They reflect the genuine complexity of a question that does not have a single correct communal answer, and they reflect the diversity of opinion within Lakota communities on questions about how to manage the interface between their history and the broader world’s interest in it.

The Pine Ridge Reservation And Its Landscape

Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota is the largest of the Lakota reservations, covering roughly 3,500 square miles of rolling prairie, badlands, and creek drainages.

It is the reservation that is most closely associated with the Oglala Lakota, the band to which Crazy Horse belonged.

The landscape of Pine Ridge — the buttes, the creek drainages, the cottonwood-lined waterways, the expanse of grassland broken by geological formations — is the landscape of the Lakota homeland that survived the reservation era.

It is the country that Crazy Horse knew, though in his time it was not a reservation but the open range of the northern Plains.