The question “why would anyone refuse a billion dollars?” is a question asked from inside a specific cultural and economic framework in which large sums of money are the universal solvent — the thing that makes any problem, in principle, resolvable.

The Black Hills dispute exists because not everyone inhabits that framework, and because the thing that was taken — a specific piece of land and the relationships it embodied — is not the kind of thing that money, at any amount, can actually replace.

That is not an exotic or incomprehensible position.

It is the position of anyone who has ever been told that something irreplaceable can be compensated for with enough money and has recognized the gap between the compensation and the loss.

The Black Hills are Paha Sapa.

They were promised.