Broken Treaties: Every Promise America Made and Broke

The United States made approximately 375 treaties with Native nations between 1778 and 1871. It violated every single one of them.^1^ That is not a rhetorical claim. It is the documented conclusion of legal scholars, historians, and the federal government’s own records. The mechanisms of violation varied — renegotiation under coercion, congressional unilateral action, deliberate non-enforcement — but the pattern held across nearly a century of treaty-making: promises made, promises broken, land taken.

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Treaty-Making Was a Mechanism for Dismantling Native Sovereignty

The treaty system was itself an artifact of legal fiction. Under U.S. constitutional law, treaties with Native nations carried the same legal weight as treaties with foreign governments — they were “the supreme Law of the Land” under Article VI of the Constitution. This framing simultaneously acknowledged Native sovereignty and provided a mechanism for dismantling it. A “treaty” implied a negotiation between equals. In practice, U.S. commissioners negotiated under conditions of military threat, economic leverage, or outright fraud, frequently working with factions who lacked authority to bind their entire nation.

The Treaty of Hopewell in 1785 — one of the earliest treaties with the Cherokee — promised that the United States would “give peace to all the Cherokees” and recognized their territorial boundaries. Within five years, settlers were regularly crossing those boundaries with no federal enforcement. The pattern was established almost immediately: make the promise, allow the violation, use the violations to justify renegotiation on less favorable terms.

How the Fort Laramie Treaty Was Broken Within Six Years

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 is among the most cited examples of explicit, premeditated treaty violation. Signed after the U.S. Army’s costly failure in Red Cloud’s War — a conflict in which the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho successfully closed the Bozeman Trail — the treaty guaranteed the Great Sioux Reservation, encompassing approximately 60 million acres including the Black Hills of present-day South Dakota, “as long as the grass shall grow and the waters flow.”^2^

The guarantee lasted six years. In 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills that confirmed gold deposits. Within months, thousands of miners were illegally entering Lakota territory. The federal government’s response was not to enforce the treaty. It was to send a commission to purchase the Black Hills. When Lakota leaders refused to sell, Congress passed the Agreement of 1877, unilaterally abrogating the 1868 treaty provisions protecting the Black Hills. This was done without the consent of three-fourths of adult male Lakota, which the treaty itself required for any modification.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the taking of the Black Hills had been an unconstitutional taking of property and awarded the Sioux Nation $17.5 million in compensation plus over a century of interest, totaling approximately $102 million at the time of the ruling. The Sioux Nation refused the money.^3^ The Black Hills, they argued, were not for sale. That money has been sitting in a federal trust account ever since, now valued at over $1 billion. The land has not been returned.

Congress Ended Treaty-Making — Then Took Land Directly

Congress ended formal treaty-making with Native nations in 1871 through the Indian Appropriations Act, which declared that no Native group would be recognized as “an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty.” Existing treaties remained theoretically in force, but the mechanism for creating new ones — however flawed — was gone. What replaced it was direct congressional action, unilateral and unconstrained by the treaty framework’s nominal requirement of mutual consent.

The General Allotment Act of 1887 — the Dawes Act — was the most consequential. It dissolved communally held reservation land into individual allotments of 160 acres per family and opened the “surplus” land to white homesteading. Between 1887 and 1934, Native nations lost approximately 90 million of the roughly 138 million acres they had held at the time of the act’s passage.^4^ The land loss was not the result of warfare. It was the result of legislation that treated treaty-guaranteed land as available for redistribution to settlers.

The treaty rights that survived — fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest guaranteed by treaties signed in the 1850s, water rights in the Southwest, mineral rights on various reservations — have been the subject of ongoing legal battles through the twentieth century and into the present. United States v. Washington in 1974, known as the Boldt Decision, reaffirmed that Pacific Northwest tribes retained the right to 50 percent of the harvestable salmon catch under their mid-19th-century treaties. That decision took decades and multiple courts to enforce.

The treaties were not simply broken and forgotten. They remain the legal basis for claims that Native nations continue to press in federal courts. The argument is not historical grievance in the abstract — it is contract law: these were agreements, signed and ratified, and the obligations they created do not disappear because one party stopped honoring them. Courts have sometimes agreed. The same bad faith that ran through the treaty era built the reservation system that confined survivors, funded the boarding schools that took their children, and created the jurisdictional framework at the center of the MMIW crisis today. The federal government has more often found ways not to honor these obligations than to fulfill them.

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Sources:

1. Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. University of California Press, 1994.
2. Lazarus, Edward. Black Hills, White Justice: The Sioux Nation Versus the United States, 1775 to the Present. HarperCollins, 1991.
3. United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980).
4. Banner, Stuart. How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier. Harvard University Press, 2005.