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UNIT 14: Federal Indian Policy Series

Reservation System

From 1850 to 1887, the United States shifted from removing Tribal nations to confining them. Reservations were promised as permanent homelands. Most weren't kept that way. This unit, you research what happened.

📜 7 Stages
ðŸŠķ Intermediate
⏱ïļ 45-60 min per stage
1850 - 1887

Federal Indian Policy Series: Unit 14 of 19

This unit is part of an eight-era series. Each era gets its own research website. When all eight are complete, you will combine them into one multi-page site in Unit 20.

Unit 12 · Treaty-Making Unit 13 · Removal Unit 14 · Reservation System Unit 15 · Allotment & Assimilation Unit 16 · Reorganization Unit 17 · Termination Unit 18 · Self-Determination Unit 19 · Nation Rebuilding

The Big Idea

If you can't drive people off the continent, define the smallest possible parcel of their homeland, call it a reservation, and promise it will be permanent. That was the logic. Understanding how the Reservation System was built - and how it was immediately undermined - is essential to understanding the land base Tribal nations have today.

In this unit, you'll build a research website about the Reservation System Era. The new CSS pattern is a pull quote - a large, styled quotation from a Tribal leader of the era, built with a CSS pseudo-element that creates an oversized decorative quotation mark. Words from people who lived this history deserve to stand out on the page.

You'll research the six Tribal nations that held out, resisted, or were most directly shaped by reservation policy in the Great Plains region. Your 'My Research' section is where your voice goes.

By the end of this unit, you'll be able to say "I can..."

  • Build a CSS pull quote with a decorative pseudo-element quotation mark
  • Create a nations grid with profile cards for each Tribal nation
  • Build a treaty comparison section with before/after framing
  • Research the Reservation System Era and document its impact on specific nations
  • Write your own analysis and publish it as a section of your site

What You'll Build

A research website about the Reservation System Era (1850-1887) - six sections, Prussian blue archival design.

Pull quotes from Tribal leaders who lived this era. Nation profiles. Treaty cards. A then/now comparison. Your research in your own words.

The voices in this unit are real. Building a website for them is a form of honoring what they said.

The reservations that exist today were shaped by this era. This unit explains how.

Your learning path

The 7 Stages

Stage 1 Foundation Design system + hero Stage 2 The Policy What drove reservation policy Stage 3 The Treaties Fort Laramie 1851 & 1868 Stage 4 The Voices CSS pull quotes & blockquotes Stage 5 The Nations Regional reservations + your nation Stage 6 My Research Live writing section Stage 7 Today Era's living impact
Let's Begin

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Sources

The historical and legal content in this unit draws from federal primary sources, peer-reviewed academic scholarship, Tribal nation official records, and the Smithsonian Institution. The Reservation System era is extensively documented in treaty records, congressional proceedings, and Supreme Court decisions that are publicly available. When you research your own nation for the Nations section, use the official Tribal nation websites listed under Student Research Resources below.

Primary Treaty & Legislative Sources

Academic & Scholarly Sources

  • Ostler, Jeffrey. The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground. Penguin Library of American Indian History, 2010. The most thorough academic account of the Fort Laramie Treaty, the Black Hills seizure, and the legal claims that followed. Readable and rigorously sourced.
  • Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. University of Nebraska Press, 1984. The standard scholarly reference on federal Indian policy across all eras. Essential for understanding reservation policy in its full administrative and political context.
  • Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2014. Frames the reservation era within the longer history of U.S. settler colonialism and provides an essential counter to policy-centered accounts that treat dispossession as bureaucratic process rather than deliberate strategy.
  • Wilkins, David E. American Indian Politics and the American Political System. Rowman & Littlefield. Situates the reservation system within the broader political relationship between Tribal nations and the United States, including the legal doctrines that enabled reservation boundaries to be redrawn without meaningful Tribal consent.

Tribal Nation Sources

Museum & Institutional Sources

Student Research Resources

Educational Standards

This unit aligns with computer science, social studies, and Indigenous education standards across MN, ND, and SD. Click a panel to expand.

  • OSEU.SS.H.2, Federal Policy and Self-Determination (All Grades): Students will analyze how federal policies affected the sovereignty, land base, and self-determination of Tribal nations over time. (The Reservation System is the second major federal policy era students encounter in this series. Where the Removal Era displaced nations from their homelands entirely, the Reservation System confined them within shrinking boundaries. The Treaties section documents both Fort Laramie treaties: what was promised, what was violated, and how Congress unilaterally seized the Black Hills in 1877 without the consent required by the treaty itself. Students learn to read treaty language, not as a historical artifact, but as a legal document whose terms still define the relationship between the U.S. government and Lakota nations today.)
  • OSEU.SS.H.3, Treaty Rights and Sovereignty (All Grades): Students will understand the history of treaty-making between the United States and Tribal nations and the significance of those treaties as legally binding agreements. (The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 is the central case study of this unit. The treaty was signed, ratified, and then violated within nine years. The Supreme Court affirmed in 1980 that the violation was unconstitutional. The Sioux Nation has refused compensation and continues to assert title. Students build the Treaties section to document this sequence: promise, violation, legal ruling, refusal of settlement. This is not a case of ambiguous legal history. It is a case of a clear treaty right being asserted for more than 150 years and still unresolved.)
  • OSEU.SS.C.3, Tribal Leadership and Governance (All Grades): Students will examine how Tribal nations governed themselves and how Tribal leaders negotiated, resisted, and adapted to federal policy. (The Voices section introduces Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Spotted Tail as political leaders who engaged the federal treaty process from within Tribal governance structures. Red Cloud negotiated the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and secured the closure of the Bozeman Trail through sustained political pressure: one of the few times a Tribal nation forced the U.S. to abandon a military installation through diplomacy. Sitting Bull refused to sign away the Black Hills in 1875 and led the military resistance at Little Bighorn. Students build pull quote components for each leader, learning to present historical voices with proper sourcing and attribution.)
  • OSEU.ELA.W.1, Research Writing (All Grades): Students will produce clear and coherent writing appropriate to task and purpose, including research-based documentation of historical events and communities. (Stage 5 asks students to research a specific reservation or Tribal nation from their own region and add a documented section to their website. The task is intentionally personal: Native students are asked to document their own nation, and non-Native students choose a Tribal community they want to understand. This is not background research that disappears into a citation: it becomes a published section of the student's site, written in their voice and attributed to verified sources.)
  • CSTA 2-AP-11 (Grades 6-8): Create clearly named variables that represent different data types and perform operations on their values. (Stage 1 extends the CSS custom property design system for the third time in this series. Students are not creating variables from scratch: they are modifying an existing system, which is closer to professional development work than the initial variable-creation exercise in Unit 11. The distinction matters pedagogically: extending a system requires understanding what the variables control and why, not just knowing that variables exist.)
  • CSTA 2-AP-16 (Grades 6-8): Incorporate existing code, media, and libraries into original programs, and give attribution. (The pull quote component introduced in Stage 4 is built using the CSS ::before pseudo-element and the content property: techniques from CSS that students have not used before. They are adding a new capability to an existing codebase rather than building from scratch. The <cite> element used to attribute each quote teaches the HTML semantic standard for source attribution, which is also the standard for crediting existing code and media in web development.)
  • ISTE 1c, Empowered Learner: Students use technology to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways. (Stage 5's personal research section produces a different kind of output than any prior stage: a documented section of the student's own website about a Tribal nation they chose. Students who are Native add a section about their own nation. Students who are not Native practice the research skill of going directly to Tribal nation official sources to learn about a community. Both outcomes demonstrate learning in a form that is meaningful and publicly readable.)
  • ISTE 3b, Knowledge Constructor: Students evaluate the accuracy, perspective, credibility, and relevance of information, media, data, or other resources. (Every research task in this unit directs students to official Tribal nation websites as the primary source, with federal archives and academic scholarship as secondary sources. This is a deliberate sourcing hierarchy: the nation's own voice comes first. For the Nations section, students choose a specific nation and find its official website before writing anything. The sourcing standard is modeled by the instructor notes throughout the stage files and reinforced in every research prompt.)
  • MN Social Studies 8.4.4.18.1 (Grade 8): Describe the origin, development, and impact of major federal policies affecting American Indian people in Minnesota and the United States, including reservation confinement and treaty rights. (Minnesota's major Ojibwe and Dakota reservations: Red Lake, White Earth, Leech Lake, Fond du Lac, and the Dakota communities at Lower Sioux and Prairie Island: were established within the Reservation System era or in its immediate aftermath. Stage 5 asks Minnesota students specifically to research one of these communities using the nation's official website. The Nations section includes Red Lake Nation as a regional callout because Red Lake maintains a closed reservation with full Tribal ownership of land, making it one of the clearest contemporary examples of what reservation sovereignty means in practice.)
  • MN Social Studies 9-12.4.4.18.2 (Grades 9-12): Analyze the legal foundations of Tribal sovereignty and the federal trust relationship, including landmark treaty decisions and their ongoing impact. (The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and the Supreme Court's 1980 ruling in United States v. Sioux Nation are the unit's anchor legal documents. Students examine what the treaty promised, how it was violated, and how a Supreme Court ruling affirming that violation was answered by the Sioux Nation not with acceptance of compensation but with a continued assertion of land title. This is one of the clearest demonstrations available of how treaty rights remain legally active and politically contested nearly 160 years after a treaty was signed.)
  • MN CS K-12 6.2.1 (Grade 6): Use a development process to plan, design, and iteratively develop computational artifacts. (Each stage builds a new section of the site on top of the sections from prior stages. Stage 4's pull quote component is introduced, explained, and demonstrated in one stage: then students use the same ::before pseudo-element technique in a new context in Stage 5, reinforcing the pattern without re-teaching it. This is iterative development: not just building something once, but applying a learned pattern to a new problem.)
  • MN ELA 8.3.3.1 (Grade 8): Use technology to produce and publish writing that demonstrates command of the conventions of standard English. (Stage 5 and Stage 6 both require original writing. Stage 5 asks for a documented section about a specific Tribal nation. Stage 6 is the My Research section where students write 2 to 4 paragraphs about an era event, person, or Tribal community of their choosing. Both sections render the writing as formatted text on a live website, framing the work as publication rather than assignment.)
  • ND Indigenous Studies, History and Government (All Grades): Understand the historical and political relationship between the United States government and Indigenous nations of North Dakota, including the treaty-making period and reservation establishment. (North Dakota's Tribal nations: Standing Rock, Fort Berthold, Spirit Lake, Turtle Mountain, and the Lake Traverse portion of Sisseton-Wahpeton: all had their reservation boundaries established or significantly defined during the Reservation System era. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 directly defined territory that is now North Dakota, and its violation through the Black Hills seizure of 1877 is a foundational event in the region's history. Stage 5 asks North Dakota students to document one of these nations using official Tribal sources.)
  • ND SS 9-12.6.2 (Grades 9-12): Analyze the role of federal law and Supreme Court decisions in shaping the political, legal, and economic status of American Indian nations within the United States. (This unit's legal spine is the sequence: Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) → Black Hills seizure (1877) → United States v. Sioux Nation (1980) → refusal of compensation (ongoing). Each step in this sequence is a federal legal action or judicial decision with real consequences for living Tribal nations. Students trace this sequence in the Treaties section, then return to it in the Today section to discuss what the unresolved Black Hills claim means for Tribal sovereignty right now.)
  • ND CS 6.E.1 / 7.E.1 / 8.E.1 (Grades 6-8): Create artifacts by applying existing knowledge of computing concepts and practices. (The ::before pseudo-element technique introduced in Stage 4 applies the CSS knowledge base students have built across Units 11 and 12: selectors, properties, values, the box model, and display behavior: to a new and more advanced technique. Students are not encountering a new concept in isolation but applying accumulated knowledge to a specific design problem: how do you add large decorative quotation marks to a blockquote without any image files?)
  • ND CS 9-12.E.3 (Grades 9-12): Design and iteratively develop computational artifacts for practical intent, personal expression, or to address a societal need. (The Nations section's two-part structure: general context plus a personal research section: makes the student's site more than a historical report. It becomes a piece of documentation about a living community. For students who are members of a Tribal nation, this section of their site is their own nation's story, documented in their own words and attributed to their nation's official sources. That is a meaningful artifact: practically useful, personally significant, and culturally grounded.)
  • SD Social Studies 9-12.H.2 (Grades 9-12): Analyze the causes and effects of major historical events and federal policies affecting Indigenous peoples of South Dakota, including reservation boundaries, treaty violations, and the assertion of sovereign rights. (The Policy section built in Stage 2 presents the four forces that drove reservation policy: westward settler migration, the discovery of natural resources on Tribal lands, the federal government's "civilization" ideology, and the military capacity to enforce confinement. Students build context cards for each force, then trace how those forces converged in the specific case of the Black Hills. The unit does not treat the Black Hills seizure as an isolated incident but as the predictable outcome of a policy designed to acquire Tribal land regardless of treaty commitments.)
  • SD CS 6-8.AP.M.1 (Grades 6-8): Decompose problems and subproblems into parts to facilitate the design, implementation, and review of increasingly complex programs. (The pull quote component is built in layers: first the HTML structure (blockquote and cite), then the CSS for the text styling and border accent, then the ::before pseudo-element for the decorative quotation mark. Students build each layer with understanding before the next is added. By the time the component is complete, students understand not just what the ::before selector does but why it is the right tool for this specific problem: adding a presentational element without adding HTML markup.)