The Black Hills seizure, the forcing of the Lakota onto confined reservations, the destruction of the bison herds, the boarding school policies that attacked Lakota language and culture from the next generation forward — all of these followed the treaty, violating both its letter and its spirit.

Red Cloud’s long post-treaty life was spent fighting the failures of the peace — advocating, petitioning, testifying, arguing for rights that had been promised and not honored.

He achieved real things through this advocacy.

He also failed to prevent the broader catastrophe of what American policy did to the Lakota people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The question of what the 1868 treaty’s legacy is today is actively contested.

The Supreme Court’s 1980 ruling that the Black Hills seizure was unconstitutional established a legal principle that Indigenous nations’ treaty rights are real and enforceable obligations of the United States.