Robinson briefly recounted the history of the Northern Cheyenne moving into Canada, then into the Great Lakes region before settling in the American plains.

“We have stuck to our ways and kept our language and our primary ceremonies,” he said, even after the U.S. government made and then, he said, broke all eight treaties that the government signed with the tribe.

Robinson’s ancestor, the peace chief Black Kettle, was killed in November 1868 in Washita, Okla., by troops led by George Armstrong Custer.

“They tried to keep us in Oklahoma, but our people escaped, got caught, then escaped again and made it back to our land” in southeastern Montana, “444,000 acres of beautiful land with game you guys can’t get,” Robinson said with a smile.

Robinson traced U.S. legal thinking on tribal sovereignty back to John Marshall, the fourth chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

“What he came up with is that we have internal sovereignty, but we don’t have the authority to exercise our sovereignty with any state or any other nation. He said that we were ‘sovereign dependent,’ (calling Native tribes in one opinion “domestic dependent nations”) which really doesn’t make any sense.”