I live in the Black Hills. Not near them — in them. My home in Hulett sits within He Sapa, the northwestern reach of what the Lakota have always called the Heart of Everything That Is — the Heart of Mother Earth.

I want to begin this series with a sentence that may sound strange at first, but which contains everything else this series is going to say:
The Black Hills were never owned by the Lakota.

Not because they were taken before they could be owned.
Because ownership was never the relationship.

This single distinction — between ownership and relationship — is the door through which everything about "Land Back" needs to be understood. Without walking through that door first, the conversation becomes a legal argument, a political grievance, a historical wrong to be litigated. All of those things are also true. But underneath all of them is something the modern world has almost no vocabulary for — and which I want to spend this post trying to give words to.

He Sapa — the Black Hills — are not named for their color exactly, though the dense pine forests do appear nearly black from a distance against the surrounding plains. The name carries something deeper: this is the heart. The center. The place from which the four directions extend, the place where the Lakota understanding of the world is quite literally anchored.

In the traditional understanding, He Sapa is not a location within a larger territory. He Sapa is the center from which territory, identity, ceremony, and cosmology all radiate outward. To be Lakota without access to He Sapa is something like — though even this analogy falls short — a heart removed from a body that is somehow still expected to live.

The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty recognized the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation — sacred land, set aside, promised. Six years later, gold was discovered.

Within two years, the land was taken — not through a new treaty, not through any process the Lakota recognized as legitimate, but through an Act of Congress in 1877 that simply redrew the boundaries.

In 1980, more than a century later, the United States Supreme Court agreed: the taking was illegal. The Court awarded a financial settlement — at the time, around $100 million, now grown through interest to well over a billion dollars.

The official spiritual traditional Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation has never accepted the money.
Not once. Not ever. For more than forty years, that money has sat, untouched, growing — while the people who could claim it choose, generation after generation, not to.

This is the question that confuses almost everyone who first encounters this fact. It confused me to explain it, for years, to people who simply could not understand why anyone would leave that kind of money on the table.

And the confusion deepens when you look at the ground truth: even now, while corporations and nonprofits proliferate and raise phenomenal amounts of money in the name of "helping the people," the vast majority of our Oyate — living both on the reservations and throughout the Black Hills territories — are still not benefitting. They live in substandard housing, work minimum wage jobs, and for most, are barely making a living. Meanwhile, those in non-traditional leadership roles too often live in luxury, seemingly oblivious to the more than obvious discrepancies — protecting their wealth through arrangements that appear, with just enough benefit, to qualify as legitimate, while what reaches the people most in need remains inadequate.

Our elders understood abundance as something equally shared — in good relationship, in fair trade, in reciprocity with all our relations within reach. That relationship was what made it always, and only, a sacred one.

So here is the honest answer, as plainly as I can give it in a world that believes in ownership and scarcity rather than relationship and abundance:  

Because accepting the money means agreeing that the land was for sale.
And He Sapa was never for sale. Not in 1877. Not in 1980. Not now.

This is not stubbornness. It is not a negotiating position, waiting for a higher offer. It is the same logic — the exact same logic — as being offered money in exchange for accepting that your mother, or your own heart, was a piece of property that had simply changed hands.

You cannot sell what was never a possession to begin with. And no amount of money changes what a thing actually is.

When people first hear "Land Back," many imagine something dramatic and impractical: 

millions of non-Native residents being displaced, private property seized, an entire region's population uprooted.

This fear — understandable, if uninformed — has made "Land Back" into a phrase that frightens people before they have heard what it actually asks for.

fear cannot heal. Only love, in good relationship with self and with all our relations, can heal.

From the traditional spiritual perspective I carry, "Land Back" is not primarily about deeds, fences, or who holds legal title to which parcel.

It is about relationship being restored. 

Relationship with ALL our relations — trees, rocks, four-leggeds, winged ones, finned ones, creepy-crawling ones, the star nations above that are aligned with all our sacred sites in the Black Hills below - all our relatives with whom we share these lands held sacred by our commitment to the ONEness of life. Life-force spirits above, upon, within, and below these lands entrusted to us to be in close daily relationship with, care for — not only for the fair trade of food, shelter, and clothing, but in daily, living, breathing reciprocity with all life within our reach.

It means access to sacred sites for ceremony — to celebrate and teach the principles and protocols needed to keep things in Balance — without permit applications, without park ranger oversight, without being treated as visitors at our own most sacred relatives' homes.

It means a voice — real, prayerful, song-carried — in how He Sapa is cared for, managed, and protected. 

Because the people who held this land in healthy relationship for thousands of years before any current arrangement existed have something to offer that no present management plan currently includes.

It means truth — in the histories taught, in the names used, in the stories the Park Service tells visitors at sites like Mato Tipila, so that "Devils Tower" is understood as a mistranslation rather than a true name, and so that the deeper teachings are honored rather than reduced to "legends," myths, or trite fairy tales.

And at its deepest level, it means something almost no current policy framework has language for:

it means the land itself being recognized as having its own standing — not as property belonging to any people, Native or otherwise, but as a living relative whose wellbeing is not separate from anyone's wellbeing.

Balance asks us to be honest about the actual history — not to assign blame, but to see clearly.
Harmony asks us to recognize that the current arrangement is not in right relationship — for anyone, Native or non-Native — because land that is not in right relationship cannot truly support anyone's flourishing.
Abundance is what becomes possible when that relationship is restored — not a redistribution of scarcity, but the discovery that there was always more than enough, once the relationship itself stopped being broken. And
Peace — true peace, not the absence of conflict but the presence and resonance of right relationship — is what the sharp phrase "Land Back" can only gesture toward, but never fully touch in the way our ancestors' living understanding always held it.

There's a reason I keep returning to science in this series, and it isn't decoration. 

It's confirmation arriving from a direction nobody expected.

For centuries, physics described the world the way conquest described the land: separate things, each occupying its own space, each independent of the others, touching only when a signal passed between them. Objects. Boundaries. Ownership, in a sense, built right into the equations.

Then physicists looked closer, at the smallest scales of reality, and that picture broke. Two particles, once connected, keep responding to each other instantly, no matter how far apart they travel — not because a signal passes between them, but because they were never truly separate systems to begin with. 

What looks like two things turns out, underneath, to be one relationship wearing two faces. This isn't a metaphor borrowed from spirituality. It's been tested in laboratories for fifty years, confirmed again and again, 

I want to say this plainly, because I know some of you reading this in my own state, my own town, have learned to hear the word "oneness" and brace for something political — 

a demand that the individual dissolve into the collective, that what's yours becomes everyone's. That is not what this is. 

The particles in an entangled pair don't lose themselves. They're still two particles. What changes is the discovery that they were never as separate as they appeared. That's physics, not policy. It asks nothing of your politics. It only asks you to notice that the ground beneath "mine and not yours" was never quite as solid as we were told.

This matters here, at He Sapa, because it's the same relationship the old ones never stopped teaching — that the mountain, the water, the bison, the two-legged, the star nations, are not separate holdings but one long conversation happening at every scale, from the smallest particle to the whole turning earth.

And I won't pretend this relationship is only gentle. My song "Two Worlds Clash" doesn't arrive at peace before it passes through thunder. Nature keeps her own counsel on timing, and sometimes what she does looks, from where we stand, like devastation. Mountains slide. Rivers rise. Homes are lost, and people are harmed who did nothing to deserve it — no fault, no lesson, no punishment. Just nature moving the way nature moves, on a timescale far older than our understanding of it.

Balance and Harmony, the first two of Nature's 4 Steps, are not always tender steps. Sometimes they look like a stump cut down to nothing. But the stump does not know it is finished — and it is never finished. Abundance and Peace, the steps that follow, take longer than we'd like, and they ask more patience than grief ever wants to give. But they come.

This is, oddly, where the quantum view offers real comfort rather than just explanation. 

If separation was never the deepest truth — if relationship holds everything even when it looks torn apart — then no one is ever truly alone in what nature does. Not the people caught in her changes, and not the earth itself in what it's forced to become. 

We are held in one system even in the clashing. Especially in the clashing. That is the promise underneath "all our relations": not that harm won't come, but that nothing that happens, happens outside the circle.

He Sapa has been waiting a long time.

Not angrily. Not vengefully. The way a mountain waits — the way a chopped-down tree stump waits, standing as tall as it can, knowing life always finds its way — patiently, across timescales that make human grievance look impossibly small, knowing the relationship will be restored because it was never actually broken at the level that matters most.

The mountain is still here. The tree stump knows life always wins. Dependable. Predictable when you look at it straight. The ceremonies are still held. The ancestors are still present — not gone, simply continuing in a different expression of the same circle of always-interconnected resonance. 

A resonance connection that even now quantum physics is proving exists and powers all of creation, from the grain of sand to the vast cosmos.

Crazy Horse spoke of a generation — the seventh from his own — when all the colors of mankind would gather under the Sacred Tree of Life and the whole earth would become one circle again. Yes, in healthy, restored relationship with the entire vast circle of life, once again.

That generation is now.

The Circle the Walk of Peace Path gathering planned for Mato Tipila on Summer Solstice 2028 is part of this — not a protest, not a political event, but a living demonstration of what right relationship with He Sapa can look like: people of every nation, every color, gathering not to claim the land, but to honor it. To circle it. To be in relationship with it, to resonate the source energy aligned with it — love — the way it was always meant to be.

He Sapa and its sacred relatives — Grey Horn Butte (Mato Tipila), Bear Butte, Black Elk Peak, and the ancient speaking silences of what is called the Badlands — are still calling. Still singing in colors, lights, and silences echoing across millions of years of sacred formation. These teachings, these coaxings, are here to be shared with a world that has forgotten and left behind sacred places like old rusted toys — not knowing that their ever-recycling, always-cleansing, constantly expressing beauty still resounds in balance, harmony, abundance, and peace, if we but only stop to listen to nature's deep, broad, and wide wisdoms.

Two worlds clash now — but only because humanity is refusing to recognize the ever-resident health and wellness within these ancient relationships still calling out to us to come back home. What we perceive as threatening — due to our blindness, fear, and misunderstanding of this great unfathomable love — always, when faced, open-eyed and open-heartedly without fear, proves to be obvious and everlasting truth. With each new sunrise we awaken to we are invited to learn how to live in alignment and understanding of the wisdom of the circle of all that nature shares within the vortex.

He Sapa is waiting. It has been waiting a long time. It is patient. And it is not going anywhere.

What remains of the Tree of Life awaits the day when humans release their fear-based, scarcity-bred greed bent doggedly on the false belief of ownership — and finally, wisely, peacefully return to the celebration of loving, good relationship.

It is waiting on the hearts already turning toward it.

You are one of them.

All are welcome. The circle is always open.
 Mitakuye Oyasin.