As we approach the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of US Army’s reconnaissance expedition to the Black Hills, CAIRNS has teamed up with Lukas Rieppel, a historian at Brown University, to write weekly “dispatches” from the summer of 1874. We do not want to rehash well-worn stories that are better left behind. Instead, we want to try something different. By keeping a close eye on the expedition’s movements in Lakotan treaty land, we can learn a great deal about Lakotan history and culture. That is our goal: to surveil the surveyors, with an eye to offering new insights and interpretations about a transformative period in Lakotan history. Every week, we will write a new Surveilling the Surveyors column that turns the extractive goal of the Custer expedition back on itself, mining the rich archive of documentary records that it produced to ask what it reveals about the region’s Lakotan inhabitants. We look forward to having you along for the journey! Click here to read the full text of this first column.