Che Jim: In 1973, 200 protesters staged an armed takeover of Wounded Knee, where the U.S. military had massacred 300 Lakota less than a hundred years earlier. 

They held the site for 71 days, exchanging gunfire with federal authorities, who later admitted to firing over half a million rounds at tribal members, killing two Native men. 

And while most remembered the occupation for its violence, the protesters also held ceremonial dances, songs, and prayers and gained a lot of for their cause. 

But what were they fighting for?

Hi, I'm Che Jim, and welcome to Crash Course: Native American History. 

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The occupation of Wounded Knee was broadly about treaties, formal agreements, usually between two or more states or nations.

Many of the protesters were members of the American Indian Movement, which among other things, fought for the U.S. government to honour its treaty obligations with Native nations. 

See, between the mid 18th and mid 19th centuries, a period called the Treaty Era, the U.S. entered into nearly 400 treaties with Indian nations. 

And it wasn’t a fun Taylor Swift kind of era.

Most tribes were coerced into signing these treaties. And the few who entered willingly often did so without full understanding of their meaning. 

Treaties change tribal borders in major ways during this period, and played a huge part in removing Native Americans from their lands, as colonists pushed westward. 

And when treaties didn't work in their favour, the U.S. government often just disregarded them.

And trust me, they ignored a lot. 

During this period, we also saw the formation and scaling up of reservations. These were specific portions of lands that the U.S. government allocated to tribes, often forcing them to move there.

We call the period between 1850 and 1887 the Reservation Era.

But to understand how we ever got here to this point and to the occupation a hundred years later, we have to look backwards. 

So, I'm going to walk you through that hundredish year timeline, which means I'm about to cover a lot of history in a short amount of time. 

Think of this as a primer, a little appetiser. Don't make me say it, Crash Course! So, when you finish this video, you might want to dig deeper. Actually, you should dig a little deeper. 

[Stares down camera] You will dig deeper. 

Let's start back in the olden times, 1626, when the indigenous Lenape people of what's now New York, sold the island of Manhattan, then called Nanahhata, to the Dutch for $24 worth of beads and other trinkets. 

Or at least, that's probably the story you heard. It's been retold in textbooks and paintings, and it's even been cited as one of the foundational myths of New York City. 

I hear it's engraved on the Statue of Liberty, right under "I'm walking here!"

But this story has likely been exaggerated. 

Our records of the deal come from the writings of one lone Dutch dude who wasn't even there when it happened. 

The fact is, it's possible that a band of Lenape did sell the island to the Dutch, for about $1000. But the terms of the agreement were influenced by each party having very different worldviews. 

The Dutch, like most Europeans, thought of land ownership as something tangible and permanent.

But many Native nations, including some clans among the Lenape, had a very viewpoint. In their culture, land was controlled by the community and divided for use among extended family, which was different from the individual system of ownership Europeans were used to. 

Anyway, the Lenape likely believed that they were renting or leasing the land, not selling it outright. 

Johanna Gorelick from the Museum of the American Indian put it this way: "I don't think the exchange itself is in question. I think the meaning of that exchange is in question."

This is just one early example, but these cultural misunderstandings and some intentional fine print would play a large role in the treaty era.

As more and more colonists came to the so-called New World, they pushed Native Americans westward, often violently, and tribes would understandably retaliate against the colonists who used their land and stole their resources. 

But during and after the American Revolution, especially when the young Republic was weakened by its war with Britain, the threat of conflict with Native Americans was threatening. 

So many treaties at this time were focused on peace and friendship in exchange for land. 

In fact, the very first treaty, called the Treaty with the Delawares, was signed during the revolution in 1778, between the newly formed United States and the Lenape, who the Americans called the Delaware. 

It promised sovereignty and statehood in exchange for, among other things, letting American troops pass through their land unscathed during battles with the Brits. 

But although the Lenape held up their end of the bargain, the U.S. failed to deliver on theirs. This pattern would unfortunately repeat itself many times over. 

In the words of Lakota leader Red Cloud, "They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it."

As the U.S. continued to grow, these treaties became less about keeping the peace and more explicitly about gaining territory. 

Some tribes signed away their lands either willingly or unwillingly, but many resisted, including the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations in the south-east. 

In this region, colonists saw the tribes as a roadblock to fertile land for growing cotton. 

In 1814, future president Andrew Jackson, then a major general in the army, led a push against the Creek Nation.

It came to a head in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend near what's now the Georgia-Alabama border. Many of the Creek were massacred, and the remaining were forced to sign a treaty that ceded over 20 million acres to the U.S., which was a wake up call for many tribes. 

Realising it would be nearly impossible to defeat the Americans in battle, many chose to sign treaties that gave up much of their land in the hopes that they would at least get to keep some of it. 

But on 1830, a year after Jackson was elected president, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which gave the U.S. government sweeping power to grant land west of the Mississippi River to any Native nation that agreed to give up their land in the east.

These treaties were officially considered voluntary, but in practice that was far from the truth as bribery and threats were commonplace. 

Consider the Treaty of New Echota, which Jackson signed with the backing of a single Cherokee chief who represented barely a fraction of the tribe. It gave the U.S. 7 million acres of land in exchange for just $5 million. 

Unsurprisingly, many Cherokee didn't want to leave their ancestral homeland. 

So, under the leadership of principal chief John Ross, they held out against removal. Ross and his supporters argued the treaty was a fraud and worked to convince the government to recognise the older treaties it had signed,  guaranteeing the Cherokee the land they were already on. 

Ultimately though, the resistance broke down in 1838, when the remaining Cherokee were finally removed at gunpoint by the army and members of the Georgia militia. 

From there, Ross led his people westward as part of what would become known as the Trail of Tears. 

All told, during the 1830s, an estimated 100,000 Native American people were forced to leave their homes and journey thousands of miles west, and around 15,000 individuals died along the way. 

But it didn't end there.

As the U.S. continued to expand westward, the government began re-encountering the same peoples they had driven from the east a few decades earlier, not to mention those western tribes who had already lived there. 

I mean, what did they expect?

But this time, the government took a different approach. 

What if, instead of signing a bunch a bunch of treaties, they just reserved a small piece of land for tribes to live on?

It had been done before with some success in 1786 when the United States established its first reservation. So, in 1851, Congress passed the Appropriation Bill for Indian Affairs, which allocated funds to build a more robust reservation system, kicking off the Reservation Era. 

Over the next 30-something years, most Native Americans were either forcibly relocated or saw their land dramatically reduced. 

And in 1871, Congress officially took away the right of Native nations to enter into treaties with the United States government. It was an unceremonious amendment attached to an appropriations act passed without the input of any tribal members, and it was officially the end of the treaty era.

But what did this mean for the nearly 400 treaties that had been made in the last century?

Technically, they remained intact, but this decision made it even harder for them to be enforced, which brings us back to Wounded Knee.

See, in 1868, the Lakota Sioux signed a treaty with the U.S. that established a great Sioux reservation on 60 million acres of land. 

But not long after, the U.S. government discovered a lot of natural resources on that land, and decided to do some classic take-backsies. 

By the end of the Reservation Era, only about 20% of the original remained, with the rest back in the hands of the federal government. 

On top of that, reservation life was difficult for the Lakota. Drought, along with allotments that were bad for sustainable crop growth, made farming difficult.

And both a near extinction of the buffalo population and rules against hunting on reservation land made their traditional way of life nearly impossible to sustain. So they had no choice but to rely on government rations. 

They were also disconnected from their culture and identity, forced to wear Western clothing and abandoned their traditional spiritual practices in favour of Christianity. 

We'll talk more about life on reservations in a future episode. 

By 1890, after a series of conflicts in the murder of Lakota chief Sitting Bull, tensions between the tribe and the government had reached a breaking point. 

US forces surrounded a Minneconjou Lakota camp near Wounded Knee Creek, where, after a gun went off accidentally, the military massacred upwards of 300 Lakota men, women and children. 

83 years later, the occupation of Wounded Knee brought this massacre back into the public eye. 

Many scholars point to the occupation as the spark that kicked off a massive push for recognition of Native treaty rights all across the country. 

After all, those hundreds of treaties are still the law of their land, whether or not they're honoured. 

So, invoking them had become a major strategy for Native nations to push for the return of their lands. And since the occupation, a number of them used historic treaties to fight for and achieve legal wins. 

I know all this can feel like the distant past, but its not. Babies born on the day of the Wounded Knee Massacre would have been in their early 80s during the occupation. And occupiers joined protests at Standing Rock to object to Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016.

The point is, the fight for treaty recognition continues right here, right now. Native leaders and activists continue to push the federal government to honour its promises and momentum only continues to build as new generations join the fight. 

Next time, we'll talk about Native American assimilation and the Allotment Era, and I will see you then. 

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course: Native American History, which was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.