Paha Sapa: The Lakota Heart of the Black Hills

The hills around you have two names. Geologists call them the Black Hills, a dome of granite and limestone thrust up through the plains over sixty million years ago. The Lakota people call them Paha Sapa, the heart of everything that is. They are not a metaphor. For the Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations, these hills are the literal center of the world, the place of the Black Elk vision, the place where the sacred hoop holds.

The Lakota relationship with Paha Sapa was codified in the Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed on April twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-eight. In that treaty, the United States government recognized the Great Sioux Reservation, which explicitly included the Black Hills, as unceded Lakota territory. Trespassing by settlers was formally prohibited. The treaty held for exactly six years.

In the summer of eighteen seventy-four, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led twelve hundred soldiers into the Hills on what was officially a reconnaissance mission. His expedition found gold in the creek bottoms near present-day Custer, South Dakota. Custer's dispatches went out by courier, and within weeks the eastern newspapers were running banner headlines. By eighteen seventy-five, thousands of miners were pouring into treaty land the government had promised would be off limits.

The United States tried to purchase the Hills from the Lakota. When negotiations failed, federal commissioners recommended military action to force a settlement. War came swiftly. The Great Sioux War of eighteen seventy-six included the Little Bighorn, where Custer died. But the wars of annihilation that followed broke Lakota resistance, and in eighteen seventy-seven Congress unilaterally seized the Black Hills without Lakota consent.

The legal fight did not end there. In nineteen eighty, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the Black Hills had been taken unconstitutionally, and awarded one hundred two million dollars in compensation. The Lakota refused the money. That sum, now grown with interest to over a billion dollars, sits uncollected in a federal account. The Lakota position has not changed: the Hills are not for sale.