The Judgment Fund — What It Is And What It Is Not

Before going further, it is important to be precise about what the judgment fund actually represents, because the way the headline frames it — the government “offered” the Sioux a billion dollars — can create a misleading impression.

The fund is not an offer in the sense that a buyer makes an offer to a seller.

It is not an amount of money that the United States government set aside as a purchase price for the Black Hills and invited the Sioux to accept or reject.

What happened is more specific and more legally consequential than that.

When the Supreme Court upheld the Black Hills judgment in 1980, the compensation that had been awarded — the $17.1 million principal plus the accumulated interest, which together amounted to approximately $105 million at the time of the 1980 ruling, according to multiple sources including the PBS NewsHour — was appropriated by Congress and placed in an interest-bearing trust account managed by the Department of the Treasury.