The Black Hills Ledger — Entry V — The Verdict They Refused

The Black Hills Ledger

"A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history."

— Justice Harry Blackmun, United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 1980

Entry No. V

The Verdict They Refused

Randy Gipe · Claude / Anthropic · 2026

It took the Sioux Nation over forty years just to get a courtroom door to open. Barred by law from suing the federal government without Congress's specific permission, they finally won a special jurisdictional act in 1920 allowing them to bring the Black Hills claim at all. It didn't work. In 1942, the Court of Claims threw the claim out. For thirty-six more years, that 1942 ruling stood as the final word — until, in 1978, the Sioux won something almost unheard of: a second act of Congress, specifically waiving the legal doctrine that should have kept the case closed forever, ordering the Court of Claims to hear the merits fresh, as if 1942 had never happened.

This time, the court didn't equivocate. It found what the record had shown all along — that the government had acted in bad faith — and set the Black Hills' 1877 fair market value at $17.1 million, plus interest running from the date of the taking. The United States appealed that finding all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost there too, 8–1, on June 30, 1980. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the opinion, and stripped of any diplomatic softening, his verdict on the 1877 Act was as blunt as language gets in a Supreme Court opinion:

Majority Opinion

A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history.

Justice Harry Blackmun, United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980)

By the time the gavel came down, the principal plus a century of accrued interest already totaled around $106 million. The Sioux said no. Not "not enough" — no. Taking the money would legally extinguish the claim to the land itself, and the land was never the thing being litigated as far as they were concerned; it just happened to be the only language a federal courtroom knows how to speak. By the late 1990s the untouched balance had grown past $600 million. Estimates today put it above $1 billion, possibly closer to $2 billion — and in 2025, when a reporter tried to get the exact current figure through a public records request, the federal government sided with the Sioux and refused to release it, on the grounds that the number itself is now a bargaining chip.

A hundred and three years after Congress decided a ten-percent signature rate was close enough to law, the nation's highest court agreed it wasn't. The money has been sitting, accruing, refused, for going on fifty years.

Sources: United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980); Court of Claims opinion on remand, 1979; Bureau of Indian Affairs trust fund records; 2025 FOIA correspondence, Interior Department.