On April 15, 2019, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France suffered a devastating fire. Donations flowed in immediately to restore the cathedral. Imagine if donors had told France that they could only have the money if they waived all rights to the cathedral.
That is essentially the deal the U.S. offered to the Lakota in 1980 for the Black Hills. The U.S. Supreme Court held that the U.S. government violated the 5th Amendment by not paying fair compensation when it took the Black Hills from the Lakota in 1877. The court calculated the 1877 value of the land at $17 million; then added interest to set compensation at $102 million. By comparison gold worth about $358 million was mined in the Black Hills from 1876 to 1935.
If the Lakota accepted the court’s decision, they would give up all rights to the Black Hills. The Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota, as well as, to other tribes, just as Notre Dame Cathedral is sacred to Christians. They had been fighting to keep the land since the early 1800’s.
In the 1840’s, thousands of whites traveled past the Black Hills on their way to Oregon and California. They were fulfilling Manifest Destiny, the belief that white expansion was inevitable and justified. Whites considered Indian culture to be inferior and so it was okay to ignore their rights to the land.
The Lakota fought to preserve their lands and sacred spaces from white encroachment under leaders like Red Cloud, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. They were strong enough to win battles but lacked the resources to win a war. As a result, they periodically negotiated treaties hoping to preserve their rights.
In 1851, the Treaty of Fort Laramie provided that whites would have safe passage to the goldfields of California in exchange for compensation paid to the Lakota. The U.S. Senate reduced the annuity payment period from 50 to 10 years and never paid a cent anyway.
In 1868, another Fort Laramie Treaty established the Lakota reservations in South Dakota and guaranteed their rights to the Black Hills. The treaty also promised that whites would be kept out of the Black Hills. However, white adventurers had already discovered gold in the Black Hills. When the Lakota fought to keep them out, the U.S. Army was sent to crush the Indians.
Lakota resistance enabled the U.S. government to ignore prior treaty commitments. In 1873, George A. Custer led an Army expedition into the Black Hills and later wrote a book extolling the wealth of the Black Hills. White emigration into the Black Hills exploded. In 1876, Deadwood was founded as a gold mining camp in the Black Hills.
By 1877, the Lakota were forced to negotiate again. The Lakota say they agreed to sell their rights to the Black Hills in exchange for not being forcibly removed to a new reservation in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) and a guarantee that they would be fed for the next 100 years. Whatever verbal promises they heard, the 1877 treaty text said only that the Lakota gave up their rights to the Black Hills.
The Lakota spent the next 100 years demanding compensation for the loss of the Black Hills. Initially, they were ignored because Indians didn’t legally exist under U.S. law. In the 1920’s, they were finally recognized as U.S. citizens and were able to file claims in the U.S. Court of Claims.
These claims became the basis for a 1923 claim that their 5th Amendment rights were violated when they were not given fair compensation for ceding ownership of the Black Hills. The Lakota claims languished for several more decades until 1980, but by then Lakota attitudes had evolved.
“The Black Hills are not for sale,” they said as they rejected the court’s compensation. Today, the Lakota have no ownership rights to the Black Hills, but have limited access for cultural and religious activities.
November is Native American History month. The history of white-Indian relations is painful to read because of systemic racism, genocide and injustice; but I encourage you to read anyway. No country can be great or at peace with itself without acknowledging past wrongs. To learn more about the Black Hills litigation, see The Lakotas and the Black Hills, by Jeffrey Ostler (2010)
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