They won’t take the money. Why should they? To them, the Black Hills are sacred and not for sale. And they were stolen anyway. Accepting the money would legitimize the crime.

In 1868 the Lakota Sioux signed a treaty with the US government that promised the Black Hills would be theirs forever. But just a few years later gold was discovered and the government changed its mind. It reneged on the deal and expropriated the land.

The Lakota name for the Black Hills is Wamaka Ognaka I-cante, ‘the heart of everything that is’. According to Lakota creation legend, in the beginning the universe was given a song and a piece of the song is held in each piece of the universe. Except the Black Hills, that is. They hold the entire song. It should come as no surprise to learn that the Lakota have fought for 150 years, on battlefields and in lawcourts alike, for the return of this most spiritual of places.

More than a century after it was expropriated, a US judge awarded compensation for the land – at 1877 prices plus interest. The Lakota are not rich. They languish on a few reservations, ragged scraps of their territory by treaty. By all economic measures these are places of misery and deprivation; not charming, agrarian poverty, but the grimy, squalid, no-hope variety normally associated with urban ghettos. They could use the half-billion dollars of compensation money but still they won’t take it. A price tag is only one measure of value, they say.

In December 2007, the Republic of Lakotah was formed. A delegation travelled to Washington DC to deliver their formal withdrawal from the treaties signed with the US government. Not so much a secession as a reassertion of sovereignty. The case of the Black Hills land claim continues.