Lakota Nation vs. United States

This visually-stunning documentary recounts the history of the Lakota people’s treaty-making with the United States and shares the story of how those treaties were broken and otherwise undermined after the discovery of a massive gold reserve in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1874. The Black Hills Act stripped the tribe of most of its ancestral acreage in the Dakotas and northwestern Nebraska, separating it from the land from which its identity derived. Adding insult to injury, the faces of four white men were carved into the tribe’s most sacred stone, creating Mount Rushmore. For generations the Lakota people waged a legal fight to regain their homeland but to no avail. Then, in 1980, the case went before the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed course and awarded Lakota Nation $106 million in compensation for its loss. But the Lakota refused to accept the money and continue to insist that all they want is the return of their land (now valued at more than $1 billion). Against the backdrop of this generation-spanning legal dispute, directors Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli paint an unflinching picture of a people continuing to combat the effects of historic dispossession and erasure. 1 hour, 57 minutes