He Sapa In The Twenty-First Century — What The Claim Still Requires

Paha Sapa remains what it has always been: dark hills rising from the Northern Plains, visible from a great distance, distinct from the surrounding landscape, containing the specific places and the specific relationships that have mattered to Lakota people across the centuries.

The hills have, in the century and a half since 1877, been substantially changed by the uses to which American occupation has put them.

The gold mines that drove the original seizure have yielded enormous quantities of ore over that period — the Homestake Mine alone, one of the largest gold mines in the Western Hemisphere, operated continuously until 2002 and produced tens of millions of ounces of gold from the Black Hills.

The national monument at Mount Rushmore has become one of the most visited sites in the United States, with the faces of four American presidents carved into a granite face in the Hills — a site that many Lakota people regard with specific feelings that are not uncomplicated.

The national forests, the parks, the recreation areas, the private communities and commercial establishments — all of this development has occurred in land that the Supreme Court confirmed was taken without just compensation.