The Lakota understanding of relationship to land is not the same as the American legal understanding of property.

Land is not, in Lakota understanding, something that can be permanently alienated — bought and sold, transferred from one owner to another, reduced to a transaction.

The relationship with specific land is a different kind of relationship, not translatable into the vocabulary of the real estate market.

Accepting money in exchange for the claim to the Black Hills would not be, in this understanding, accepting money for a piece of real estate.

It would be accepting money as the price of a permanent rupture — with the Hills themselves, with the specific relationship between the Lakota people and Paha Sapa, with the continuity of something that cannot be replaced.

This is why “the Black Hills are not for sale” has continued to function as the statement of the position even after more than four decades of accumulating interest have made the monetary alternative ever more substantial.