Crow Creek & Crow Creek Massacre

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Crow Creek and the Crow Creek Massacre When people associate South Dakota and Native Americans, many will think of Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse. However, few have heard of the Crow Creek Reservation in southern part of South Dakota, and even fewer people have actually heard of the massacre that took place there over several years ago. Just as a quick overview of Crow Creek, it is located in southern South Dakota, and at one time the reservation extended from the western border of the Big Horn Mountains to the eastern border of Minnesota, and from the northern border of Canada to the southern border of the Platte River [5]. The Crow Creek Reservation now extends across South Dakota about four-hundred miles in the three major counties of Hyde, Buffalo, and Hughes [5]. The reservation is home to 3,000 enrolled members, and its tribal headquarters is Fort Thompson, which is located just south of Pierre, South Dakota in Buffalo County, South Dakota [5]. The counties of Hyde, Buffalo, and Hughes are some of the poorest counties in South Dakota and in the United States [5]. The quality of life on the entire reservation is very low income. Many of the families that do live on the reservation live in overcrowded houses, and have sheets or even tin foil on the windows [5]. The quality of living on the Crow Creek reservation is not very high [4]. The Crow Creek Reservation was created by the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty; after the defeat of the Indian tribes in the Indian Wars of 1870 the reservation was then broken down in several smaller reservations [4]. Then in 1889, the United States reclaimed over 7.7 million acres of the South Dakota Sioux’s Black Hills and then assigned many of the families, that were currently living in the Black Hills, to the Crow Creek Reservation that is just south of Chamberlain, South Dakota [4]. Along with splitting up many extended families, the

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