Reclaiming Sacred Lands: Unveiling the Displacement Narrative — 55a — Dara Eaglestaff, Summer Afraid of Hawk, Angelina Wade, Eva Weddell, Summer Dupree with mentors Camille Griffith and Dana Gehring

The project aims to retell the displacement narrative of the Oceti Sakowin and their relationships with treaty lands and the buffalo nation. The Oceti Sakowin and the Buffalo nation have walked the same path since time immemorial. Since European contact, the people and buffalo have been restricted to smaller portions of land. Limiting access to utilizing ancestral lands for hunting and maintaining our way of life. We are retelling this narrative from Oceti Sakowin perspectives.  We read the 1851 Horse Creek Treaty (1851 Fort Laramie Treaty) and pulled key point locations and remapped the original treaty territories using ArcGIS Pro. We mapped the historical buffalo migration range and how it changed overtime using ArcGIS Pro.  The map layers were imported into Google Colab and Python was used to further define these territories into time periods. Not only have the boundaries of the native lands decreased dramatically over time but there is also a similar pattern between this decline and the buffalo migration range. This loss of land resulted in a decrease in the area of land available for hunting. This insecurity directly impacts our way of life, food sovereignty, and prevents cultural identity. Solutions to relieve this impact would include landback, co-management of land and buffalo, and seeking and elevating tribal input to create nation to nation reconciliation.

Oglala Lakota College
Camille Griffith and Dana Gehring