The Sixty-Year Legal Marathon — Why It Took So Long To Get A Ruling

The story of how the Black Hills claim moved from grievance to Supreme Court ruling spans six decades of legal effort, and that span itself reveals something important about how the American legal system has historically handled Indigenous land claims.

When the Sioux began pursuing formal legal redress in the years after 1877, the obstacles were institutional rather than factual.

The facts were not in serious dispute: the 1868 treaty had promised specific things, and those things had not been honored.

The problem was that the mechanisms for enforcing those promises against the United States government were severely limited.

The doctrine of sovereign immunity — the legal principle that the government cannot be sued without its consent — applied with full force to Indian claims as to any other.