Revised Black Hills background

This is basically a cultural primer for our group, and the lore behind it. The main idea for this emerged in 2012, when I was looking for a way to explain my character (a high ranking Resistance officer) absence between transitioning two TRP servers.

The first thing to know here is that I am an anthropologist, and have always been interested in developing fiction using lessons I've learned as an archaeologist and as a cultural anthropologist, as I feel that it helps me to create dynamic, authentic characters with a rich cultural background that is portrayed tastefully, avoiding patronizing stereotypes, New Age nonsense, and "Planet of Hats" problem: Once a character from a different cultural background is assigned his cultural values, no one else deviates from it.  I became interested in how cultures with unique taboos on death would realistically handle living in a setting where killer machines dominate much of the continent, and how culture warps and adapts in a post-apocalyptic setting.

As I was studying Native American anthropology at the time (and had been planning to enter the field of applied cultural anthropology specifically with indigenous peoples), I decided to write what I knew about, and as a result I created the Black Hills conflict, a seemingly endless conflict over a large area of land in South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana being quietly manipulated by SkyNET using historical grudges and cultural differences, discovered by a Resistance officer that spent most of his career in California. This was later augmented by my study of the Dine/Navajo, and being addicted to Tony Hillerman Navajo mysteries.

As this iteration of TRP takes place several years before the resolution of that conflict, I decided to bring this concept back, as this would be a formative period for many of the characters involved in that story.

Our group of indigenous characters are essentially an offshoot of this idea and storyline, and while our group is much more casual, I do hope to use what I learn from it to continue developing this entire metaplot, through a series of upcoming forum stories, and potentially as a standalone sci-fi short story series.

I have been doing my best to weave a fine line between keeping the narrative authentic and accurate (from developing proper historical and cultural context), and keeping it interesting. It's also important to note that I developed this entire arc from a past TRP continuity, one where the dynamics of things like the Resistance are different, so I hope I am not shattering any canon by doing this.
I also welcome any criticism, particularly from people that are more knowledgeable than me on Terminator canon, or Indigenous peoples. This is a general passion project of mine (I have done similar lore-building for Central Africa, Latin America, and China in the past continuity, and next on my agenda is a story set in a small Polynesian atoll), so if there is anything you might have to suggest, I encourage you to let me know.
Mong.

A summary of Mongoose's Native American lore:
Judgment Day couldn't have come at a more important time for the thousands of Native Americans living in reservations and federal land across the continental United States https://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/special/aian_wall/aia_us_100.gif and Canada http://www.cws.amscotta.com/resources/Maps-Canada/cdn-aboriginal-populations.jpg.

Throughout the 20th century, indigenous peoples of the Americas lived marginalized lives, relocated to small patches of land often a fraction of their former territory, or hundreds of miles away from it. A long string of failed promises and broken treaties by the American government, and discrimination and mistreatment by other Americans helped to create a strong Native American presence in the Civil Rights movement, notably the Trail of Broken Treaties campaign in 1972, which brought the plight of Native Americans living on Plains reservations to the national stage. In 1973, the organization shifted from passive resistance to active militancy, and one chapter of the American Indian Movement staged a 69 day occupation of the town of Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in a standoff between AIM activists and the supporters of the tribal government, which had been accused of corruption and intimidation.  While the occupation resulted in minimal loss of life, and in the following years the AIM crumbled as a national organization under infighting and federal investigation, the message was clear: American Indians could not be pushed around without consequence.

The 1980's and 1990's saw general improvements to government legislation, but poverty and access to basic economic needs were still more limited than elsewhere in the country, and most relied on heavy federal funding.  Harsh feelings and discontent were rife on the reservations, as were ever-present problems with petty crime, alcoholism and drug abuse, and many Indians still felt as though they were second-class citizens in their own homes, even military veterans, which represented a disproportionately large part of reservation residents.

During the immediate aftermath of the nuclear attacks, many reservations were placed in unique situations. The small reservations in California were often destroyed during the attacks on American cities, as were many of the reservations in the Great Lakes and the Eastern Seaboard: those communities were often downwind of direct strikes on cities, and became immediately susceptible to nuclear fallout. Poorer communities such as Couer D'Alene in Idaho were devastated, as most houses were of poor construction and most did not have basements or proper insulation, and residents perished from radiation sickness and fallout-related conditions. Thousands more died of starvation, disease, and violence perpetrated by hordes of refugees. Some found that the only solution was to return to traditional ways of life, taking their chances well away from even the small towns allotted to them by the government.

In Canada, many First Nations and band governments were spread over a larger distance from each other in remote regions, forcing them to develop their own transport and communication networks to sustain each other; A loose trade confederation of Anishinaabe communities soon emerged among the Plains Cree, Blackfoot, and other band governments in the Prairies, echoing the former Iron Confederacy in size and influence. In the Canadian North, peoples living on the fringe of habitable land often had to return to subsistence-based lifestyles, as air and naval-based shipments of critical supplies ceased to arrive.

The Northern Cheyenne
Others, such as the Northern Cheyenne in Montana and the Lakota of Pine Ridge and Standing Rock, were completely spared from either nuclear strikes or fallout effects, and were in a better position to assert regional dominance.

The Northern Cheyenne, concentrated on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southern Montana, boasted a relatively strategic location, with access to the small town of Colstrip, which produced coal and electricity for the reservation. The overworked Tribal Police, bolstered by local volunteers and military veterans, kept the peace and protected the Reservation from major attacks by outsiders. While the first years were difficult, the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation stabilized, and the capital of Lame Deer remained functional, including the Community College that churned out specialists for agriculture and leadership. In 2005, the Northern Cheyenne formed the Cheyenne-Crow Alliance, with the equally large Crow to the west and small pockets of Turtle Mountain Ojibwa to the east. The Crow, historically enemies of the Cheyenne, were not easily convinced, but the three tribes formed a tentative Intertribal Council with roughly proportional representation among its members.

Trade relationships began to develop with the Lakota in South Dakota, as well as the more distant Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara (MHA) Nation at Fort Berthold, North Dakota.  Through ham radio, the Cheyenne-Crow Alliance maintained contact with the Anishinaabe League in Canada, and both did their best to maintain a very long and hazardous trade route.

Not all of the Northern Cheyenne were content with this lifestyle. Many of the Cheyenne still lived in squalid conditions in decaying settlements inside the reservation land, or else working in unsafe conditions in coal mines or on collective farms. Many Cheyenne disagreed with the tribal council's willingness to work with Montanans, and the occasional incorporation of Montanan towns in the Cheyenne Alliance.  Eventually, a schism emerged between the Northern Cheyenne and the nomadic Dog Society, one of the 4 Cheyenne military societies that straddled the former border of Montana and Wyoming. The members of the Dog Society opted to pursue a nomadic lifestyle, and actively discouraged any sort of cooperation with whites while traveling the landscape. Dog Society War Chiefs had very little representation in the Tribal government, so pursued actions that often contradicted Tribal policy- Dog Soldiers actively targeted some of the more antagonistic factions and white militias in Montana and Wyoming.

Dog Society nomads wandered the interstate highways, living a lifestyle that echoed the Cheyenne people's foray into horse culture.  They lived in seasonally migrant communities, maintained traditional practices of car, bike, and horse theft, and of counting coup, daring acts of touching enemies without killing them which they used as a supremely effective intimidation tactic against their rivals. The members of the Dog Society, called Dog Soldiers, were often seasoned military veterans from America's wars, and put their training to great use on the Plains. A few groups became raiders themselves, using violence to prey on the weak, which brought them into conflict with other Cheyenne Tribal Police and even other Dog Soldier bands.

The Black Hills Again (1997-2015)
Meanwhile, at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, The Oglala Lakota had even stronger ideas, as many had been involved in the American Indian Movement, in addition to being veterans. In their eyes, the government that had so often failed them no longer existed, nor had any means of controlling them.
Like the Cheyenne, a schism emerged between the members of the Lakota tribal governments, which advocated moderation, and the members of the resurrected Ghost Dance movement, traditionalists which advocated an "Indians first" policy.

Ghost Dancers historically believed that through spiritual power and the practice of a special round over a period of 5 days, the spirits of the dead would reunite with the living, and that at a larger scale, a large event would happen in which God and the spirits of the dead would rise up to help Indians take back their land.  The new Ghost Dance believed that Judgment Day itself was the watershed event that the prophet Wovoka had foresaw a century earlier, and that the spiritual power provided to them would make them undefeatable in their quest. Unlike the original Ghost Dance, which emerged on the earliest reservations as a form of passive resistance, and ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee by the US Army, the new Ghost Dance made no such pretense of being pacifist.

Prior to Judgment Day, an ongoing land dispute existed over the territory known as He Sapa, the Black Hills. The Lakota considered the Black Hills their traditional homeland, but it had been taken from them by successive treaties carving up the Great Sioux Reservation, and opened up to gold miners and settlers in the late 19th century.  Almost all Lakota now supported the reconquest of the Black Hills, and many wanted to entirely evict the Montanans, Wyomingites and South Dakotans that currently lived there. Ghost Dancers seized power in 2012, and this militant lobby soon dominated Lakota politics.  The Lakota were much more aggressive in their expansion. They were joined by their Lakota brothers at Standing Rock, Lower Brule, and Crow Creek, and spent the next decade consolidating the remaining territory between the reservations.  When the town of Sturgis finally fell to the Lakota in 2015, they expanded westward into Wyoming under the banner of the Lakota League, with the intended goal of annexing the land that had once belonged to them http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/08/pine-ridge/reservation-map  .  As many saw this as vindication for the deaths of Sitting Bull and others at the Wounded Knee massacre, the pan-tribal Ghost Dance electrified other Indians, and created further resentment and disdain towards whites.  The Dog Soldiers, which came into frequent contact with the Lakota, were among the many who adopted the Ghost Dance, and many Dog Soldier bands joined the Lakota forces in their march west.

The Black Hills War (2015-)
Naturally, the Lakota and its allies faced an incredibly resistant populace in Wyoming, which itself had organized into heavily armed settlements to ward off attacks by outsiders, which included renegade National Guardsmen, large motorcycle gangs, as well as marauding Indians.  Attempts to take the non-reservation towns in the Black Hills were met by force, and many of the Wyoming communities eventually banded together, finally having enough. In a mirror to the Dog Soldiers, a ruthless militia known as The Cavalry soon emerged, which began indiscriminately terrorizing native communities, beginning with Lakota, but also soon attacking Dog Soldiers and then uninvolved Cheyenne and Crow settlements, outside of the mandate of the Wyoming Coalition.

The Dog Soldiers's involvement in this conflict and their subsequent battle with The Cavalry led to growing influence on the Intertribal Council. These Dog Soldier war chiefs called for an immediate response to the aggression of the Cavalry, and also called for the CCA to throw its weight behind the greater war effort in the Black Hills. In 2018, as they had 150 years prior, the CCA and Lakota formed their own defense pact, as the Cavalry had begun to raid Cheyenne caravans and larger Cheyenne communities. This proved to be an outrage to the Crow chiefs, who still considered the Lakota their sworn enemies even moreso than the Cheyenne, and the Crow provided very little assistance to the war effort.

Both sides suffered heavy losses, though neither side were able to make permanent gains, and the war had effectively stalemated by 2020. A battle at Newcastle in Wyoming in 2023 led to almost 3000 casualties, among the costliest battles of any kind since before Judgment Day. Guerilla warfare and acts of terrorism by radical Lakota plagued the settlements under the control of the Wyoming Coalition, and they responded in kind with mass imprisonment, public executions, and further destruction of Lakota and Cheyenne settlements.

By this time, SkyNET was acting in full force elsewhere across the continent, but the CCA and Lakota were very slow to act. Very few had ever seen SkyNET Hunter-Killers or been exposed to machines at all, leading many to simply believe that the machines were some sort of propaganda being circulated by their enemies to make them prematurely end the conflict.  The Resistance, now a fully functioning military organization dedicated to the destruction of SkyNET, saw the Black Hills' proximity to SkyNET's core territory as an important strategic location, and despite the toxic political nature of the conflict, continued to support the Wyoming Coalition with military aid. Some members of the CCA Intertribal Council, including some Cheyenne and most of the Crow chiefs, had expressed an interest in affiliating with the Resistance, and blamed the Dog Society and the Ghost Dancers for participating in a conflict that was jeopardizing their survival, but their overtures were overruled by the supporters of the war, which included the majority of Cheyenne chiefs and the Ojibwa, which did not participate in the Ghost Dance but were caught directly in the crossfire of the conflict.  Additionally, public sentiment was very much in favor of the war, and the strange absence of SkyNET in the region made many disregard the need for the Resistance's help. Many, such as the Plains nomads, had never encountered SkyNET in their daily lives, and refused to believe the machines even existed. Even as the war accelerated in the Southwest and West Coast, very little changed on the Plains.

Coyote is Always Hungry: The War Against the Machines (2005-)

Elsewhere in North America, the stronger indigenous factions became important and early Resistance allies in the fight against SkyNET.

The Navajo Nation of New Mexico and Arizona came under immediate attack by SkyNET following its emergence in the mid-2000's, and became one of the first to actively take up arms against the more primitive Hunter-Killer units, providing useful case studies for the challenges faced by SkyNET units in remote desert terrain; unlike the early Hunter-Killers, Navajo and other guerrillas were able to conceal themselves very well, often hiding in cliff-faces, perching themselves on large mesas, or living in villages so remote that even SkyNET dare not pay much attention. Like the Cheyenne and the Anishinaabe, the Navajo Nation eventually became a coalition of the Navajo, as well as remnants of the surrounding Ute Mountain Ute, Southern Ute, Zuni, Hopi, and Jicarilla Apache reservations, as well as some non-indigenous towns and military installations such as Fort Wingate. The large amount of Navajo and other indigenous military veterans provided a strong initial fighting force which would later be augmented by other Resistance cells.

As the war progressed, Anishinaabe band governments formed an important network with Canadian Resistance cells to navigate around the Coltan Line, the string of fortresses, refineries, and factories controlled by SkyNET that bisected much of the continent. This effort allowed scientists and specialists to travel through the dangerous Canadian interior, and allowed limited contact between Western and Eastern Resistance groups. As the West Coast became the center of all offensive activities by SkyNET and eventually the global Resistance, this pipeline proved vital to opening a northern front against SkyNET to distract from offensives moving against their home territory in the Southwest.