150 Years of the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty
My family’s ties to the fate of the Lakota Nation
The entirety of the last year and a half has been an epic journey to discover my heritage. It all started when I was laid off from my job at AppNexus (advertising tech company). In all honesty, it was soul draining engineering work for me just serving up ads and helping the advertising economy humming along. I wanted more, but I didn’t know what. I wanted to quit, but I thought No I need a job. I don’t know how I’d live without this income. The universe did not see things exactly the same way, so it pushed me out of my nest like a good mother might.
After I was laid off and told I didn’t need to come into work anymore, I met up with my good friend Sky. His father is a Paiute medicine man who had sadly passed over into the spirit world. He sent me there in honor of his father, because his father Calvin Hecocta would have been there. After a short while, I made my way over to the land of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people. I ended up at the Oceti Sakowin Camp. I never felt like I was there long enough, but that was just merely the beginning of my journey finding out how my life intertwines with the Sioux Nation of Indians.
After that, I traveled around the country I ended up spending nearly four months out in the Florida Everglades. At least one week I was out there mostly by myself keeping the fire going and cooking for myself. I became quite adept at making sure the coals were always hot enough to build a fire back up within 15 minutes.
Next I found myself in Maine. I had gone to Wabanaki territory for a ceremony of healing called “Healing Turtle Island”. I met up with my uncle and our elder and medicine man from Florida, Bobby C. Billy. I helped support them and provide what I could for the elders at that meeting.
After a brief excursion with Geeks Without Bounds to Las Vegas for some security conferences (bSides and DEFCON), I found myself back on Lakota land at the Wiconi Un Tipi camp. I found myself continuing to learn bits of the language and songs. It felt natural for me and the land seemed very familiar to me. Maybe the familiarity came from having grown up in the Midwest as a teenager. Maybe the closeness from my family having migrated through it over a couple of generations.
A month ago, I was reading “The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West” by Peter Cozzens. As I read, I noticed the mention of a General Alfred H. Terry. On my father’s side, my grandmother’s name is Terry and we have stories in my family of people working with the Lakota. I turn to a page with a photograph of him and see some family resemblance. Despite feeling a connection to this person, I wasn’t entirely certain of our connection. There were several Terry families which came across to the colonies and I wanted to be sure.
I spent a good part of two days piecing together the research I had already done with some census records and a book on the Terry’s I had found. I was able to trace our lineage all the way back to the founding on Springfield, Massachusetts and Enfield, Connecticut. Twelve generations ago Stephen Terry came across to help William Pynchon establish Agawam Plantation along the Chicopee River. It turned out that in the kinship system most people are used to, Gen. Terry is my fourth cousin four times removed (his great-great-grandfather is my great-great-grandfather’s great-great-grandfather’s brother). On my mother’s side of our family the kinship system is a bit different. In the Spanish kinship system, he would be considered my great-great-great-uncle. However, most of the time the people in my family have always asked me to refer to uncles as parents and great uncles as grandparents. In this sense, I consider Terry my great-great-grandfather.
The treaty is problematic for several reasons. It attempts to constrict the culture of the Lakota. By providing clothing it attempted to ensure they stop dressing in their traditional manner. By providing schooling, it controlled what they were taught — especially with the introduction of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Additionally, there are many provisions which push towards moving completely to an agriculture based society without the traditional hunt. By ensuring no interference on the railroad, it ensured the area the Buffalo, the Pte Oyate, would be constrained. Eventually, the Pte Oyate were over hunted by colonizers and were only saved by ranchers stealing them and starting to raise them privately. The treaty promised “the right to hunt on any lands north of North Platte, and on the Republican Fork of the Smoky Hill river, so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.” This was pretty hollow, especially since the numbers of buffalo were dwindling since 1810 and the US knew this since it counted the Pte Oyate in the decennial census.
My mother is from Veracruz, Mexico. It’s a state in the south along the Gulf of Mexico. There’s a gourd there which is related to an endangered gourd in the Everglades of Florida. Her village used to be part of the Olmec civilization. It is right to the south of the Rio Papaloapan, near the Isthmus. The Mexica came and made us a part of their tribute system. Next came Cortez who was at first seen as an potential ally who could defeat the Mexica and restore freedom. Cortez converted everyone there to Catholicism — something which got worse as the Spanish Inquisition made its way to area, now know as New Spain. Unfortunately, Cortez also made us slaves and he brought additional slaves from Africa to augment us. We became worse off than we were under the Mexica. My mom’s village used to be one of Cortez’s sugarcane plantations. Today, it’s main exports are petroleum and sugar.
Because of everything which happened there, we no longer know what our ancestors were called. A few large Olmec heads were found within five miles of my mom’s home. According to our mitochondrial DNA, we split off from the Maya a long time ago. Looking at the history of the Olmec, they split off from the Maya around 900BCE and settled north. This means our closest living relatives with their culture in tact are probably the O’depüt, otherwise known as the Zoque. We are also distantly related through our maternal line to Athabaskan speaking groups, Dené, Diné, Choctaw, Tsalagi (Cherokee), Cree, Chippewa, and possibly the mound builders of the early Cahokia mound builders of the Mississippian Culture through to the Tiwanaku in the south.
I am still searching for the connections I need to recover what I can about our culture. I wish it didn’t bother me as much as it does, but it does. I can’t change that.
All this is to say that I am both colonizer and colonized. My job is take the best parts of my cultures and develop them and share them to help improve myself and helpfully help those around me develop as people. My job is to be a story teller and weaver of people.
We are all related. The trees, the mushrooms, the animals, the insects, and everything that exists on this planet is all our relative. It is up to us to ensure the survival of that which supports us. It is up to us to support one another, especially cultures which are different from our own.
Too often we don’t fully understand what culture is. We are blind to the culture in which we were raised. Sometimes, even when we butt up against another culture we don’t even realize that it’s culture which is causing the rift. Sometimes we just wonder why someone can’t deal with us or why they can’t adapt to different circumstances. We make the same error my great-great-grandfather made when he assumed the Lakota could dress as colonizers, farm like colonizers, eat like colonizers, and speak like colonizers. To do that is to change a people and lose a culture. Fortunately, the Lakota have been persistent in keeping their beliefs around despite the punishment that meant they would receive.
I’m fortunate that, by chance or by spirit, I found a group walking from Rosebud, SD to Ft. Laramie, WY. The group was looking for other descendants of treaty signers, but they were having bad luck. They were finding no one until I commented on a friends post about the treaty’s anniversary. I had about 5 major obstacles to getting there, but every thing aligned perfectly for me to show up there.
Kuali tonalli. Ne no toka Kuautlajtoatsin. Good day. My Nahuatl name is Cuauhtla’toatzin — which translates to Little Speaking Eagle. My English name is Jillian Ada Burrows. Pilomayaye for inviting me. I have much wopila for the opportunity to be on this prayer walk with you and that everything worked out for me to be here.
If you couldn’t tell, I am mixed race. My mother is indigenous from Mexico. My father is American. Gen. Alfred Terry is my great-great-grandfather and he signed the 1868 Treaty of Ft. Laramie. He just wanted the fighting to stop and he didn’t see anything wrong with all the Lakota people becoming farmers. However, that was his blind spot. He didn’t see the culture as a culture. The 1868 treaty is a bit of raw deal in that regard. It attempts to get rid of the culture of the Lakota. The treaty allows for hunting for as long as the numbers of buffalo justify it. The US government knew this was changing. They had detailed maps of where the buffalo where since 1810. The only thing useful about treaty is that it has a provision for negotiating a new treaty to supersede it.
I know a thing or two about losing culture. My mother’s people do not know their name. We were made slaves by Cortez and converted to Christianity. Our only remnants of culture are around our food. My mother grew up grinding maize into masa on the metate — but even that went away when she was seven and the village was modernized. Afterward, only our food remained the same. It is terrible to loose one’s culture and I’m sorry that my ancestor attempted to do that to the Lakota people to end the war.
We are weaving with our actions. Everything we do is weaving a pattern through time and space. We need to choose the best actions we can to put into that pattern, because it is permanent. We need to honor different cultures. We need to take the best of our cultures and put that forward. We need to build new cultures which can help us weave a beautiful pattern through our lives.
[This is an approximation of what I said during one or our meetings. For more teaching in a similar vein, see Weaving our Worlds]
