Week 4 Community History Workshop: Reading the Fort Laramie Treaty

Part 1 — The Big Picture

This week you met tribal sovereignty, treaties as agreements between nations, removal, allotment, the boarding schools, and settler colonialism. In this workshop you read a real public record, three passages from the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the way the field reads every record: what it says, who made it, whom it affected, and what it leaves out. Then you place it in time, compare it with a second treaty that affected a different group, check a chatbot's reading of it, and reflect on what your own position let you see. This is the read-the-record mode of the Community History Workshop; the oral-history mode returns in later weeks, and a compare-and-connect step is built into Part 4.

Time budget: Plan for about 90 minutes.

Part 2 — The Task

Guiding question: What does the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 say in its own words, and what does reading it as an agreement between two nations show about what happened to the Black Hills in 1877?

Workshop data: Three passages from the Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) and the week's dated record

Source: Three short passages copied from the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, a public-domain treaty between the United States and the Sioux Nation, as transcribed on the National Archives' milestone-document page, with the dated events from Chapter 4. The passages use the treaty's own 1868 wording, including its term Indians; this course writes American Indian or a nation's own name in its own voice.

• Rows: 3 treaty passages (Articles I, II, and XII); the first scaffold table has one row per passage, 3 rows
• Article I: "From this day forward all war between the parties to this agreement shall forever cease."
• Article II, the reservation clause: the reservation "shall be and the same is set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians herein named"
• Article XII: "No treaty for the cession of any portion or part of the reservation herein described, which may be held in common, shall be of any validity or force as against the said Indians, unless executed and signed by at least three fourths of all the adult male Indians occupying or interested in the same"
• Dated record: Indian Removal Act, 1830; Fort Laramie Treaty, 1868; expedition after which gold was found in the Black Hills, 1874; confiscation of the Black Hills, 1877; Dawes Act, 1887
• Comparison treaty: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848, ended the war between the United States and Mexico; its Article VIII let Mexicans who stayed in the ceded lands keep Mexican citizenship or acquire U.S. citizenship and promised that their property would be respected, so for them the border moved and they did not immigrate. Week 9 takes this treaty up in full; here you use only these pinned facts.

Part 3 — Materials & Procedure

Tools and materials

• A notebook or any free note-taking app for reading a record and for oral-history notes (identified by role and decade, never by name); a free spreadsheet for the lending table's rates and gaps and for any year-stamped figure; any free timeline tool, or a hand-drawn timeline, for the law-and-case timeline; and one approved chatbot used as a sparring partner whose claims about real people, laws, and dates the student checks against an issuing-body or primary source before trusting them
• A notebook or any free note-taking app
• A free spreadsheet, or a hand-drawn timeline
• One approved chatbot

Ways of working

• read-the-record
• oral-history
• compare-and-connect

Procedure

1. Read the three treaty passages and the dated record in Part 2 slowly, twice. Copy each passage into your notes with its article number, word for word. Tool: A notebook or any free note-taking app. Check: Your notes hold all three passages, each labelled with its article number, and the five dated events.
2. Fill in the first table in Part 4: for each passage, write what it says, who made it, whom it affected, and what it leaves out. Tool: A notebook or any free note-taking app. Check: Each passage has four short entries, one for each reading question.
3. Place the treaty in time. In a free spreadsheet, type the years from the dated record and the comparison treaty in column A, then subtract each earlier year from the later one in column B; or draw a timeline by hand with equal spacing for equal years. Copy each gap into the second table. Tool: A free spreadsheet, or a hand-drawn timeline. Check: Three gaps in years, each shown with the two years that produce it.
4. Write your comparison in the third table: set the Fort Laramie Treaty beside the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, say what each did for the people living on the land it covered, and write one plain sentence naming what the comparison shows. Tool: A notebook or any free note-taking app. Check: One completed comparison row and one plain sentence.
5. Do the critique moment in Part 6: paste the prompt into one approved chatbot, then check every claim it makes against the passages, Chapter 4, and the National Archives page, and correct at least two slips by hand. If you choose the equivalent route instead, mark up the printed flawed analysis. Tool: One approved chatbot. Check: A short critique report quoting the chatbot or the flawed analysis and correcting at least two errors.
6. Answer the five analysis questions in Part 5, including the reflection option you choose, and assemble your submission. Check: Five written answers and three completed tables.

Fallback route

When to use it: Use this route if you cannot open a note-taking app or a spreadsheet, or print the tables.

Copy the three tables by hand onto paper or into any text file, read the passages and the dated record from this page, work each subtraction by hand, and complete every table, every analysis question, and the critique step in the same order. Submit a photo or scan of the paper, or the text file, for equal credit.

This route earns the same credit as the primary route.

Part 4 — The Scaffold

Read each passage the way the field reads any record before you name a concept.

Student scaffold table 1

Passage	What it says	Who made it	Whom it affected	What it leaves out
Article I: the end of war between the parties
Article II: the reservation set apart
Article XII: the rule for any later cession

Place the treaty on the timeline so each reading sits in its time.

Student scaffold table 2

Earlier event and year	Later event and year	Years between, with the subtraction shown
Indian Removal Act, 1830	Fort Laramie Treaty, 1868
Fort Laramie Treaty, 1868	Confiscation of the Black Hills, 1877
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848	Fort Laramie Treaty, 1868

Set two treaties side by side to see what a comparison across two groups adds.

Student scaffold table 3

Treaty	What it did for the people on the land	How those people became part of the United States	One plain sentence
Fort Laramie Treaty (1868)
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)

Part 5 — Analysis Questions

1. For each of the three passages, what does it say, who made it, whom did it affect, and what does it leave out? Point to the passage's own words.
2. How many years separate the Indian Removal Act from the Fort Laramie Treaty, the treaty from the confiscation of the Black Hills, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo from the Fort Laramie Treaty? Show each subtraction with its two years.
3. Compare the Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). Both are agreements made by the United States, and both affected people already living on the land; say what each did for those people, and end in one plain sentence naming what the comparison shows about colonized or incorporated peoples.
4. Set Article XII beside the confiscation of the Black Hills in 1877. What question does the treaty's own text raise about how the land was taken, what can three passages not tell you on their own, and which source would you read next? Describe the present-day dispute without a verdict.
5. Choose one reflection: (a) what did your own background help you notice in these passages, and what might it have led you to miss? or (b) which passage was hardest to read in the field's order, and what would you want to know about it before deciding?

Part 6 — AI-Critique Moment

Choose one equal-credit critique route. Route A: ask an approved AI tool to critique your completed work, then check its response against your own evidence. Route B is the no-AI equivalent printed below.

Approved tools: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, Microsoft Copilot.

Prompt to paste:

I've pasted my completed workshop tables above. Below are three passages copied from the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, a treaty between the United States and the Sioux Nation, as the National Archives transcribes it. Article I: "From this day forward all war between the parties to this agreement shall forever cease." Article II says the reservation "shall be and the same is set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians herein named". Article XII: "No treaty for the cession of any portion or part of the reservation herein described, which may be held in common, shall be of any validity or force as against the said Indians, unless executed and signed by at least three fourths of all the adult male Indians occupying or interested in the same". Please do four things. First, for each passage say what it says, who made it, whom it affected, and what it leaves out. Second, say what happened to the Black Hills after the treaty, with the years. Third, compare the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 in two sentences: what each treaty did for the people living on the land it covered. Fourth, write a neutral one-paragraph summary of the Fort Laramie Treaty for a museum label.

Test the response for these likely failures:

• Chatbots often write that the treaty shows how 'Native Americans' lost their land, as if every Native nation had one history and one treaty.
• Chatbots often add a romantic image of the Sioux as a people defined by war or by living close to nature, presented as a fact about a whole people.
• Chatbots often attach a famous-sounding speech to a named Sioux leader, or add an acreage or a payment figure that is not in the passages or the chapter.
• Chatbots often close by saying the Sioux 'lived on the Great Plains' or 'were defeated', as if the nation belongs only to history.
• Chatbots often say the 1877 confiscation was 'necessary for westward expansion' or that 'both sides had good reasons'.
• Chatbots often declare who rightfully owns the Black Hills now, or what the government should do about them.
• Chatbots often date the treaty to 1851, put the gold expedition in 1876, or say the land was taken in 1874.
• Chatbots often repeat the treaty's 1868 wording, or worse terms from old newspapers, in their own voice when they paraphrase.
• Chatbots often call the Sioux Nation 'a racial group' or call the treaty an agreement with 'an ethnic minority'.
• Chatbots often say a person belongs to the nation the treaty names if a census form lists them as American Indian, as if the category were biological.
• Chatbots' 'neutral' museum labels often say the Sioux 'claimed' the Black Hills while the government 'took control of the territory', giving one side doubt words and the other plain ones.

Write three to five sentences naming what the chatbot got right and at least two places where it slipped into one of the failures above, quoting its words and correcting each by hand against the treaty passages, Chapter 4, and the National Archives page.

Equivalent route (no AI required)

No AI account is required for this workshop. This route assesses the same objectives, Objective 4 (analyze Native American and Indigenous experiences: tribal sovereignty as a political status, treaties, removal, allotment, boarding schools, termination and relocation, self-determination, repatriation, and survivance, using settler colonialism as a framework) and Objective 3 (compare theories of belonging (assimilation, cultural pluralism, segmented assimilation, internal colonialism, and double consciousness) as frameworks with named authors and named critics, and distinguish immigrant from colonized or incorporated peoples), takes comparable effort of about the same 90 minutes, uses the same rubric, and earns the same credit. Instead of the chatbot, critique this flawed analysis of the treaty, printed here in full: "The Fort Laramie Treaty shows how Native Americans as a whole lost everything. The Sioux were a warrior race who lived close to nature. One Sioux leader told the commissioners, 'This land will be ours until the rivers run dry.' The treaty was signed in 1851, and the government took the Black Hills in 1874. Taking the land was a regrettable necessity for a growing nation, and both sides had their reasons. The Black Hills belong to the United States today, so the question is closed. The treaty calls the people Indians, and the hostiles who refused it were soon defeated. The Sioux are a racial group, and a person's census race shows whether they belong to the nation. The Sioux once lived on the Plains. In neutral terms, the Sioux claimed the Black Hills, while the government took control of the territory." Mark every error you find, name the failure it shows, and correct it by hand against the passages, Chapter 4, and the National Archives page; find at least two. The quotation in it is invented for this exercise and are themselves one of the errors. Submit the marked-up analysis with your corrections in place of the chatbot report and share link.

Part 7 — What to Submit

• The three completed tables from Part 4
• Written answers to all five analysis questions
• The chatbot critique report with its share link, or the equivalent route's marked-up flawed analysis

Deliverable:

A short Community History Workshop report on three passages from the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868: three completed tables (each passage read for what it says, who made it, whom it affected, and what it leaves out; three gaps in years with the subtraction shown; and one comparison with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending in a plain sentence), written answers to five analysis questions, and a critique of a chatbot's reading of the same passages, or, on the equivalent route, a marked-up correction of the printed flawed analysis. Choose how you show it: written answers, a recorded explanation with a transcript, or labelled tables and a hand-drawn timeline with short notes; every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

Rubric

The rubric below shows how each submitted part is evaluated; bands are full, partial, or none.

Workshop evaluation criteria

Criterion	Full	Partial	None
Reading each treaty passage as a record	All three passages are read for what they say, who made them, whom they affected, and what they leave out, pointing to the passages' own words and naming the treaty as an agreement between nations.	Two passages are read fully, or all three are read but one or two of the four questions are missing.	No passage is read, or the reading invents words the passages do not contain.
Placing the treaty in time	All three gaps are shown with their two years and the subtraction, and the reading places the 1877 confiscation after the 1874 expedition.	One or two gaps are shown with their years, or the gaps are given without the subtraction.	No gaps are given, or the years used are not the ones in the dated record.
The comparison across two treaties	The comparison says what each treaty did for the people on the land, names both as cases of colonized or incorporated peoples rather than immigrants, and ends in one plain sentence naming what the comparison shows.	Both treaties are described, but the incorporated-not-immigrant point is missing, or there is no closing sentence.	No comparison is made.
Caught-and-corrected AI slip, on either route	The chatbot critique report, or the equivalent route's marked-up flawed analysis, quotes at least two errors and corrects each by hand against the passages, Chapter 4, and the National Archives page; either route earns this band equally.	One error is quoted and corrected on either route, or errors are named without a correction.	No critique on either route, or chatbot output is pasted without checking it.
Limits and positionality	The answer names the question Article XII raises without a verdict, a limit of three passages, and a source to read next, and the chosen reflection option is answered honestly with a specific example.	Either the limit or the reflection is present, but not both.	Neither the limit nor the reflection is present.

Quality Gate

• Every quotation from the treaty is copied exactly from this page, with its article number.
• Every reading names what the passage says, who made it, whom it affected, and what it leaves out.
• Every gap in years shows its two years and the subtraction.
• No statistic, law, date, quotation, speech, or source is invented anywhere in the submission.
• The comparison ends in one plain sentence naming what it shows.
• The present-day Black Hills dispute is described without a verdict, Native nations are spoken of in the present tense, and no living politician is named.
• The critique quotes the chatbot or the flawed analysis and corrects at least two errors by hand.