He Sapa (The Black Hills)

The Fort Laramie treaty of 1868 recognised the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation and undertook to keep settlers out. Custer's expedition of 1874 confirmed gold in the hills. Miners came, the Army stopped removing them, and in 1877 Congress enacted the taking outright.

In 1980, in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, the Supreme Court held that this had been a taking requiring just compensation under the Fifth Amendment, and upheld a substantial award with interest running from 1877.

The Lakota have never taken the money. It sits in the Treasury accruing interest and is now well past a billion dollars.

Why the refusal is a strategy, not a gesture

Accepting payment would settle the claim. It would convert an unlawful seizure into a completed, compensated sale, and it would end any prospect of the land itself being returned. The claim has never been for compensation, and it stays open only so long as it is unpaid. It is one of very few cases anywhere in which a people have declined a judgment of that size in their own favour, and the refusal has now been sustained across more than four decades and several generations of tribal governments who could each have ended it at any time.

Mount Rushmore was carved between 1927 and 1941 into a peak the Lakota know as the Six Grandfathers, inside the disputed area.

What is not set out here

He Sapa is not a single shrine but a landscape of named places, and a body of Lakota knowledge connects particular sites to particular observances and to the turning of the year. That knowledge is held by specific people. Some of it has been published, in ethnographies and more recently in astronomical studies, not always with the agreement of the people who hold it. This entry gives the history and the legal position, which are public, and leaves the rest where it belongs.

The event most often cited as the start of the modern dispute over the Black Hills was an army expedition sent to confirm a rumour, not a war.

The 1874 expedition

An 1868 treaty had recognised the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation, closed to non-Native settlement. In 1874 Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led a military expedition into the hills that confirmed gold deposits there, and the resulting publicity brought a rush of prospectors onto treaty-protected land within the year, a violation the United States did not meaningfully prevent and later moved to formalise by seizing the hills outright in 1877.

A site within the site

Beyond the well-known peaks, specific locations across the Black Hills carry their own significance, including Pe'Sla, a large open meadow tied to Lakota origin narratives. Part of Pe'Sla was purchased at public auction in 2012 by a coalition of Lakota, Nakota and Dakota nations working with conservation partners, a rare direct land buyback aimed at securing at least one specific sacred site within the larger disputed territory.

Compensation offered, and refused

The taking led eventually to the 1980 Supreme Court award covered elsewhere in this entry's companion article; the buyback at Pe'Sla reflects the same underlying position acted out differently, land recovered directly rather than compensation accepted in place of it.