The Black Hills as Maka's Most Sacred Ground

Devotion to Maka in Lakota tradition is inseparable from a specific, named sacred landscape, above all the Black Hills, Paha Sapa, in present-day South Dakota, understood as profoundly sacred ground central to Lakota origin narratives and ongoing religious practice, and the site of one of the most significant and still unresolved conflicts between Lakota religious and treaty rights and United States federal law. The 1980 Supreme Court decision in United States v.

Sioux Nation of Indians found that the Black Hills had been illegally taken from the Lakota in violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and ordered financial compensation, an award Lakota nations have consistently refused to accept, insisting on the return of the land itself rather than payment, since the Black Hills' significance is understood as religious and relational to Maka rather than only economic or historical, a position that remains unresolved in the twenty-first century. This ongoing legal and political struggle over Paha Sapa is a direct, living expression of Maka's continuing religious significance to Lakota communities today, not merely a historical episode from the nineteenth century.