Project by Elizabeth Kostina, Sofia Tomacruz
This project maps the historical and ongoing land loss of the Lakota Sioux from the original Očhéthi Šakówiŋ territory through the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie treaties, the illegal 1877 seizure of the Black Hills, and the allotment-era fragmentation of the Great Sioux Reservation — as a single stratigraphic document in which time is encoded as texture and density. The central question is how do the boundaries defined in the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie compare to land currently held by the Lakota, and how does the resulting patchwork of reservation, private, and federal land make legible the tools of encroachment, not merely its effects? The Black Hills (Pahá Sápa) will anchor the composition: surrounding them, every zone of loss is filled with the actual text of the legal instrument that caused it: Article XII of the 1868 Treaty, the Act of February 28, 1877, the General Allotment Act of 1887.
