the Venerable Black Hills of South Dakota

These are the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota, a land revered as sacred by the First Nations Lakota Tribes. 

The area has 3 original Tribal names: the Lakota call them: Ȟe Sápa, the Cheyenne know them as: Moʼȯhta-voʼhonáaeva and the Hidatsa call it: Awaxaawi shiibisha. (Research Source)

First Nations Tribes have lived and hunted in the Black Hills for millennia. After conquering the Cheyenne in 1776, the Lakota Tribe took over the territory of the Black Hills, which became central to their culture. In 1868, the U.S. government signed the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, establishing the Great Sioux Reservation west of the Missouri River, and exempting the Black Hills from all white settlement forever. (Research Source)

Unfortunately, when settlers discovered gold there in 1874, as a result of George Armstrong Custer's Black Hills Expedition, miners swept into the area in a gold rush. The US government took back the Black Hills and in 1889 reassigned the Lakota, against their wishes, to five smaller reservations in western South Dakota, selling off 9 million acres of their former land. (Research Source)

Unlike most of South Dakota, the Black Hills were settled by European Americans primarily from population centers to the west and south of the region, as miners flocked there from earlier gold boom locations in Colorado and Montana.  

I lensed this image while exploring and filming the Badlands wilderness near the Black Hills. This image is from my ongoing project in which I am trying to raise awareness of the 47% of the USA and 90% of Canada that remain unpopulated wilderness.  

Where Eagles Fly - The American Wilderness Expedition is my personal mission to introduce people to these amazing locations that surround us.  

If you like what you see here upvote then resteemit so that others may experience these wondrous places as well.  

Yehaw!!