How Native Americans Planned For The Future | 7 Generations Rule

How Native Americans Planned For The Future | 7 Generations Rule In 1862 a Santee Dakota council debated war for 11 days while a land office 200 miles south processed 47 claims an hour. The settlers planned in weeks. The Dakota planned in lifetimes. What the federal agents never learned was that tribal councils operated under a rule older than any European government in North America: every decision had to serve the seventh generation, 175 years forward. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy encoded it in wampum before 1525. By 1744 treaty negotiators watched councils debate forests that wouldn't mature for 80 years. In 1851 the Fort Laramie Treaty promised Lakota rights for as long as buffalo existed in sufficient numbers but didn't define sufficient. When tribal leaders asked what would happen in the eighth generation, commissioners said the government would negotiate in good faith when the time came. That answer meant nothing under the seven generations rule. By 1878 the buffalo were gone and bands faced an impossible equation: hold the rule and the seventh generation would never exist because children were starving now, or break it and the land would be gone forever. On January 9, 1879, 64 Northern Cheyenne locked in a barracks at Fort Robinson ran into a blizzard rather than sign a return south. Thirty-two died in the snow. The seventh generation from 1868 matured in 2018 and inherited reservations that had lost 90 percent of their treaty boundaries, mercury in every guaranteed fishing lake, and topsoil in the Gulf of Mexico. The Ogallala Aquifer dropped 150 feet. The cost the elders predicted in council arrived exactly as warned.