The U.S. Government Offered The Sioux More Than $1 Billion For The Black Hills – They Refused To Take The Money
The stand can be principled and the obstacles can be real.
The question of what the right outcome is — what justice would actually look like — is not answered by pointing to either the intractability of the obstacle or the depth of the principle.
It requires grappling with both.
The Specific Harm — What The Black Hills Dispute Actually Cost
The century-and-a-half between 1877 and the present has not been a period of suspended animation for the Sioux nations.
It has been a period of real consequence — of impoverishment, displacement, and constraint that flows, in direct ways, from the taking of the Black Hills and the breaking of the treaty that protected them.