HOMELAND - Plains Indian Timeline 1879-1910

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(left) Three Lakota boys on their arrival at the Carlisle Indian School.
(right) The same three Lakota boys after deculturization at the Carlisle Indian School (Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives)

1879 - The Carlisle Indian School is founded in Pennsylvania, in an aggressive U.S. government campaign to "civilize" Indian children. Children from reservations across the West are sent to the school in order to assimilate into white culture. This assimilation includes cutting their hair, burning their clothing and forcing them to wear European American dress. They are forbidden to speak their Native language, and punishment for infractions is severe. The school is a breeding ground for disease, and many children die there.

1881 - Chief Sitting Bull and 186 of his followers return from Canada and surrender at Fort Buford. The chief is imprisoned for two years instead of being pardoned, as promised.

1887 - The Dawes Act divides tribal land into individual allotted tracts, destroying tribal relations in an attempt to promote assimilation into white culture. Those tracts not allotted to individual Native families could be leased to whites, further reducing the size of Sioux lands. From 1887 to 1920, Indian reservation lands shrink to one half their pre-allotment size.

1888 - Red Cloud invites the Jesuits to the reservation to establish a school for Lakota children in order to avoid sending children off the reservation.

Spotted Elk's band of Lakota, later massacred at Wounded Knee (Library of Congress)

1890 - Sitting Bull is killed in his home while being arrested for allowing his people to participate in the Ghost Dance. On December 29, the Wounded Knee massacre occurs when Miniconjou Indians under Spotted Elk (aka Big Foot), returning from the Ghost Dance via Pine Ridge, are searched and disarmed by U.S. soldiers. After a single shot kills a U.S. officer, the soldiers go on a rampage and kill the chief and over 300 Indian men, women and children, many running for their lives.

1894 - The U.S. Army imprisons "hostile" Hopi leaders in military facilities on Alcatraz Island.

1898 - The Curtis Act re-affirms allotment of tribal lands on Indian reservations and ends tribal sovereignty in the territories.

1906 - The Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities makes excavation, theft or destruction of historic or prehistoric ruins or objects of antiquity on federal lands a criminal offense. Dead Indians and Indian artifacts are defined as "archeological resources," thus considered federal property.

1907 - Oklahoma becomes the 46th state, opening the former Indian Territory to further white settlement.

1910 - Plains tribes, revive the traditional Sun Dance, the communal religious ceremony conducted by many of the Plains Indians who hunted buffalo in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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