The 1980 Supreme Court ruling in United States v.

Sioux Nation established that the Black Hills seizure was unconstitutional.

That ruling is grounded in the same 1868 treaty that Red Cloud signed after watching the forts burn.

The legal chain that runs from Red Cloud’s insistence on specific treaty terms, through the signing of a document that created specific legal obligations, through the violation of those obligations, through more than a century of legal advocacy by the Sioux Nation, to the Supreme Court ruling — that chain is still legally relevant today.

The unclaimed compensation — now exceeding $1 billion — sitting in a trust account because the Lakota people have consistently refused to accept money in lieu of land is not an abstraction.