James McLaughlin (February 12, 1842 – July 28, 1923) was a Canadian-American United States Indian agent and inspector, best known for having ordered the arrest of Sitting Bull in December 1890, which resulted in the chief's death and contributed to the Wounded Knee Massacre.

McLaughlin emigrated to the United States at the age of 21, living briefly in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he married a Mdewakanton woman of mixed-blood descent.

While working as a blacksmith at Fort Totten, he studied to become a U.S. Indian agent, and was selected to supervise the Devils Lake Agency in 1876.

He was promoted and transferred in 1881 to the larger Standing Rock Sioux Agency in the Dakotas, working there for many years, in an era of short-term political appointments.

McLaughlin believed his mission was to make Native Americans self-sufficient by encouraging them to assimilate, to become educated according to Western standards and to adopt white/Anglo-American culture, including subsistence farming.

In 1888, he and other agents accompanied a large delegation of chiefs from the six Sioux reservations to Washington, D.C., to meet with Bureau of Indian Affairs officials to discuss the Dawes Act.

A photograph of McLaughlin and the Standing Rock delegation,[7] including the noted chief Sitting Bull and interpreter Louis Primeau, along with U.S.

McLaughlin partially blamed Caroline Weldon,[8] an Indian Rights Activist from Brooklyn, N.Y., who had befriended Sitting Bull, for having influenced the chief into open defiance.

Rising tensions among the people led to the Army-Lakota confrontation on Pine Ridge at Wounded Knee two weeks later, resulting in the Army massacre of many Lakota.