The Atlantic: Sioux Nation says no to $1B for theft of Black Hills

Monday, February 14, 2011  

"Mario Gonzalez is Oglala Sioux and Mexican and walks like he was once a linebacker. A tribal lawyer for the Sioux, Gonzalez has devoted much of his career to the convoluted fight for the Black Hills of South Dakota—a fight that has already lasted a century. More than 30 years ago, the federal Indian Claims Commission awarded the Sioux what amounted to $102 million for the taking of the Black Hills. But the Sioux didn’t want the money; they wanted their land back. So the money has lingered in trust accounts, accumulating interest. Today, in the name of some of the poorest people in the country, about $1 billion waits untouched in accounts at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

In his office in Rapid City, Gonzalez told me that he’s hopeful these days; during his campaign, Barack Obama indicated that he would be open to innovative solutions to the Black Hills case. Gonzalez is working with a group of Sioux to put a proposal in front of the president. I’d like to believe something could shift: in my time working in Indian Affairs at the Department of the Interior, from 2005 to 2007, no issue seemed more agonizing.

The struggle of the Sioux on the 17 reservations scattered from Montana through the Dakotas to Minnesota is written in abysmal statistics. More than 80 percent of residents of the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge reservation are unemployed. Rape is pandemic. According to Oglala President John Yellow Bird Steele, almost half of Oglala Sioux over 40 have diabetes, and in the Western Hemisphere, few countries have shorter life expectancies (for men it is 48; for women, 52).

Tribe members insist that the 1877 act of Congress that moved the Sioux from their sacred Black Hills is not valid: it wasn’t agreed to by enough tribe members, and the land was never for sale in the first place. When the Supreme Court in 1980 affirmed the original award of $102 million, Gonzalez told me, “there was some jubilation among some of the tribal members. But there were a lot of younger people, including me, who felt that the Indian Claims Commission process, as it applied to the Sioux land claims, was a sham, and we should not participate.”"

Get the Story:
Saying No to $1 Billion (The Atlantic March 2011)