Health outcomes were poor: life expectancy on Pine Ridge was among the lowest in the country, comparable to conditions in much of the developing world.

The housing stock was deteriorating.

Educational opportunities were limited.

These conditions were not separate from the Black Hills question.

They were, in a significant sense, its consequences.

The land that the 1868 treaty had guaranteed to the Sioux — the Great Sioux Reservation in its full extent — would have provided a resource base substantially larger than what the reduced reservations offered.