When $1 billion isn’t enough. Why the Sioux won’t put a price on land.

It’s been decades since Madonna Thunder Hawk last saw the valley she grew up in on the Cheyenne River Reservation. It lies buried under the Missouri River. The United States government sent the river rushing over the reservation’s largest town in 1960 as part of a series of post-war federal flood control projects.

In the history of Native American land dispossession in North America, the creation of the Oahe Dam is little more than a footnote. But for Ms. Thunder Hawk, it is her footnote. She couldn’t bear to watch the water consume the land. Then in her early 20s, she says she didn’t fully appreciate that, in various guises, this had been happening to her ancestors for centuries.

The dam wasn’t illegal, or even militaristic – though the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built it. As with the 370-plus treaties that tribes have negotiated with the government, Ms. Thunder Hawk’s father received some compensation. Like many of those tribes, he didn’t want the money. He wanted to preserve the land.

Ms. Thunder Hawk says she doesn’t know how much he got in compensation, or what happened to the money. What she knows is she will never be able to return to the land. She knows the story of that land is the story of Indigenous people around the world, which is to say it’s the story of colonization in America. A story of land taken with ruthless speed and the faintest of legal justifications.

The scale of land loss is hard to quantify. One study that tribes have, on average, 2.6% of the land base they had before