The relationship between the Lakota people and Paha Sapa is not one that can be set aside and picked up later without consequence.

It requires ongoing acknowledgment.

The claim is alive because the relationship is alive.

The relationship is alive because the people who hold it continue to assert it.

That continuity — of claim, of relationship, of assertion — across nearly a century and a half since 1877 is itself part of what makes the Black Hills dispute something different from most legal disputes.

Most legal disputes end: through settlement, through judgment, through the passage of time that eventually renders the parties and their interests historical rather than current.