The Broken Treaties That Are Still Winning in Court
The treaties are not dead law. In 2020 the Supreme Court held in McGirt that a nineteenth-century Muscogee reservation was never disestablished. At Standing Rock, an 1868 treaty became a rallying cry. The Sioux still refuse the Black Hills billions. The finale weighs the verdict: for 250 years the record earns the series' hard title, and yet the promises keep resurfacing and sometimes winning — in Boldt, in Mille Lacs, in Herrera, in McGirt. It ends where it began, on the road to Sand Lake, with a measured reckoning of what was owed.
5 Jul 2026
The "Lost Tribe" the Treaties Forgot Entirely
Every other episode is about a broken promise. This one is about a promise never made. The St. Croix Chippewa were left out of the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe and lost their federal identity for eighty years — landless squatters known as 'the lost tribe' until 1934. Set against the 1850 Sandy Lake Tragedy, it is the human heart of the series: the Sand Lake community the narrator visited as a boy, and the poverty that follows when a nation can't even get onto the page. It closes with a modern echo — Alaska Natives, offered no treaties at all.
5 Jul 2026
Was It Genocide? Putting the American Record on Trial
If the laws had existed then, which administrations would face charges? This episode runs the record against the actual legal instruments — Nuremberg, the 1948 Genocide Convention, the Rome Statute — and steelmans the defense before weighing the case. It applies the law element by element to Removal, Sand Creek, the Dakota executions, the California genocide, and the boarding schools, where the government's own 2024 investigation documented at least 973 child deaths across 417 schools.
4 Jul 2026
What Native Leaders Said When the Treaties Were Broken
When the promises fell, the tribes answered — in words we mostly know only through the very people who broke them. This episode gathers the authenticated voices: Chief Joseph, Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Standing Bear's courtroom declaration that a Native man is a person under the law, Black Hawk, Ten Bears. And it handles a hard truth honestly — the famous Chief Seattle 'speech' was largely written by white authors decades and a century later. The record is real, but it is mediated, and that matters.
4 Jul 2026
Smallpox Blankets: What Actually Happened
Who 'used smallpox' against Native Americans? The honest answer is narrower than the legend — and the truth is more damning. This episode separates fact from myth: the one documented deliberate attempt, at British-held Fort Pitt in 1763, before the United States existed; the widely repeated 1837 claim that doesn't survive the evidence; and the far better-documented weapons the government did use — the massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, engineered starvation, and the deliberate extermination of the buffalo.
4 Jul 2026
The Presidents Who Inherited Andrew Jackson's Playbook
Andrew Jackson's belief — that Native nations must assimilate, remove, or vanish — outlived him by more than a century, carried by presidents of both parties. This episode follows the through-line: Lincoln approving the largest mass execution in American history at Mankato, Grant's 'Peace Policy' and the wars beneath it, Cleveland's Dawes Act that cost tribes some ninety million acres, and the 1953 Termination resolution. The vocabulary changed — removal, allotment, termination. The premise did not.
4 Jul 2026
Why the Sioux Refuse Over a Billion Dollars
The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty guaranteed the Black Hills to the Sioux for their 'absolute and undisturbed use,' and required three-quarters of the nation to approve any sale. Then gold was found — and the government took the mountains anyway. In 1980 the Supreme Court called it a taking, owed just compensation. That fund now exceeds a billion dollars, and the Sioux still refuse it, because taking the money would mean selling sacred land. The most famous broken treaty — and the one still open.
4 Jul 2026
How Bureaucracy and Gold Broke the Great Plains Treaties
On the Plains the pattern was almost mechanical: promise territory and rations, then cut the annuities, fail to stop the gold-seekers, and send the Army when starving people left to hunt. This episode follows the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, whose payment term Congress slashed without telling the tribes, and the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty, whose undelivered rations helped drive the Kiowa and Comanche into the Red River War. The promise to settlers was kept. The promise to the tribes was not.
4 Jul 2026
How the Supreme Court Made Breaking Native Treaties Legal
If the United States broke almost every treaty it signed, how was any of it legal? This episode traces the machine: the Doctrine of Discovery imported into American law in Johnson v. M'Intosh, the Marshall Trilogy that reduced sovereign nations to 'domestic dependent nations,' and the 1903 decision Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock — the 'Indians' Dred Scott' — which held that Congress could break any treaty at will. We steelman the legal defense before weighing what it cost.
4 Jul 2026
The Fraudulent Treaty Behind the Trail of Tears
The Treaty of New Echota was signed by a handful of Cherokee men who had no authority to sign anything. A petition of sixteen thousand Cherokees begged the Senate to reject it. The Senate ratified it by a single vote — and used it to justify the Trail of Tears. This episode traces removal through two treaties, from the Choctaws' Dancing Rabbit Creek to New Echota, where a Supreme Court victory was simply defied and thousands died on the roads west.
4 Jul 2026
How Andrew Jackson Turned Conquest Into Federal Policy
Even his own Creek allies weren't spared. After the Creek War, Andrew Jackson forced the entire Creek Nation to cede twenty-three million acres in a 'conquered peace.' This episode takes Jackson's own words seriously — his 1830 message to Congress framing removal as benevolent and inevitable — and measures that rhetoric against the Indian Removal Act and the machinery of dispossession it set in motion. It is the ideological engine of everything that follows.
4 Jul 2026
The "Permanent" Native Border That Lasted Barely a Decade
The 1795 Treaty of Greenville drew a line across Ohio meant to separate Native land from American settlement forever. Settlers crossed it almost immediately. When William Henry Harrison bought three million acres in 1809 from chiefs with no authority to sell, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh built a confederacy on a radical idea: the land was held in common and no single chief could sign it away. This is the story of a treaty broken in the making — and the war it ignited.
4 Jul 2026
How the Founders Broke Their Word to the Iroquois
The 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, signed for George Washington with the Haudenosaunee, is still marked by an annual treaty-cloth payment today. But this episode shows both sides of the founders' word: the punitive 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the states and land companies that undercut federal treaties, and the twentieth-century violations — the Kinzua Dam and the Niagara Power Project — that drowned and seized land the United States had sworn to protect forever.
4 Jul 2026
The First Treaty the United States Ever Broke
The first treaty the United States ever signed with a Native nation — the 1778 Treaty of Fort Pitt with the Lenape — offered something astonishing: the possibility of a Native-led 14th state. Within four years the promise was ash: the pro-American leader White Eyes was dead and very likely murdered, the promised protection never came, and Pennsylvania militia slaughtered ninety-six unarmed Christian Lenape at Gnadenhütten. The template for the next two centuries was set at the founding.
4 Jul 2026
How the U.S. Broke Nearly 370 Treaties With Native Nations
Between 1778 and 1871 the United States ratified roughly 370 treaties with Native nations — and broke essentially all of them. This opening episode sets the scale and the stakes: the 'as long as the grass grows' language of permanence, the Doctrine of Discovery that treated a continent as there for the taking, and the legal endpoint that would make treaty-breaking lawful. It begins with a boy's visit to the Sand Lake community of the St. Croix Chippewa, a nation left out of the treaties entirely, and lays out the six questions that drive the whole series.
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