President Biden could settle the Black Hills Claim

Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and an assistant professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. 

In 1987, New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, a former New York Knicks basketball player, introduced legislation drafted by Lakota people to return 1.3 million acres, targeting Park Service land, not private land. The bill died in committee. [The battle for the Black Hills]

It’s been 40 years since attorney Mario Gonzalez filed the federal court case stopping payment of the Black Hills Claim award to the Oglala Lakota Nation. Gonzalez contends that the commission charged to make peace with tribes inserted language into the Fort Laramie Treaty signed in 1868 that Red Cloud had neither seen nor agreed to in negotiations. The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe has passed resolutions condemning what they say are abuses of the General Mining Law of 1872 that led to the Custer Expedition's discovery of gold in the Black Hills.

The South Dakota Democratic Party should lobby the Biden administration to free Leonard Peltier,  paying the tribes and settling the Black Hills Claim, dissolving the Black Hills National Forest, moving management of the land from the US Department of Agriculture into the Department of Interior as a national monument in cooperation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs Division of Forestry and Wildfire Management. Mato Paha (Bear Butte), the associated national grasslands and the Sioux Ranger District of the Custer/Gallatin National Forest should be included in the move.

No doubt my Native American friends would have said it more eloquently but good article on Tribal Sovereignty and how it is not some act of kindness or grace. Too much was given for treaties to be violated. https://t.co/AwpLzhxxd5

— Brendan Johnson (@Brendan_SD) January 2, 2021