In this deeply moving account of America’s greatest Indian war, viewers are quickly immersed in the world of Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes, and their futile struggle in the 1870s to retain a lifeway on the buffalo prairie.  Those ever-committed Northern Indians faced a succession of white invaders: railroaders, borderland surveyors, prospectors, and ultimately the United States Army.

In the best of days, they turned back George Crook at the Rosebud and wiped out George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn. But a dozen other clashes followed, and in the end these tradition-minded people could not endure the army’s endless hounding. Some fled to Canada to a luring if momentary exile, but in the end one and all faced starvation, submission, and, for some, death. Sitting Bull’s War is the saga of a people intent only on adhering to a traditional life on the buffalo prairie.