What The Black Hills Are And Have Always Been

The Black Hills rise from the plains of what is now western South Dakota and northeastern Wyoming in a way that announces itself from a distance — a dark mass on the horizon, elevated and forested and distinct from the grasslands surrounding them on all sides.

The Lakota name for them is Paha Sapa, sometimes rendered as He Sapa.

The words carry their own meaning: dark hills, black hills, the hills as they appear from the plains when the sun is behind them.

For the Lakota people and for other nations who have long held relationships with the hills, Paha Sapa is not simply real estate.

It is the physical center of a world — not metaphorically, but in the literal cosmological sense in which some cultures understand particular places to be axes of meaning, points where the human and the sacred intersect in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere.

The hills provided food, shelter, materials, and ceremony.

They were the place where vision quests were undertaken, where critical rituals were performed, where certain knowledge was sought and sometimes received.

This dimension of what the Black Hills are is not separable from the legal and political struggle over them.

It is, in fact, the reason the legal and political struggle has taken the form it has.

If the hills were simply land — valuable land, historically important land, but land whose value could be expressed in money — the story of the billion-dollar judgment fund would be a story about negotiating a higher price.

It is not that story.

It is a story about whether some things can be converted into prices at all.

That said, this article is not going to treat the spiritual significance of the Black Hills as either decoration or as something beyond examination.