The Black Hills, a cluster of primordial rock fingers and forested knolls in western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming, is so called for the dark shade of its ridges. From space, it appears as an evergreen birthmark in the center of North America, a patch of dense texture on the great, golden plains. It is the oldest mountain range in North America, a sacred site for many Indigenous Americans and, as illustrated in the new documentary Lakota Nation vs the United States, the “cradle of civilization” for the Lakota people.
The Lakota fought to protect the Black Hills, and won; in April 1868, members of the US government’s Indian Peace Commission agreed to treaty terms at Fort Laramie, in present-day Wyoming, which pledged on the constitution that the Great Sioux reservation – all of present-day western South Dakota, as well as parts of North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Nebraska – would be “set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians”.
