What actually happened is that the United States broke a treaty, took land under coercive circumstances that the Supreme Court later described in terms of profound dishonor, and then spent nearly a century resisting a legal claim for redress.

When the legal claim finally succeeded, the remedy the legal system provided was money — not because money was what the Sioux had asked for, not because money was what the situation required, but because money is what the Fifth Amendment’s just compensation clause provides for takings, and the only legal framework available to the Sioux was the Fifth Amendment.

The tribal nations did not refuse a billion dollars in the way that a seller refuses an inadequate offer.

They declined to accept a form of resolution that would have converted an acknowledged illegal taking into a completed sale.

That distinction is not semantic.

It is the entire substance of the dispute.