The Lakotas and the Black Hills

Jeffrey Ostler. The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground. New York: Penguin Books, 2010.

This short, readable popular history is a good introduction to the history of the dispossession of the Lakota peoples' claims to the Black Hills, and subsequent legal battles to have those claims recognized, compensated, and addressed. It also touches on issues of the legitimacy of Indian claims to first sovereignty in general, as the Lakota people were arguably relative to the Black Hills, who replaced earlier Indian people from whom they might have acquired some of their mythologies and spiritual beliefs connected to the landscape and specific places.

One of the arguments used to justify the dispossession of the Lakota was to rely ohn reports which downplayed their presence in, and longtime residency in, the Black Hills--Ostler makes a compelling argument that such claims, when not completely dishonest, relied on a misunderstanding of the ways in which the Lakota used the resources of the Black Hills and focused their cultural and spiritual practices on specific places in the landscape.

A better understanding of the Lakota people are their claims to the Black Hills should help readers develop a broader appreciation for how impossibly rigorous standards of legitimacy and historical veracity have been wielded by State governments and Federal authorities to undermine Indian sovereignty and access to judicial recourse. The second half of this book, which follows the long, still-unfinished legal battle for recognition of Lakota claims, is also a reminder that Indian history didn't end with the end of the Treaty period, or with the confinement to reservations at the end of the nineteenth century.