The Money Is Still There

In the vaults of the United States Treasury, in an interest-bearing trust account managed by the federal government on behalf of nine Sioux tribal nations, there is a sum of money that has been sitting uncollected for more than four decades.

The fund traces back to a 1980 Supreme Court ruling that established, in the most formal terms the American legal system possesses, that the United States government had taken land from the Sioux people in violation of a solemn treaty — and that the government owed compensation.

By the late 1990s, the accumulated principal and interest had surpassed $600 million.

By around 2011, various federal government reports and journalistic accounts described the figure as having grown to more than $1 billion.

A 2024 PBS NewsHour report described the fund as “worth more than a billion dollars” and still sitting uncollected in the Treasury Department.

The precise current balance has not been publicly released.

When the Oglala Sioux Tribe was asked, in late 2025, about a Freedom of Information Act request filed by a media organization seeking to reveal the exact accounting, the tribe opposed the disclosure.

Their president stated that “wide dissemination of the amount of money in the Black Hills award trust account would likely lead to the Sioux tribes being subject to harder bargaining in commercial dealings.” The number, in other words, has remained deliberately obscured — but the fact of its scale has not.

Nine tribal nations.

More than a billion dollars.

Not collected.

The question that sits underneath that fact — the question this article is built to answer — is not a simple one.

It cannot be answered by pointing to stubbornness, or poverty, or bad legal advice.

The answer involves the specific history of how the Black Hills were taken, what the land means to the Lakota and Dakota people who have lived in relation to it for centuries, what the Supreme Court actually ruled in 1980 and what it conspicuously did not rule, and why accepting a monetary judgment would, in the understanding of tribal governments and many of their members, constitute something far worse than continuing to refuse it.

The money is not the story.

The land is the story.

The money is the evidence.