Fools Crow v. Gullet, D.S.D. 1982, affirmed 8th Cir. 1983

Fools Crow v. Gullet, decided by the United States District Court for the District of South Dakota and affirmed by the Eighth Circuit, is a primary legal source, a real case in which Lakota religious leaders sought to restrict tourist access and development at Bear Butte, a site sacred to multiple Plains nations, under free exercise and American Indian Religious Freedom Act claims. As the actual court opinions, they are directly authoritative for what the courts held and their stated legal reasoning, which ruled against the plaintiffs. The decision is frequently cited in the broader legal and scholarly literature on Native American sacred site protection as an example of how narrowly courts of that era read religious freedom claims against public land access, a context worth carrying alongside the bare holding.