And it is the consistent response of the Sioux nations, across all those years, to the question of whether money would be accepted in place of the land: no.

Not because the money is not real.

Not because the poverty on the reservations is not real.

Not because the legal and practical difficulties of pursuing land restoration are not real.

But because the Black Hills are not a transaction.

They are Paha Sapa — the dark hills that rise from the plains of South Dakota, the place that Lakota people have understood as the center of the world, the place that was promised under the most binding legal instrument available and then taken by a process the Supreme Court of the United States would later call dishonorable.