Fluent in War and Peace

Abstract

This research is an observation of the life and actions of the Lakota Sioux headman, Red Cloud. A consideration of his life provides the observer with an understanding of the Lakota epoch on the northern Great Plains of North America and his role in the continuation of the Lakota people. As Red Cloud ascended the Lakota meritocracy, he led multiple successful sorties against rival Native groups and the American military. These actions included horse raids and combat missions that enforced Lakota supremacy over the modern Dakotas, Northern Nebraska, eastern Montana, and Wyoming. Later in his life, he and other Plains Natives encountered increasing numbers of Euro-Americans in the form of civilian settlers and traders followed by elements of the Federal Government. As tensions built between the Plains Natives and the US, Red Cloud began to actively oppose American intrusions into Lakota land. The crescendo of Red Cloud’s physical resistance was the Fetterman Fight, an action in which Red Cloud and his allies encircled and destroyed a company-sized element of the US Army. Following its defeat, the US proposed peace through the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. To the US, the agreement concentrated the Lakota in southern South Dakota, away from American economic activities. To men like Red Cloud, unfamiliar with concepts of finite containment, the treaty only affirmed their hunting rights and hegemony in the region. However, as waves of new migrants flowed west from their eastern metropoles, it became apparent to Red Cloud that the policy of the Federal Government was the permanent concentration and degradation of the Lakota. Faced with this forlorn reality, Red Cloud led the Lakota on the reservation through a restricted existence. Despite the Federal attempts at the degradation of the tribe, Red Cloud, using pacifist defiance, ensured the Lakota’s survival and the preservation of a large portion of the region he conquered in his youth. It is possible that his choice to surrender on terms favorable to his tribe and the timing of his cessation of combat actions were more important to the survival of the Lakota than the decision of his peers to continue their war with the US. This is evident in the continuation of the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation based on the agreement between the US and the Lakota following Red Cloud’s victories in the Powder River Region. Although the Reservation was and is a form of human concentration and containment, it was, a relatively safe place for the Lakota when one considers their treatment outside the sphere of Red Cloud’s influence, most notably the massacre at Wounded Knee.