The Upper Sioux Indian Reservation, or Pezihutazizi in Dakota, is the reservation of the Upper Sioux Community, a federally recognized tribe of the Dakota people, that includes the Mdewakanton. The Upper Sioux Indian Reservation is located in Minnesota Falls Township along the Minnesota River in eastern Yellow Medicine County, Minnesota, south of Granite Falls. It was created in 1938 when of land were returned to the tribe by the federal government, under the Indian Reorganization Act encouraging tribal self-government. As of the 2020 census, the reservation recorded a resident population of 120 persons. Its land area is currently , including off-reservation trust land. The tribe operates the Prairie's Edge Casino Resort. Every August, the Upper Sioux community holds its Pejhutazizi Oyate traditional wacipi (pow-wow). History This reservation was originally established for the Wahpeton and Sisseton bands of the Upper Dakota. Under the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux of 1851 with the United States, it encompassed an area about wide and long along the Minnesota River. Following the Dakota War of 1862, the federal government punished the Dakota by drastically reducing the sizes of two reservations along the river, in an attempt to force the Dakota out of the area. Many of the people did move westward, and many of their descendants live on reservations in South Dakota. In 1938 the federal government returned of land to the tribe, who were mostly landless, under the Indian Reorganization Act of the President Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. It also encouraged tribes to revive their self-government. Termination efforts A decade later, the federal government began to promote the Indian termination policy, to end recognition of tribes they thought could successfully assimilate to mainstream society. Such termination would allocate their communal lands among individual households and end federal benefits associated with federal recognition. This policy was followed by the US government from the 1940s to the 1960s. The Department of Interior issued a memo dated 19 January 1955 for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) indicating that terminations were being reviewed in proposed legislation for four Indian communities of southwestern Minnesota, including the Lower Sioux Community in Redwood and Scott counties, the New Upper Sioux Community in Yellow Medicine County, the Prairie Island Community in Goodhue County, and about 15 individuals living on restricted tracts in Yellow Medicine County. Discussions between the BIA and the Indians in the identified tribes had begun in 1953 and