America's Great Indian Nations - Full Length Documentary

When Christopher Columbus first encountered the people of the new world, he was deeply moved; For their part, the Taíno Indians of the Caribbean thought that Columbus and his sailors were gods who had come from heaven, but in a single generation the peaceful kingdom of the Taíno Indians that Columbus first saw would disappear forever due to disease, slavery, torture and war. This new world that Columbus found was in fact a very ancient place and the people he called in Daeul's had lived on the continent for thousands of years, his ancestors were the real discoverers of it.

Hunters of ages who had followed the Rising Sun eastward across the land bridge from Asia to discover a continent ruled by glaciers and

great

horned bison when the ice melted, nomadic tribes moved south into the green heart of the continent following the stars, the seasons and the flocks. They populated the mountain ranges, the green river valleys and the painted canyons of the desert, they created languages ​​and customs as varied as the feathers of birds, but among them ran spiritual roots very deep in the earth and then, after countless centuries, man white came in search. of wealth and power two million Indians would endure centuries of fighting before the Sun finally set on their freedom in the yin these European settlers came and wave after wave to occupy a land of Native Americans in the bellies of their ships the Europeans carried horses, weapons and diseases and in their hearts they carried the belief in their destiny to rule the Americas from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

As the whites pressed further and further west, they eventually waged an all-out war against the Indians that would close the frontier and usher in the white man's era of railroads. The Telegraph and Mining However, the history of the United States is in many ways the history of the American Indians, as they gave Europeans the skills and knowledge necessary to survive in the new world. These are the stories of the most powerful Indian

nations

, the Iroquois of upstate New York. They are a unique confederation of six Indian

nations

. His

great

peace law attracted the attention of American settlers who were forging their own new country.

The Florida Seminoles, who brought together free Indians and black slaves fleeing the northern lands. Together they built a nation of mosaics. the peoples who reflect the melting pot of America, the Navajo, whose powerful spiritual bond with their land inspired a cure, the Aegis defense of their territory in the great Southwest, the fiercely independent Cheyenne, the beautiful plains people whose families were slaughtered by the U.S. Army soldiers at Sand Creek and their brothers the Teton Lakota, the defiant warriors of the West who joined with the Cheyenne to stem the tide of western expansion for 50 years. These stories tell only part of the story of the American Indians, but they paint a picture of the immensity of their domain.

The depth of their beliefs and hopes and a brave challenge to these men and women as they walked into the evening of their time. Freedom in upstate New York lies in a land where our hundred rivers and lakes weave through dense green forests and misty language swamps that rise above this The lush landscape is the smoky heights of the great mountains of Adirondacks. This is the land where the longhouse people of the powerful Iroquois nations took root. The Iroquois were a powerful confederation of five separate Indian nations and in their time were among the most feared and dominant Indians.

In North America, their unique Confederacy was a model of democracy. Some have even said that parts of our own Constitution were borrowed from the great law of peace of the Iroquois, but the five nations of the Iroquois did not always live in peace before they were united. The Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga Cayuga and the Seneca were often at war with each other until by the 14th century they were killing and threatening to destroy them all. At this terrible time, a great peacemaker came from the north proclaiming the word I bring is. That all people will love one another and live together in peace along with the great Mohawk chief Hiawatha, the peacemaker traveled to each of the five nations to proclaim his message, but within the nation Unand Agha lived an evil chief called Terra From ho who terrorized his people with deadly magic his face was cruel and his hair was tangled like a mass of writhing snakes, he despised these peacekeepers but finally the peacekeeper and Hiawatha held a council with Terra Tahoe and exercised their own magic on him.

They asked him to become the main boss. of the new Confederacy da-da-da-dah was agreed upon and the great peace began the establishment of the Confederacy brought a new sense of security to the Iroquois the times of peace were good and the Creator provided the people with their three sisters corn beans and pumpkin to support them, the women of each clan were the farmers and every spring they planted the three sisters in the fertile fields while the men hunted and fished in the forests and lakes that surrounded their lands, the women had great power for the Iroquois.

Through the lineage of their mother and chief mothers, not the men designated as heads of each clan, the growing seasons ended with great festivals of Thanksgiving, the gathering of maple sap, the harvesting of berries and beans, and the corn cutting, all were celebrated with beasts and religious dances. Iroquois history was recorded on wampum belts woven with shell beads. Every decision of the council and every treaty with the whites was sealed with an exchange of wampum. The van wampum powder was one of the most revered powders brought out whenever the Iroquois Constitution was recited at the founding of the The Confederacy brought peace among the five nations and led to peace in all the nations of the northeast, but at the end In the 17th century, beaver pelts were a prized commodity in Europe that rivaled the Europeans' thirst for gold.

Realizing this, the Iroquois sought to monopolize the fur trade. The European power confronted the other and dictated conditions to other tribes eager to trade; they challenged their old enemies, the Mohicans, for the right to trade exclusively with the Dutch; They then turned their attention north, where the French traded with the Hurons along the St. Lawrence River. The Iroquois devastated the Hurons and absorbed many Hurons into their Confederacy, then headed west toward the Erie nation in a bloody war. of three years. The Erie were defeated and also absorbed into the Confederacy that was now expanding southward. The Iroquois encountered the Tuscarora tribe in the Carolinas, the Tuscaroras were being driven from their lands by white settlers, so the Iroquois invited them to become part of their great Confederacy.

The Tuscaroras migrated north and became the sixth nation of the Iroquois in the mid-18th century. The great peace law of the Iroquois was attracting the attention of some. Benjamin Franklin, one of the most farsighted American settlers, who served as a British envoy to the Indians, was deeply impressed with the Iroquois form of government. His contributions to the United States Constitution may have come from Iroquois principles. In 1763, the English defeated the French and took control of all French possessions south of Canada, but trouble was brewing with the British colonies and soon the Iroquois would be drawn into the American Revolution.

Formally, the Iroquois had pledged to remain neutral in the Revolutionary War, but the Mohawk warrior Joseph Brant convinced many of the Iroquois men to fight for the British for the first time since the Great Peace. The Iroquois fought against the Iroquois. The Mohawks. Senecas Cayugas and Onondagas fought with the British while the United and Tuscaroras sided with the colonies when the English finally fell in 1783 the new United States of America treated the entire Iroquois Confederacy as a conquered nation which forced the Iroquois to give up most of their territory, now much of the precious land that sustained their life for a thousand years had disappeared and the scourge 'from reserve life appeared, drink and idleness led to violent fights between once proud warriors in their poverty were forced to sell even more of their land the whites had finally robbed them of their pride and dignity at the end of the 18th century the spirits of the Iroquois people had fallen to new depths in this dark hour an unlikely The prophet came to them, a handsome late Seneca chief and a notorious drunk fell one day into a stupor so deep that his pulse stopped moments later, the handsome Lake awoke from near death and revealed a great vision.

Three messengers came with the Creator's order. These messengers condemned whiskey. Abortion and witchcraft and called for a return to the old ways of life before the whites arrived. The Iroquois people were deeply affected and their teachings became known everywhere as the longhouse religion, but the displacement of the Iroquois from their lands continued tragically into 1830 and 1830. In 1846 the United States government led to After the removal of the Indians west of the Mississippi, despite a series of land scams and broken treaties, the Iroquois managed to retain small parcels of their lands in New York and Canada, by the mid-19th century the Iroquois were adapting to white man's culture, some children attended school off reservations, and some Iroquois were finding their way into the American mainstream.

Eli s Parker, a well-educated Seneca, enlisted in the army during the Civil War and rose to the rank of brigadier general as Parker, Ulysses Grant's secretary, wrote the surrender papers signed at Appomattox Courthouse after After the war, when Grant became president, he appointed Eli Parker as the first Native American Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Today, the rich legacy of the Iroquois lives on in the great Six Nations Confederacy, not only leaving its mark on American history, but also influencing the United States Constitution. The Iroquois also gave their name to the country of Canada from their meaningless word community.

The people of the longhouse, once the most powerful Confederacy of Indians in North America, continued to burn the fire of their Council and cling to their sacred unity in that council flame burning the memory of a thousand fights and the sacrifice of countless chiefs and mothers of clans who fought to keep their people free on a large peninsula at the edge of the continent lies a land of lush green forests. and deep meandering swamps bordered to the east by the mighty Atlantic and to the west by the Gulf of Mexico. This is the Florida land of the great Seminole Nation.

It was here that the Seminoles fought the longest resistance against us. It took three wars, half the US Army, and more than $30 million to subdue the proud and defiant Seminole team for the expansion of any Indian nation. To this day, the Seminoles remain the only Indian nation that never signed a surrender document with the US government. The first people of Florida. The Timucua Colusa and other tribes were virtually wiped out by war and disease brought by the Spanish and British in the 16th and 17th centuries. Then, in the early 18th century, a wave of refugees came to Florida from the north fleeing the expanding British Creek colonies.

Indians driven from their lands by African settlers and slaves and other Indians escaping slavery on the lush grasslands of Spanish Florida. These Indians and blacks began to merge into a single people known as the Seminoles. Its name comes from the Seminole II creek word meaning fugitive or wild. For many years, these fugitives lived together in the untamed lands of northern Florida, the blacks formed their own towns alongside the Indians, some free, others enslaved by Indian masters, life was centered in Seminole or Tawa towns, they worshiped the master of breath incarnated in the sun. and took names for their clans from the world around them, names like alligator turtle snake and corn, each summer at harvest time, the Seminole people gathered in city squares to celebrate the new year with the festival of green corn, after eight days of dancing, sweat baths and purification.

The priests swept the old ashes from the hearths, then lit a new fire in the town square and all past grievances were forgiven. The healers carried embers from the village fire to each house and in each home the people roasted green corn in the warmer weather. Florida Seminole farmers began cultivating large orange groves and many learned the customs of horse breeding and slave keeping from their European neighbors. The Seminole chief, King Paine, even owned a plantation with 20 slaves,1,500 head of cattle and 400 horses, but then, in 1776, American settlers. rebelled against British rule England created chaos by proclaiming freedom for all African slaves More and more African fugitives fled south to join the Seminoles.

American slaveholders became angry and nervous about entire towns of black Indians living on their southern doorstep after the Revolutionary War. Americans began crossing the Florida border would settle on Indian lands Slave traders branded Seminole villages who kidnapped anyone who looked black angered the Seminoles fought back in 1817 the U.S. government sent Army General Andrew Jackson to the South on a mission to recapture runaway slaves Jackson's troops illegally crossed Florida's Spanish border and burned The Seminole village confiscated livestock and destroyed food stores. The Seminole people fought back. Their numbers tripled with new Creek refugees from the north in November 1817.

The Seminoles ambushed a boat carrying women, children, and 40 soldiers on the Apalachicola River and all but 13 whites were shot to death. this marked the beginning of the first Seminole War once again Andrew Jackson marched into Florida Jackson and his troops destroyed more Seminole towns and the Seminoles fled further south Jackson's victory in the first Seminole War led Spain to sign a document with the United States for the sale of Florida, the Seminoles were coerced by the US government into signing a treaty and were pressed into a large reservation in Central Florida. These new lands were swampy and unsuitable for hunting, and government rations and supplies were scarce, reported the officer in charge of the reservation.

They are in the most miserable situation, and unless the government helps them, many of them will die of hunger in this hour of despair. A warrior rose to lead the Seminoles in their second war of resistance. His name was Osceola and he soon became one of the great leaders in American Indian history. In 1834, the government attempted to get the Seminole chiefs to sign a treaty for their removal from Oklahoma. The government agents spread the treaty on the table and waited tensely, suddenly Osceola jumped up and plunged his knife into the treaty. saying the only way I'll sign is with this a government agent named Wiley Thompson arrested Osceola and the boss screamed as he was dragged away.

I will remember the time the agent had his day. I'll have mine. Osceola was soon released from prison and with his great skill as an orator he convinced his people that they should resist in December 1835 Osceola ambushed and murdered Indian agent Wiley Thompson that same day Seminole chief Micanopy led an attack on government troops under the command of Major Francis Dade near present-day Ocala. 180 Seminole warriors ambushed the current infantry unit, the entire Army Command was soon wiped out with only three known survivors. The Dade Massacre was a shocking defeat for the US Army and brought down all the fury of the government.

The Second Seminole War had now begun against the Osceola whites. said you have guns and so do we, your men will fight and ours too until the last drop of Seminole blood has moistened the dust of our hunting grounds at the end of a bloody and futile year of fighting, the United States had almost half of His army in Florida, General Jessup, called Osceola to assemble under a flag of truce, but then betrayed him and imprisoned the great leader in st. Augustine, Three months later, Osceola, heartbroken and seriously ill, died in prison at Fort Moultrie, SC, MO.

Seola's death was a horrible setback for the Seminole resistance and the army continued its relentless war against the people who were pushing the Seminoles further and further into the swamps and Everglades of southern Florida. Perhaps 500 Seminoles remained in Florida almost invisible in the deep swamps, their lands often covered in water, they lived by hunting and gathering and growing vegetables and small plots above the waterline, building elevated houses and learning to avoid the deadly water moccasins that occupied their homes. swamps, but civilization occasionally discovered isolated bands in 1855 in an effort to agitate the remaining Seminoles. A group of American surveyors raided Billy Bowlegs Garden.

The last of the Seminole chiefs. Government agents confiscated what they could carry and burned the rest. The bowlegs led their people. They continued to hold out against the army for three years, but eventually, outnumbered and out of resources, Bowlegs and his followers surrendered and were sent west of the Mississippi, but several hundred Seminoles managed to stay behind in the vast, unexplored Everglades, the government he finally abandoned the search for the latter. Free Seminole Indians and to this day never formally surrendered as the melting pot that became the United States. The Seminoles are a mosaic of different peoples and cultures.

They are Indians, African slaves and other refugees. United in a fight to create a separate nation, a proud and defiant people. The Seminoles today remain the only unconquered Indian nation in the United States in the mystical land of the great southwest. Jagged pinnacles touched the clouds and giant sandstone hills rose dramatically from the desert floor. It is here that the Navajo Nation forged its civilization many centuries ago. Ancient Navajo ancestors came to this land from northwestern Canada more than 700 years ago and settled in the Red Rock canyons of what is now northern Arizona and New Mexico.

They invaded the homelands of the cliff-dwelling Anasazi and drove south toward Mexico. The Navajos created a unique environment. culture based on farming, cattle herding, weaving and jewelry making, while white settlers avoided this dry and rugged landscape, the Navajo held it in special reverence, the land became a source of sustenance and food spiritually, they learned to cultivate corn plots in desert soil and planted peach orchards. In the canyon bottom lands, when Father Sky provided rain, Mother Earth provided fruits, grains and grasses, the most common symbol of the Navajo spiritual connection to the land was the Hogan, a domed dwelling made of logs and earth.

Nuts were used for both housing and ceremonial purposes. Their entrances Always facing east, toward the Rising Sun, almost all acts of Navajo life, from building Hogans to planting crops, were ceremonial in nature, accompanied by song and prayer. Sand paintings were part of many Navajo healing ceremonies and had the power to restore order. world these paintings were made by medicine men who sprinkled colored sand on the floor of a ceremonial hogan the designs told stories of the navajo creation myth when the first holy people were miraculously produced from corn rain pollen and gemstones by the gods in the winds in In the 17th century, the Spanish introduced sheep and horses to the Navajos, they became the most famous shepherds and writers of the Southwest, but women played a vital role in the tribal life of almost all Navajos.

The women were experts at hand-weaving sheep's wool on village looms, their decorative rugs and blankets with printed designs or symbolic images became known around the world at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. .English-speaking whites moved to Navajo Dan. The Navajos had been fighting Spanish-speaking intruders for 215 years. The Navajos stole sheep and horses. The Mexicans, who in turn captured Indians to become slaves, the Navajos thought their enemies would be expelled from the new United States. territory of New Mexico, Washington instead gave the Mexicans the American citizenship he had denied to the Navajos and allowed the slave trade to continue.

The Indians could only watch in anger as the soldiers built their first military post in 1851, in their name the whites expressed their feelings for the Navajo they called it Fort Defiance the great Navajo chief manually towed his ally Barban Cito they were determined to sweep the fort and his people from his land in 1860 attacked Fort Defiance with 1,000 warriors, although their arrows were no match for the musket fire that convinced Washington that the Navajos would defend their homeland at all costs. General James Carleton, a ruthless army veteran who had subdued the Mescalero Apaches, soon took command of Fort Defiance.

Carleton found that Navajo land was a princely round, but of the Navajos he said they were running wolves. through the mountains and had to be cleared if the territory was to be opened to settlement, so Carleton chose a new place for the Navajos, a flat and desolate wasteland far away on the Pecos River called Bosque Redondo, here guarded by soldiers from Fort Sumner. Carleton's plan for the Navajos to become self-sufficient farmers, but Barban quote refused, saying: "I will not go to the Forest. I will never leave my country, not even if it means they will kill me." Carleton chose his old friend Kit Carson to lead the military campaign against the Navajos.

Carson was at first reluctant, not wanting to fight the Indians with whom he had traded and lived with in the past, but in the summer of 1863 Colonel Kit Carson led a thousand volunteers from New Mexico to wage war against the Navajos, who numbered more than 12,000. The only way to conquer the Navajos was to burn the very land they lived on and starve them into submission. Kit Carson's men destroyed most of the herds and crops between Fort Defiance and Canyon de Chelly in January 1864. Carson led 300 soldiers to the walled reaches of Canyon de Chelly, the last Navajo stronghold, the Soldiers burned Hogan's slaughtered cattle, destroyed corn fields, took women and children captive and killed them with their muskets.

Barban Seto was captured, but Manuel Ito escaped with 4,000 members of his band, the 8,000 Navajos who had surrendered undertook the long walk, a terrible journey of 300 miles to captivity in Bosque Redondo, hungry for nostalgia and almost naked against the cold. 200 Navajos They died on the way to the wilderness that General Carleton considered an excellent reservation, but the Indians who escaped from the reservation spoke of an arid, drought-stricken Land where they lived like prairie dogs in burrows. Kit Carson continued hunting those still free. It is September 1866. Chief Manuel Eco and 23 ragged, starving warriors surrendered at a military post in northwestern New Mexico.

His gang had resisted capture the longest. more than three years, but now they were too exhausted to fight in the days when the free Navajo Nation was open in 1868, the horrible reports of life in Bosque Redondo had created a public outcry, the land was desolate, the water was not 2,000 existing Navajos died in the Forest due to hunger and disease, the sooner it is abandoned and the Indians eliminated, the better said the superintendent of the reservation, so on June 1 Manuel Ito Barban Seto and five other people met with army commander William Tecumseh Sherman to sign a treaty, when the Navajo leaders saw Sherman for the first time, they were afraid of him because his face was the same as Carlton's, fierce and hairy , with a cruel mouth, but his eyes were different, he had the eyes of a man who had suffered and seen a lot of pain, Sherman told the Navajo, my children, I will send you back to your homes, that is why the government allowed the Navajos return to a reservation in their former homeland.

When we saw the manually configured Albuquerque mountain top, we felt like talking to the ground. We loved it. so that the Navajo would never forget those four years of death and suffering in Bosque Redondo, the fearful time as it was called over the years, the Navajo people fought countless battles to defend their territory and endured endless years of forced captivity, but he never lost his spiritual bond. to land it is on this land and in the giant mountains that surround it and in the sky above that the very soul of the Navajo can be found. It was the Cheyenne and Teton Lakota who fought hardest for their land and their lives and these two nations were the last to travel in freedom across the Great Plains here, the vast prairie stretched from Texas to Canada and from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, as the most powerful tribes on the Plains in the 19th century, the Cheyenne and the Teton Lakota shared a similar way of life.

They were horseback warriors who built tipi villages and had many of the same ceremonies and rites and to each of them the American bison was life, a gift from the Great Spirit in 1850 million buffalo moved like a dark living sea across the land that wastruly the kingdom of the buffalo and the Indians who followed the herds cast only a small shadow under the sky because the Teton Lakota and Cheyenne the bison were endowed with supernatural powers and took from the herds everything they needed for their existence, they killed only enough animals to meet their needs during the winter, they care

full

y stripped the meat to dry it in the sun, storing the bone marrow, in fact, in skins, treating the seen use for bowstrings and thread, and curing the skins for teepee covers. , clothes and moccasins.

The Cheyenne considered themselves the beautiful ones. For centuries they lived as farmers and potters in the great pine forests above the headwaters of the Mississippi, but the Lakota and Ojibwa drove them to the high plains in the 18th century, when they abandoned the plantations and followed the wandering buffalo. The Cheyenne were fiercely independent. Among the most feared warriors of the West, its famous dog soldiers, the warrior society was a powerful military organization, half of the warriors of each band were members and they roamed at will over a large territory hunting and attacking. The Cheyenne were known for their advanced religious beliefs. a Sundance ceremony that renews life each summer, after the tribes left the winter camps and gathered for the buffalo hunt, it was their most important religious ritual, a Thanksgiving to the mysterious power and rebirth of life on earth, the return of the growing season, but at the end.

At the end of the Civil War there was a force on the plains that ran like a storm cloud from the east; It would soon change the centuries-old life of the Cheyenne people. Covered wagons crossed the prairie, cattle grazed on the prairies and the Whites began to slaughter buffalo for their hides and sometimes, simply for pleasure, soon hundreds of buffalo bones lay scattered on the southern plains; They were ragged meat rotting under the hot prairie sun after the Colorado Territory was created in 1861. The Whites wanted to open up all the land for settlement and force the Cheyenne into submission.

God's heaven is to kill Indians who would kill women and children, but the Cheyenne peace chief, Black Kettle, said that it is not my intention nor desire to fight against the whites. I want to be friendly and peaceful and keep the soul of my band. I want to live in peace. Black Kettle. He once shook hands with President Lincoln in Washington and prided himself on never having led a raid against the colonists. In the fall of 1864, Black Kettle and his fellow chiefs met with Evans and Chivington and convinced the Cheyenne to move to Fort Lyon, where the Cheyenne could spend the winter under military protection, their old black cattle leading 600 of their people. to a camp in Colorado's wide Sand Creek Valley, but there, in the gray dawn of November 29, 1864, Chivington led his 3rd Cavalry on a senseless raid of murder and mutilation known as the Massacre of Sand Creek, most of Black Kettle's warriors were hunting when 700 soldiers attacked the sleeping village.

Black Kettle raised an American flag and a white banner over his television, but the troops shot everyone they found, screaming. The Indians fled in all directions. of warriors defended themselves and the skirmishes continued for four hours along the creek, then at noon there was silence 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho were dead 2/3 of them women and children 9 chiefs were dead and although Black Kettle escaped unharmed his wife Shot nine times and left for dead, Chivington's boys, as he called them, were paraded through Denver displaying the severed scalps, arms, and legs of the Indians, but rumors of the atrocity spread terrible enough to outrage the American public. .

Kit Carson himself, an Indian fighter, called it the action of a coward or a dog. Over the next three years, an alliance of Indians raided the South Platte Valley and tore down telegraph wires. and they looted stagecoach stations, ranches, military posts and towns, dozens of settlers were killed, their women and children dragged away as captives, now public opinion turned against the Indians and the United States launched a

full

-scale Indian War. Black Kettle still hoped to save the town from him and led 80 families to a refuge south of the Arkansas River. In 1868, Kansas military commander Philip Sheridan was convinced that the Cheyenne should be punished.

Sheridan ordered the daring and flamboyant Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer to advance toward the Washita River during the supposed winter. seat on the hostile tribes to destroy their villages and ponies to kill or hang all the warriors and bring back all the women and children four years after the story of Sand Creek seemed thrown into a cruel and endless loop, the seventh Custer's elite cavalry attacked a sleeping Cheyenne village to the south. of the Arkansas River, where Black Kettle and his people camped within minutes. 103 Cheyenne lay dead, including the great Black Kettle and his wife. The Cheyenne prophet, the sweet medicine who once predicted years of darkness for his people, the end of Buffalo and the coming. of the white man, but he could not foresee how his days of wandering the prairie and freedom would end.

The Cheyenne were herded to a reservation in Western Indian Territory, where the warpath and buffalo hunting were replaced by food rations and Christianity, but the land always met the people who once walked its vast prairies and hunted their sea of ​​thundering bison. The Cheyenne were among the first to practice the concept of peaceful resistance. Their advanced religious beliefs and spiritual devotion served them well in their fight to remain free even among the Native Americans. Today, the Cheyenne will always be known as the beautiful people of the plains. The most famous of the North American Indians was the mighty Teton.

The protonation that dominated the heart of the Great Plain from what is now Minnesota to Montana, from the upper Missouri River to the Platte. River fiercely resisted the white man's rule for 50 years, stemming the tide of western expansion until they could fight no longer. The Lakota had originally come from the forests of the southeast, migrated along the Atlantic coast and then passed through the Great Lakes where they farmed and hunted. On the upper Mississippi River in Minnesota until they finally settled on the Great Plains in the early 18th century, the Lakota built a free lifestyle around two animals, the buffalo and the horse.

They depended on the buffalo for food, dress and stay. It was an animal endowed with supernatural powers. powers a gift from the sage about the hey sapa called by the settlers the black hills became the sacred heart of the Lakota Nation the warriors traveled to their sapa they sought visions communion with the Great Spirit and received their spiritual power or medicine but the Lakota medicine would be powerless against the white man by the early 1860s, the Lakota had lost most of their land through treaties, all that was left in their possession was the sacred Hey Sapa and some hunting grounds in Montana, but In 1866 the whites returned to them this time.

To obtain permission to make a grand trail through the Powder River Country to the newly discovered gold fields of Montana, the great Lakota chief, Red Cloud, hated the idea of ​​an immigrant trail through the last hunting grounds of The Lakota, when the white man comes to my country, he leaves a trail of blood behind him. I have two mountains in that country, the Black Hills and Bighorn Mountain. I want the Great Father not to make paths through them. The permit application was just a farce. Soldiers were already on their way to secure the role with a Red Cloud line of forts steeled their threat and for the next two years the Lakota held the troops under virtual siege.

No civilian or military caravan was safe on the Bozeman Trail and Lakota raids claimed 154 lives in the spring of 1868. General William Tecumseh Sherman came to Fort Laramie to make a peace treaty with Red Cloud, but the leader of Oglala sent a message saying that when we see the soldiers leaving and the fort abandoned, I will go down and speak reluctantly. The War Department complied. The Bozeman Trail forts were abandoned. Red Cloud rode triumphantly to Fort Laramie and signed the treaty declaring Powder River Territory and the Black Hills removed from Indian Territory. In exchange, Red Cloud promised to go to the reservation where he would never raise his hand again for eight years that the Lakota would try to forget. whites, but in the summer of 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led 1,200 men on a gold-seeking expedition to the Black Hills.

Custer sent reports to eastern newspapers about the gold coming from the base city. The Indians observed a torrent of unrestrained seekers arriving at the sacred place. heart of his nation with complete disregard for the treaty the whites had signed when Washington tried to buy the Black Hills Oglala war chief Crazy Horse responded one does not sell the land the people walk on Chief Hunkpapa Sitting Bull warned that the Black Hills belongs To me, if the whites try to capture them, I will fight in disbelief that Black Hills. President Grant sent orders to the Lakota to report to an agency or be declared hostile by the U.S. and subject to military action while the Plains tribes gathered at Rosebud.

Creek for the sacred Sundance amid the chants and swirls of warriors Sitting Bull made fifty offerings of skin on each of his arms until his blood flowed around him and he fell into a trance when he woke up. A vision. I saw soldiers and some Indians on horses. descending like grasshoppers with heads bowed and hats falling off, they were falling directly into our camp, the soldiers were indeed arriving. General Sheridan had ordered troops to southern Montana. The invincible George Armstrong Custer led his exhausted 7th Cavalry through the Montana hills in a relentless search for the Indians.

Finally, on the morning of June 25, 1876, Custer found his quarry camped in a creek valley that The Lakota called it greasy grass, but the whites would remember how the long-haired Custer Little Bighorn charged his soldiers directly into the Indians. camp, but a thousand warriors led by Crazy Horse encountered Custer's troops and on a ridge now called Custer Hill, the longhair forces were swallowed by the Indians and lost in the dust and smoke of history. Sitting Bull's vision had been fulfilled, the Indians soon divided into small groups. and scattered by the winds, Crazy Horse's Oglala continued their attacks and Sitting Bull led his Hunkpapa to Canada that fall, the Lakota were forced to give up their right to the Powder River and Haise Appa, the government said they had violated the treaty When he went to war with the United States, he promised a reservation in the Powder River country in May 1877.

Crazy Horse marched with his band of hungry Mughals to Fort Robinson. They came singing songs of peace and Crazy Horse threw down three rifles, abandoning the warpath. forever, but when Crazy Horse was taken to Fort Robinson a soldier shot him in the back with a bayonet, to the north, a commission came to lure Sitting Bull back from Canada, offering forgiveness for his war crimes in exchange for surrender, the leader of Hunkpapa refused to ask what we have done to make you want us to stop him, that's all. people on his side who began to create problems for us if we must die, we die defending our rights.

Canada denied them a reservation and his people were home sick and tired of the cold and hunger in July 1881. Sitting Bull and his followers crossed the border. In the next ten years, the last Lakota were driven to the reservations and in all the vastness of the Great Plains not a herd of buffalo could be found. Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show by selling autographed photographs of himself to gawking children around the world. continent, the end of the show was a reenactment of the battle of Little Bighorn and the terrible Indian wars were now just entertainment for the victor on the reservation, the warriors lived on rotten thongs and dream of their past, inevitably, a prophet came announcing the arrival of a new Messiah. to bury the whites underground and raise the dead Indians, the hunting grounds would be restored and the land would once again be filled with buffalo.

This prophet was a Paiute medicine man from Nevada called wovoka and his Ghost Dance religion spread across western reservations as A Prairie engulfed the dance lifting the broken warriors into their trance as Voges' followers donned ghost t-shirts that would stop the white man's bullets for fear of a new Indian uprising. Major General Nelson Miles commanded troops in the Indian agencies. Sitting Bull was openly skeptical about the new religion. The whites thought he was to blame for the riots and ordered his arrest in themorning of December 15. 43 The Indian police took the Hunkpapa chief out of his hut.

Shots were fired and Sitting Bull fell to the ground dead. Another band of soldiers had gone in search of the miniconjou chief Bigfoot, whose people had gone to the Badlands where they could perform the Ghost Dance without fear, the Bluecoats caught up with him and the Indians and soldiers camped for the night next to Wounded Knee Creek. 500 soldiers stood guard over 350 men, women and children in At dawn, the army began to disarm the Indians somehow a rifle was fired and a soldier fell dead and both sides opened fire on one. The army killed half the men with their first volley and rapid-fire cannon shrapnel from the hill.

The Indians ran and were shot. down like Buffalo when the smoke carried away 153 men, women and children of the Lakota Nation lay dead there blood flowed along with 25 corpses of the 7th Cavalry the ghost shirts had been powerless and the snow fell for two days softly muffling the moans of The Dying On New Year's Day 1891, the frozen dead of Wounded Knee were gathered onto carts and buried in a mass grave. Lakota Shaymin Black Elk said that many years later I can still see the butchered women and children lying in piles and scattered and I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard, the dream of a people died there , it was a beautiful dream, but the legacy of the Teton Lakota still inspires deep respect and admiration today.

Their fight for survival against the US Army at Little Bighorn created a legend. However, they ultimately led to their final defeat, the spirit of the Lakota applauded the people who shed their blood to preserve a way of life that will endure long after the stories of battle. Each of these nations contributed a piece of the patchwork quilt that has become America from the beginning. The great Iroquois peace law that influenced the writing of our constitution to the Cheyenne concept of peaceful resistance. These great Indian nations built a heritage that still inspires new generations of Native Americans.

They will always be a vital part of the American adventure.