The United States government’s vision was of a continent fully organized under American sovereignty, with Indigenous peoples confined to reservations, their lands available for settlement and resource extraction, their cultures suppressed and replaced by the culture of the dominant society.

The Lakota and Cheyenne vision was of a world in which the Plains nations remained free — free to hunt the bison that sustained them, to follow the seasonal cycles that their way of life required, to practice the religious and cultural traditions that gave their lives meaning, to live on the lands that the Fort Laramie Treaty had recognized as theirs.

These visions could not coexist.

One had to win, and one had to lose.