As Long as the Grass Grows: 250 Years of Broken Treaties with Native Nations

Let's ReThink History
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Between 1778 and 1871 the United States ratified roughly 370 treaties with Native nations — and broke essentially all of them. Most Americans were never told it happened. As Long as the Grass Grows is a 15-part ReThink History series that walks that record treaty by treaty: the first broken promise at Fort Pitt in 1778, the founders' word to the Haudenosaunee, Andrew Jackson's doctrine and the Trail of Tears, the legal machine that made treaty-breaking lawful, the seizure of the sacred Black Hills, and the fights still alive today at Standing Rock and inside the Supreme Court. It asks the hard questions head-on — why the country broke them, what argument defends the breaking, what the tribes said when the promises fell, who really 'used smallpox' and how much of that story is true, which administrations shared Jackson's view, and which would face charges for crimes against humanity if that law had existed in their time. Measured and steelmanned on every side, it is told by a narrator who saw the aftermath firsthand, from a boyhood visit to the St. Croix Chippewa's Sand Lake community in Wisconsin — a nation left out of the treaties entirely — to a life lived across Indian country from Wisconsin to Alaska. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

  1. Episode 1

    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.

    42 min

  2. Episode 2

    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.

    47 min

  3. Episode 3

    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.

    38 min

  4. Episode 4

    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.

    33 min

  5. Episode 5

    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.

    44 min

  6. Episode 6

    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.

    44 min

  7. Episode 7

    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.

    46 min

  8. Episode 8

    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.

    40 min
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About

Between 1778 and 1871 the United States ratified roughly 370 treaties with Native nations — and broke essentially all of them. Most Americans were never told it happened. As Long as the Grass Grows is a 15-part ReThink History series that walks that record treaty by treaty: the first broken promise at Fort Pitt in 1778, the founders' word to the Haudenosaunee, Andrew Jackson's doctrine and the Trail of Tears, the legal machine that made treaty-breaking lawful, the seizure of the sacred Black Hills, and the fights still alive today at Standing Rock and inside the Supreme Court. It asks the hard questions head-on — why the country broke them, what argument defends the breaking, what the tribes said when the promises fell, who really 'used smallpox' and how much of that story is true, which administrations shared Jackson's view, and which would face charges for crimes against humanity if that law had existed in their time. Measured and steelmanned on every side, it is told by a narrator who saw the aftermath firsthand, from a boyhood visit to the St. Croix Chippewa's Sand Lake community in Wisconsin — a nation left out of the treaties entirely — to a life lived across Indian country from Wisconsin to Alaska. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

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