The Sioux won a billion-dollar court award and refused to take the money
In 1980 the US Supreme Court agreed that land promised to the Sioux in 1868 had been taken illegally. The compensation, with interest, had passed $1 billion by 2018. The Sioux still have not touched it. What they want is not a cheque but the Black Hills themselves.
Sioux is an outsider's word, a French rendering of an Ojibwe term. The nation's own name is Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the Seven Council Fires, each fire standing for one oyate or people. Those peoples fall into two main language groups, Dakota and Lakota, words that mean friend or ally and recall the alliances binding the bands together.
Before the 1600s the Santee, or Eastern Dakota, lived around Lake Superior, harvesting wild rice, hunting forest game and fishing from canoes. A long war with the Ojibwe through the eighteenth century pushed them into southern Minnesota. Nineteenth-century treaties ceded most of their Minnesota land to the United States, and when promised payments and rations failed to arrive on time, hunger led to the Dakota War of 1862 and exile to reservations further west. From 1870 some began drifting back. The Yankton and Yanktonai, who moved to South Dakota in 1858, kept a treaty right to serve as guardians of the Pipestone Quarry, a sacred centre for the whole nation.
Furthest west were the Lakota, or Teton, whose name may mean prairie dwellers. Horses reached them in the eighteenth century, and by the 1850s they dominated the Northern Plains. In the Sioux Wars they beat the 7th Cavalry at Little Big Horn in 1876; armed conflict with the United States ended at Wounded Knee in 1890.
The struggle moved to courtrooms and protest camps. The 1980 case United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians concerned territory guaranteed by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and the refusal of payment keeps that claim alive. Later campaigns included opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Today separate tribal governments run reservations in five US states, from Minnesota to Montana, plus reserves in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
Source: Sioux
