The reservations that Sioux people were confined to after 1877 were smaller and less resource-rich than the Great Sioux Reservation the 1868 treaty had guaranteed.

The land available for subsistence use was reduced.

The political autonomy of the tribal governments was severely curtailed.

The economic base of communities that had, before confinement, been organized around the vast resources of the Northern Plains — including the bison that the government’s policies had helped destroy — was replaced with dependency on federal programs that were themselves inadequate and inconsistently provided.

The poverty that has characterized many Sioux reservation communities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is not separate from the Black Hills question.

It is, in significant part, a consequence of the specific terms of the taking and the specific consequences of breaking the treaty.