after the Lakota and Dakota themselves seized the Black Hills from the Cheyenne.

The righteous moral order America has fostered and spread leads us to contemplation of our past, particularly in engagements where our opponents did not share this morality. However, a look at the historical record disproves the common simplistic narrative of colonialism and demonstrates clearly that the Sioux, not the Americans of the Little Bighorn, were the invaders of the Black Hills.

Shiv Parihar is an editorial intern at The American Spectator. Follow him on X @ShivomMParihar.

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