He Sapa, the Black Hills, sit at the centre of Lakota religious geography. Sites within them, among them Bear Butte, Wind Cave and Devils Tower, carry origin narratives and are used for vision quests and ceremony now. The hills are not a symbol of the Lakota homeland; specific ceremonies are conducted at specific places in them and cannot be relocated.
The United States recognised Lakota title to the hills in the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868. Gold was confirmed there by the Custer expedition of 1874, miners came, the government failed to keep them out, and after the war of 1876 Congress attached Lakota title to their rations: the agreement of 1877 taking the hills was signed by a fraction of the adult men, where the treaty had required three quarters.
In United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, decided in 1980, the Supreme Court held that this had been a taking of property requiring just compensation, and upheld an award that with interest then stood at around 106 million dollars. The Lakota have refused to draw it. The fund is still held by the United States and has grown past a billion dollars. Refusing it keeps the claim to the land open, and accepting it would extinguish that claim.
This is the clearest available case of a religious claim that a court can only mistake for a property claim. The compensation remedy assumes the injury was economic and can be repriced. The Lakota position is that the hills are the place where certain things must be done, and that no sum substitutes for the place. Related disputes follow the same shape: Bear Butte, a state park where ceremony competes with tourism and nearby commercial development, and Devils Tower, where a voluntary June climbing closure respecting ceremony has been challenged in court by climbers.
The broader pattern holds across Indian country. Federal law protects belief and expression well, and access to particular ground badly, and it is particular ground that most of these traditions require.