Little Bighorn, Battle of

The Battle of Little Bighorn, or the Greasy Grass Fight, was an 1876 military confrontation between invading U.S. military and defending Lakota and Cheyenne forces on traditional Lakota Montana land that resulted in a victory for the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations. It was one of the last Native American military victories and highlights the injustice of U.S. genocidal campaigns against Native Americans.

The Battle of Little Bighorn was a fight to preserve a spiritual and hunting way of life as one aspect of cultural and political sovereignty. In the context of skirmishes with the Anishnaabe and Cree, and the deadly epidemics such as smallpox brought by mostly English and French colonists, the Lakota began a century of permanent migration west from the upper Mississippi region out to the northern plains in the late 1600s. By the late 1700s, they partially displaced both Cheyenne and Kiowas and came into conflicts with the Crow, Shoshone, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara of the northern plains. With the aid of horses, Lakota life changed from an agricultural to a hunting base, with bison central to spiritual and cultural well-being. White Buffalo Calf Woman brought seven ceremonies to the Lakota, including the Wiwanyang Wacipi or Sun Dance ceremony that occurred at Little Bighorn.

The century after the July 4, 1776, independence of the United States brought a series of wars leveled against all Native Americans in order to obtain land by any means necessary. The ultimate goal of U.S. Manifest destiny was to completely control the U.S. section of the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Treaties between sovereign U.S. and Native American nations followed wars. The Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho wars, known as Red Cloud's War, were to end with the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. The treaty set aside the sacred Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation, as well as vast unceded hunting lands for the Lakota and Cheyenne, even if many Native Americans rightly disbelieved in the treaty process and U.S. government.

The massacre of Cheyenne and Arapahos at Sand Creek in 1864, the 1870s illegal invasion of white gold prospectors in the Black Hills, the settlement of white settlers on Lakota land, and the indiscriminate killing of most bison herds were four prominent examples of the failure of the Fort Laramie Treaty to honor Lakota and Cheyenne nations that were prominently allied against the U.S. forces at Little Bighorn. The gold rush was precipitated in 1873 by Lieutenant Custer, who was sent to the Black Hills with armed forces to protect the surveyors, gold-seeking mineralogists, and plans to build a transcontinental railroad through Lakota and Cheyenne hunting grounds. After attempts to evict white settlers from lands promised to Native Americans by the 1868 treaty, President Ulysses S. Grant ceased to prevent whites from encroaching on those lands. Instead, Grant merely ordered Lakotas and Cheyenne to stay within their reservations and off of the hunting grounds ceded by treaty.