Rosebud Sioux member Russell Eagle Bear remembers feeling relief as night was falling at a sacred site in the Black Hills of South Dakota called Pe' Sla. People had gathered to pray on a cold, windy evening in December 2012 just after a group of tribes completed the purchase of the roughly 3-square-miles of land.
"We paid a high price for it because we wanted to protect our burial sites, our cultural sites, our ceremonial sites," Eagle Bear, historic preservation officer for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, said Wednesday.
But nearly 140 years after Congress seized the Black Hills from the Sioux for gold mining, the tribes are facing opposition in South Dakota to preserving the small sliver of their former lands.
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