Forged in Resistance:

The Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation and the Long Road Home to Southeastern Montana

The Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation occupies a singular place in the historical, cultural, and political landscape of Montana. Located in southeastern Montana, this 444,000-acre reservation was established by executive order in 1884, bounded on the west by the Crow Reservation and on the east by the Tongue River.  It is a land of austere and particular beauty. With a semi-arid climate receiving less than sixteen inches of annual rainfall, the region hosts near-desert plants, open ponderosa pine plateau, and valley country shaped by the carving action of erosion, leaving rugged and colorful land formations with spectacular views of the badlands.  Within this terrain, the Northern Cheyenne people have maintained their presence, their identity, and their sovereignty against extraordinary odds for more than a century and a half. Their story is not merely one of survival. It is a record of deliberate, strategic, and often remarkable resistance.

Origins and Early History

The people who call themselves Tsis tsis’tas, meaning “the beautiful people,” represent one of the most historically documented Indigenous nations of the Northern Plains. The Cheyenne comprise two Native American groups, the So’taeo’o and the Tsetsehestahese, whose tribes merged in the early nineteenth century. Over the past four centuries, the Cheyenne evolved across different lifestyles on the Great Plains, having settled the Black Hills of South Dakota and the Powder River Country of present-day Montana and Wyoming. 

By the mid-nineteenth century, pressure from American westward expansion intensified dramatically. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty included the sacred Black Hills and described unceded Indian territory, with the United States agreeing and stipulating that the country north of the North Platte River and east of the summits of the Big Horn Mountains would be held and considered unceded Indian territory, and that no white person or persons would be permitted to settle upon or occupy any portion of the same.  Those treaty stipulations would prove hollow within a decade.

The Northern Cheyenne Exodus, 1878-1879

No episode in the history of the Northern Cheyenne carries greater weight, or greater meaning, than the events of 1878 and 1879. Following the Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876, the U.S. government accelerated its removal policies on the Northern Plains. Nine hundred and seventy-two Cheyenne were moved from Red Cloud’s Agency south to Oklahoma to live with the Southern Cheyenne. After arrival, many people contracted malaria. 

The conditions at the Darlington Agency in Indian Territory proved devastating. The agency failed to provide sufficient medical supplies, beef rations, or winter clothing, and forty-one people died that first winter. Little Wolf and Dull Knife requested permission to return with their people to Montana, but agent John DeBras Miles and the Indian Bureau repeatedly denied their requests.  The bison, which had anchored Northern Cheyenne subsistence and culture for generations, had been systematically eliminated. When the Cheyenne attempted to hunt game they found none: by the winter of 1877-78 the territory was a wasteland of dead buffalo remains, as the U.S. Army had sanctioned the wholesale slaughter of bison herds. 

In the summer of 1878, the situation reached a breaking point. In September 1878, the children, women, and men of the Northern Cheyenne, under Chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf, decided reservation life in the south did not suit them. They left the reservation without the U.S. government’s permission hoping to return to their former homelands on the Northern Plains.  The entire band, now numbering around 350, had slipped away, mounted, and started off for their home in the north on September 9, 1878. 

A running fight ensued through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, and in every engagement, the Indians emerged either victorious or managed to escape the soldiers until one group, under Dull Knife, finally surrendered to the U.S. Army in northwestern Nebraska, nearly two months and 700 miles later.  The ordeal that followed Dull Knife’s surrender at Fort Robinson in Nebraska stands among the most harrowing episodes in nineteenth-century American history. On January 3, 1879, the Cheyenne were ordered to return south to the Southern Cheyenne reservation. When the Cheyenne refused, bars were put on the windows and all rations were stopped, including wood for heat. 

Little Wolf’s band, meanwhile, successfully reached the Powder River country. Those in Little Wolf’s group made their way to Montana where they were finally allowed to remain.  The entire exodus, characterized by Northern Cheyenne people themselves not as a flight but as a homecoming, covered hundreds of miles through hostile territory and demonstrated a determination that could not be extinguished by military force or bureaucratic indifference. Historian James N. Leiker and Ramon Powers, writing in The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory, noted that one of their Northern Cheyenne colleagues, Steve Brady, properly suggested the trail might better be termed a homecoming trail rather than an exodus trail, in that the Northern Cheyenne viewed the journey as coming to their homeland, rather than departing from Indian territory.

Establishment of the Reservation

The aftermath of the Exodus compelled a reluctant federal government to acknowledge what the Northern Cheyenne had made plain through their actions: they would not be removed to Oklahoma again. The United States government established the Tongue River Indian Reservation, consisting of 371,200 acres of land, under the executive order given by President Chester A. Arthur on November 16, 1884.  The original boundaries, however, did not include all the Cheyenne who had homesteaded in the region, particularly those near the Tongue River itself. The federal government expanded the reservation in 1890, and again in 1900, making the Tongue River the eastern boundary and swelling the reservation from its previous 256,000 acres to approximately 400,000 acres. 

Those Cheyenne who had homesteaded east of the Tongue River were relocated to reservation lands west of the river.  This internal displacement, while far less violent than the Oklahoma removal, underscores the persistent disruption that federal Indian policy imposed on Northern Cheyenne communities even within their own recognized territory. The reservation’s boundaries in Rosebud and Big Horn Counties have remained largely intact since the 1900 expansion.

Allotment, Land Tenure, and Tribal Resilience

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought the pressures of the federal allotment policy, which divided tribal lands among individual members and opened surplus acreage to non-Indian settlement. The Northern Cheyenne, however, managed to retain an exceptional degree of land ownership relative to many other tribes. The Northern Cheyenne retain over 90 percent ownership of reservation lands,  a figure that stands as testament to the tribe’s sustained vigilance over its territorial base.

The Missouri River Basin Investigations Project, a 1969 federal study examining ranch management on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, documented the economic structures of Indian livestock operations and compared them with non-Indian ranching in adjacent counties, recommending strategies to assist Indian operators in improving financial returns. That study reflects a mid-twentieth century federal orientation toward reservation economies that simultaneously acknowledged the challenges faced by tribal ranchers while failing to address the structural inequities of the trust system. The reservation’s cattle and agricultural economy, while modest, remained one of the primary livelihoods available on the reservation through much of the twentieth century.

The Coal Wars: Sovereignty, Industry, and the Environment

No chapter in the modern history of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation is more consequential than the conflict over coal development. The Powder River Basin, which underlies the reservation and its surrounding region, contains one of the largest concentrations of low-sulfur coal in the United States. The coal reserves under the reservation are estimated at between 20 and 50 billion tons of low-sulfur coal. 

Beginning in the 1960s, federal bureaucrats and energy corporations moved to exploit those reserves with little input from the people most directly affected. From 1966 to 1971, the tribal council signed leases with coal companies including Peabody Coal, Consolidated Coal, and Amax Coal. Acting as trustee for the tribe, the Bureau of Indian Affairs failed to complete an environmental impact statement, sold the exploration rights for around nine dollars per acre, and agreed to royalties for the tribe of only 17.5 cents per ton. 

When tribal members came to understand the scope of what had been arranged without their genuine consent, the response was swift and emphatic. After months of listening to their constituents and conducting their own investigations, the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council voted eleven to zero on March 5, 1973, to seek cancellation of all the coal permits and leases. The tribe petitioned the Secretary of the Interior, explaining the permits and leases violated 36 federal regulations. 

The Interior Department’s response, delivered by Secretary Rogers C. B. Morton, was equivocal rather than decisive. The Northern Cheyenne Tribe petitioned the Secretary in January 1974 to withdraw the Department’s approval of leases and exploratory permits for strip mining of coal on about 214,000 acres of the 433,740-acre reservation. Morton’s decision granted the petition in part, denied it in part, referred some questions to the Department’s Office of Hearings and Appeals, and held some decisions in abeyance.  What followed was a protracted legal and political struggle that extended across decades.

The tribe’s most creative legal maneuver came through environmental law. The Northern Cheyenne became the first government to voluntarily adopt the strictest air quality standard, a Class I airshed, the same as national parks. The tribe used its new leverage to force the coal plant’s owners to install state-of-the-art pollution scrubbers and to pay for the tribe’s air monitoring.  This reclassification gave the tribe a powerful legal instrument it wielded repeatedly against proposed mining expansions and power plant construction in the region.

The Northern Cheyenne also managed to void coal leases on three sides of the reservation in 1982, cancelled the permit of a new coal mine east of the reservation in 1997, and retained ownership of all subsurface rights on the reservation.  These achievements, accomplished against the combined resources of federal agencies and multinational energy corporations, represent one of the most consequential instances of Indigenous environmental sovereignty in American history.

The tension between environmental protection and economic necessity has never been fully resolved. Some estimates report that half to two-thirds of adults on the reservation are without steady work,  and the coal plant in Colstrip, located twenty miles north of the reservation, has long served as an employer for Northern Cheyenne people despite the tribe’s official opposition to coal development more broadly. In 2016, the Tribe passed a clean energy ordinance committing to carbon neutrality as a path to employment and energy sovereignty, and a solar project funded by a Department of Energy grant aims to power more than 100 homes and several small commercial sites through solar energy. 

Culture, Language, and Education

At the center of the reservation, in the tribal capital of Lame Deer, the work of cultural continuity proceeds alongside these environmental and economic struggles. Lame Deer, with about 4,000 residents of whom 92 percent are American Indian, is the capital of the Northern Cheyenne nation.  The town’s Cheyenne name, Meave’ho’eno, translates roughly as “the giving place,” a name that carries the memory of its origins as a government ration distribution point while also gesturing toward a more reciprocal understanding of community.

Chief Dull Knife College, named for the great leader of the 1878 Exodus, stands as the reservation’s most visible educational institution. Chartered in September 1975 by tribal ordinance as the Northern Cheyenne Indian Action Program, Incorporated, the college originally operated out of U.S. Army tents until the Bureau of Indian Affairs eventually provided funds for facilities.  The institution’s founding mission centered on vocational training for mining and construction work, but it evolved over subsequent decades into a broader educational enterprise. The college also leads tribal language preservation efforts, with 10 percent of students enrolled in Cheyenne language classes. 

The Cheyenne language, an Algonquian tongue of considerable complexity, represents one of the most urgent dimensions of cultural preservation on the reservation. A century-long erosion of the tribe’s tongue began to slow thanks to a language teacher certification program at Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer. In the four years following the program’s development, the number of certified language instructors nearly doubled to thirteen. College President Richard Littlebear, who holds a doctorate in education, described the stakes plainly: once you lose a language, you lose a culture. Language transmits culture. It forms the basis for identity. 

The college’s institutional self-understanding is inseparable from the historical narrative of its namesake. Chief Dull Knife, also known as Morning Star, helped lead the Northern Cheyenne people back to Montana from Oklahoma in 1878-1879. His visionary words became the college’s mission statement: we can no longer live the way we used to. We cannot move around any more the way we were brought up. We have to learn a new way of life. Let us ask for schools to be built in our country so that our children can go to these schools and learn this new way of life. 

The reservation also maintains the St. Labre Indian School in Ashland, established in 1884 by the Franciscan Order, whose visitor center and Cheyenne Indian Museum serve as important showplaces of Cheyenne heritage and art.  Cultural observance remains vital across the reservation’s five districts. The annual Cheyenne Victory Days celebration in Busby commemorates the tribe’s role in the battles of the Little Bighorn and the Rosebud in 1876, events the Northern Cheyenne regard not as defeats but as demonstrations of military and cultural strength.

The Reservation Today

Approximately 5,000 Northern Cheyenne, along with members of other tribes and non-Native Americans, live on the reservation. Lame Deer is the tribal and government agency headquarters, and there are four other districts that comprise the whole reservation.  The tribe’s enrolled membership extends well beyond the reservation’s physical boundaries. The 1993 repatriation of human remains of 26 relatives, nineteen of whom were returned for burial from the Smithsonian Institution, and seven of whom were men, women, and children of Chief Morning Star’s band killed at Fort Robinson, represented a significant moment in the tribe’s ongoing effort to reclaim its full historical and spiritual heritage. 

The landscape itself carries layers of meaning that formal maps cannot capture. The Wolf Mountains ridge that runs across the reservation, the Tongue River watershed, the sites of Cheyenne chiefs’ burial grounds, the location of Custer’s last camp before the Little Bighorn, all constitute a living archive of Northern Cheyenne history. Flora found on the reservation is native to southeastern Montana’s ecoregion and is culturally significant to the Northern Cheyenne people.  Plants such as wild licorice, white sage, prairie coneflower, and Rocky Mountain juniper are woven into Cheyenne ceremonial and medicinal practice, their uses transmitted across generations alongside the language and the stories.

The Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation is neither a relic of the past nor simply a federal administrative unit. It is a functioning expression of tribal sovereignty, maintained through legal contest, cultural transmission, and physical presence on land that its people refused to abandon even when the entire apparatus of the United States government was marshaled to remove them. The journey from the Darlington Agency in Oklahoma back to the Powder River Basin was not completed in 1879. It continues in the classrooms of Chief Dull Knife College, in the deliberations of the Tribal Council, in the air monitoring stations on Badger Peak, and in the sound of the Cheyenne language spoken by students in Lame Deer.

Works Cited

Bureau of Indian Affairs, Office of Public Affairs. “Morton Announces Decision on Northern Cheyenne Coal Lands.” United States Department of the Interior. https://www.bia.gov/as-ia/opa/online-press-release/morton-announces-decision-northern-cheyenne-coal-lands. Accessed 22 Mar. 2026.

Earthjustice. “A Tribe Takes on Coal.” Earthjustice. https://earthjustice.org/article/a-tribe-takes-on-coal. Accessed 22 Mar. 2026.

Kraker, Daniel. “Cheyenne May Yield to Coal.” Living on Earth. Public Radio International. https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=09-P13-00031&segmentID=3. Accessed 22 Mar. 2026.

Leiker, James N., and Ramon Powers. The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011.

Littlebear, Richard. “Cheyenne Language Surviving.” Billings Gazette. https://billingsgazette.com/news/local/cheyenne-language-surviving/article_1b41e541-1c6a-577d-bef8-5bd2bf911c2a.html. Accessed 22 Mar. 2026.

Missouri River Basin Investigations Project. Ranch Management, Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, Montana. Billings: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1969. Montana History Portal. https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/5741. Accessed 22 Mar. 2026.

Montana Historical Society. “Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation.” Montana History Portal. https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/128163. Accessed 22 Mar. 2026.

Montana Tribal History Timelines: Northern Cheyenne. Helena: Montana Historical Society, Office of Public Instruction, 2017. https://mhs.mt.gov/education/IEFA/NorthernCheyenneTimeline.pdf. Accessed 22 Mar. 2026.

National Wildlife Federation Blog. “Northern Cheyenne Tribe at a Crossroads: To Develop Coal or Not?” National Wildlife Federation. https://blog.nwf.org/2012/09/northern-cheyenne-tribe-at-a-crossroads-to-develop-coal-or-not/. Accessed 22 Mar. 2026.

Northern Cheyenne Tribe. “Va’tame (Welcome) to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.” Visit Southeast Montana. https://southeastmontana.com/cheyenne. Accessed 22 Mar. 2026.

Spang, Alonzo. “The Spiritual Journey of Chief Dull Knife College.” Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education. https://tribalcollegejournal.org/the-spiritual-journey-of-chief-dull-knife-college/. Accessed 22 Mar. 2026.

University of Montana. “Northern Cheyenne Reservation.” Native Plant Garden. https://www.umt.edu/native-garden/circles/northern-cheyenne.php. Accessed 22 Mar. 2026.