The Last of the Sioux: Lakota Resistance, the Black Hills, and the Wounded Knee Massacre

The phrase ‘the last of the Sioux’ has long framed the closing chapter of Lakota armed resistance — a story that runs from the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and the sacred Black Hills to the killing grounds beside Wounded Knee Creek on December 29, 1890. It is a narrative of remarkable courage and equally remarkable betrayal: a confederation of nations that defeated the United States Army at the Little Bighorn in 1876, only to face starvation, land seizure, and the deliberate destruction of the bison herds that sustained them. The word ‘Sioux’ is itself an exonym — a French rendering of an Ojibwe term meaning ‘little snakes’ — while the people it labels call themselves the Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires of the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota. This is the story of their final decades of resistance, and of a cultural legacy that never ended.

The Oceti Sakowin: Who the ‘Sioux’ Actually Were

Long before contact, the Oceti Sakowin — the Seven Council Fires — comprised three closely related linguistic divisions: the Dakota (Santee) of the eastern woodlands and prairies, the Nakota (Yankton and Yanktonai) of the middle Missouri, and the Lakota (Teton) of the western plains. The Lakota themselves divided into seven bands, among them the Hunkpapa, Oglala, Miniconjou, Sicangu (Brulé), and Sihasapa (Blackfoot Sioux).

By the early nineteenth century the Lakota had become the dominant power of the northern Plains, a horse-and-bison culture whose economy, spirituality, and social order were inseparable from the great herds. Their historical memory was preserved not only orally but visually, through winter counts — pictographic calendars in which each year was recorded by a single defining event, from a great meteor shower to a devastating smallpox epidemic. These chronicles remain among the most important Indigenous historical documents of the Plains.

Treaties, the Black Hills, and a Sacred Landscape

The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 ended Red Cloud’s War and set aside a vast Great Sioux Reservation that explicitly included the Black Hills — He Sapa in Lakota. The treaty stipulated that no further land could be ceded without the consent of three-fourths of adult male signatories, a provision that would later become central to one of the most significant legal cases in American Indian law.

For the Lakota, the Black Hills were never merely real estate. They are the center of origin narratives and the source of sacred materials and ceremonies; the hills were, and remain, a living spiritual landscape. When Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s 1874 expedition confirmed gold in the hills, thousands of miners poured onto treaty land, and the United States demanded the Black Hills be sold. The Lakota refused. In 1876 the government declared the nontreaty bands hostile and launched the Great Sioux War.

Little Bighorn: The Last Great Victory of the Plains

On June 25–26, 1876, along the Little Bighorn River — Greasy Grass to the Lakota — Custer’s Seventh Cavalry attacked an immense encampment of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. Warned by a vision from Sitting Bull’s Sun Dance, the defenders, including Crazy Horse’s Oglala warriors, destroyed Custer’s five companies and killed 268 soldiers. It was the greatest Indigenous military victory of the Plains wars, and it was also the last — the moment remembered today as the most famous battle of the American West.

Retreat, Surrender, and the Reservation System

The victory sealed the Lakota’s fate. The army pursued the nontreaty bands relentlessly through the winter of 1876–77, and the systematic slaughter of the bison removed any possibility of independent life on the Plains. Crazy Horse surrendered at Camp Robinson in May 1877 and was fatally bayoneted by a soldier that September while being taken to the guardhouse. Sitting Bull led his people into Canada, refusing to surrender until starvation forced him to give himself up at Fort Buford in July 1881. His long defiance is the subject of Sitting Bull’s war against the U.S. Army, a struggle conducted as much with diplomacy and patience as with rifles.

On the reservations, the government’s ration system, agent rule, and allotment policy eroded Lakota autonomy. In 1889, the Sioux Act broke the Great Sioux Reservation into six smaller reservations — Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Lower Brule, and Crow Creek — opening millions of acres to non-Native settlement.

From the Proclamation of 1763 to the Reservation Era

The legal machinery of dispossession was not new. Britain’s Proclamation of 1763, issued on October 7, 1763 after Pontiac’s Rebellion, attempted to bar colonial settlement west of the Appalachian crest and to reserve frontier diplomacy for the Crown. Colonists resented the line, and the friction it generated became one of the earliest grievances leading toward the American Revolution. Yet the deeper precedent was set: Indigenous nations were treated as obstacles to be managed by decree, and after 1783 the United States inherited treaty-making with Native nations — a process the Supreme Court would later describe, in the Marshall Trilogy, as dealing with ‘domestic dependent nations.’ The logic of 1763 reappeared in 1889.

The Ghost Dance and the Massacre at Wounded Knee

In 1889–90 a religious movement known as the Ghost Dance spread across the reservations, inspired by the Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka, who taught that by living righteously and dancing, Native peoples might see the world renewed and the dead — and the bison — return. It was a peaceful, hopeful movement, but officials panicked, and agents moved to suppress it.

On December 15, 1890, Indian police attempted to arrest Sitting Bull at Standing Rock. Shots were fired; the Hunkpapa leader was killed along with his son Crow Foot and several others. In the following days, the Miniconjou leader Spotted Elk — known to the army as Big Foot — led some 350 people toward Pine Ridge, seeking shelter with Red Cloud. Intercepted on December 28, the band was camped on Wounded Knee Creek when Colonel James Forsyth’s Seventh Cavalry moved in with four Hotchkiss guns. On the morning of December 29, 1890, during a search for weapons, firing erupted. When it ended, roughly 250 to 300 Lakota lay dead, the great majority of them women and children, along with 25 soldiers — at least twenty of them killed by their own comrades’ fire. Twenty Medals of Honor were awarded for the action. The site is preserved today as the Wounded Knee massacre memorial, and in 1990 Congress issued a formal apology on its centennial.

The Buffalo, the Longhorn, and a Vanished Plains Economy

Nothing shaped Lakota life more profoundly than the American bison. Hides covered tipis; meat and dried pemmican fed families through winter; sinew became thread and bowstring; horns, hooves, and hair were used in tools and ceremony. The Sun Dance itself honored the buffalo nation. Between 1870 and 1884 commercial hide hunting, government encouragement of the trade, and railroad expansion reduced the wild herd from tens of millions to fewer than a thousand animals. Congress named the bison the national mammal in 2016, and Indigenous nations today lead its ecological restoration on tribal lands.

Domesticated cattle arrived on a very different vector. Columbus landed cattle in the Caribbean in 1493, and Spanish ranchers brought them to New Spain by the 1520s; their Iberian criollo descendants became the Texas Longhorn. By the 1860s and 1870s, millions of longhorn cattle roamed the Texas grasslands, and the open-range cattle boom — and later barbed wire — transformed the same Plains that the bison had ruled. It is worth being precise here: North America was never empty of cattle-like animals, for the bison is a native bovid. What the Spanish introduced was domesticated livestock, and with it a colonial land economy that fenced the prairies.

Historical Context & Key Cultural Takeaways

• Treaty law mattered, and it was broken. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty required three-fourths consent for any cession of the Black Hills; the 1877 taking violated that standard, a fact formally recognized in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians (1980), in which the Supreme Court awarded more than $100 million in compensation.
• The money was refused. The Great Sioux Nation declined the award for four decades and beyond, insisting that the Black Hills were never for sale — a stance that continues today.
• Wounded Knee was a massacre, not a battle. The overwhelming majority of the dead were unarmed Lakota noncombatants, killed by artillery and rifle fire at close range.
• The ‘last’ was a legal fiction, not a demographic one. Wounded Knee ended armed resistance, not the people: the Oceti Sakowin now number in the tens of thousands across reservations in South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Nebraska, with thriving language and cultural revitalization programs.
• Preservation is active work. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) governs the return of ancestors and cultural items, while tribal museums, winter counts, and oral histories keep Indigenous historical accounts at the center of the record.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the ‘Sioux,’ and what does the name mean?

‘Sioux’ is an exonym, derived from an Ojibwe word rendered into French as Nadouessioux and usually translated as ‘little snakes.’ The people it describes call themselves the Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires, comprising the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota. Because the term carries a foreign origin, many Lakota and Dakota people prefer their own names.

Why are the Black Hills so important, and who owns them today?

The Black Hills — He Sapa — sit at the center of Lakota origin traditions and remain a living ceremonial landscape. The 1868 treaty reserved them to the Sioux Nation. They were seized in 1877 in violation of the treaty, and although the Supreme Court awarded compensation in 1980, the Lakota have refused payment and continue to seek return of the land.

What happened at Wounded Knee in 1890, and how many died?

On December 29, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry opened fire on the Miniconjou band of Spotted Elk at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Between 250 and 300 Lakota were killed, most of them women and children, along with 25 soldiers, at least twenty of whom died from their own unit’s fire. Congress apologized for the massacre in 1990.

What was the Ghost Dance, and why was it suppressed?

The Ghost Dance was a peaceful religious movement rooted in the teachings of the Paiute prophet Wovoka, promising renewal of the world, the return of the ancestors, and the restoration of the bison. Federal agents misinterpreted it as an uprising, banned it, and used its suppression as the pretext for the arrest of Sitting Bull and the pursuit of Spotted Elk’s people.

How is this history preserved and taught today?

Wounded Knee Cemetery, the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, and Sitting Bull’s gravesite at Mobridge, South Dakota, are among the sites that anchor public memory. Tribal colleges, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, NAGPRA repatriation work, and Lakota-led language immersion schools ensure that this history is told by Indigenous voices rather than only about them.

Conclusion: A Legacy That Refuses to End

The phrase ‘the last of the Sioux’ belongs to an older, misleading vocabulary of endings. What actually ended at Wounded Knee was the era of armed resistance; what survived was a nation of people, a body of treaty rights, a sacred landscape, and a historical record kept in winter counts, oral tradition, and law. The Oceti Sakowin remain — as citizens of sovereign tribal nations, as scholars, artists, and leaders — and the Black Hills remain contested ground where the argument over justice is still, quite literally, being written.