Hunkpapa

The Hunkpapa (Lakota: Húŋkpapȟa) are a Native American group, one of the seven council fires of the Lakota tribe. The name Húŋkpapȟa is a Lakota word meaning "Head of the Circle". (At one time, the tribe's name was represented in European-American records as Honkpapa.) By tradition, the Húŋkpapȟa set up their lodges at the entryway to the circle of the Great Council when the Sioux met in convocation. They speak Lakȟóta, one of the three dialects of the Sioux language.

Seven hundred and fifty mounted Yanktons, Yanktonais and Lakota joined six companies of the Sixth Infantry and 80 fur trappers in an attack on an Arikara Indian village at Grand River (now South Dakota) in August 1823. Thus members of the Lakota tribe, a part of them "Ankpapat", were the first Native Americans to fight in the American Indian Wars alongside US forces west of the Missouri.

They may have formed as a tribe within the Lakota relatively recently, as the first mention of the Hunkpapa in European-American historical records was from a treaty of 1825.

By signing the 1825 treaty, the Hunkpapa and the United States committed themselves to keep up the "friendship which has heretofore existed". With their x-mark, the chiefs also recognized the supremacy of the United States. It is not certain whether they really understood the text in the document. A medal was given to Little White Bear who was the principal Hunkpapa chief according to the whites.

With the Vaccination Act of 1832, the United States assumed responsibility for the inoculation of the Indians against smallpox. Some visiting Hunkpapa may have benefitted from Dr. M. Martin's vaccination of about 900 southern Lakota (no divisions named) at the head of Medicine Creek that autumn. When smallpox struck in 1837, it hit the Hunkpapa as the northernmost Lakota division. The loss, however, may have been less than one hundred people. Overall, the Hunkpapa seem to have suffered less from new diseases than many other tribes did.

The boundaries for the Lakota Indian territory were set down in the general peace treaty negotiated near Fort Laramie in the summer of 1851. Leaders of eight different tribes, often at odds with each other and each claiming large territories, signed the treaty. The United States was a ninth party in it. The Crow Indian territory included a tract of land north of the Yellowstone, while Little Bighorn River ran through the heartland of the Crow country (now Montana). The treaty gives the land of the Arikaras, the Hidatsas and the Mandans as a mutual area north of Heart River, partly encircled by the Missouri (now North Dakota).

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