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• Rapid City Journal. Dec. 13, 2012
• Buy the Black Hills back
• Pennington County isn't the only entity that came out ahead when it auctioned a 40-acre tract of land in the Black Hills a second time after the first auction went awry. The county received $144,000 for the parcel, a $42,000 increase over the first auction price.
• The Rosebud Sioux Tribe was the highest bidder for the 40 acres west of Hill City and off Deerfield Road. The tribe bought a piece of the Black Hills that the Sioux tribes consider to part of their original tribal lands.
• Recently, a consortium of Sioux tribes announced that they had raised $9 million to buy sacred land known as Pe' Sla in the Black Hills. Officials from Rosebud, Crow Creek Sioux Tribe and the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community in Minnesota said they had raised enough money to the nearly 2,000-acre Pe' Sla north of Deerfield Reservoir from a private owner.
• Area residents are aware of the Sioux tribes' claims on the Black Hills. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 ceded the Black Hills and most of western South Dakota to the various Sioux tribes. After gold was discovered near Custer in 1876, Congress took away the Black Hills from the Sioux and created the present-day reservation boundaries in 1877.
• The Sioux have been trying to get the Black Hills back ever since. A 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision awarded the Sioux $106 million as settlement for the United States taking the Black Hills. The tribes have refused to take the money, which has been drawing interest for the past 32 years.
• Legislative efforts to return the Black Hills, notably by former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., have received little support in Congress.
• Recent history has shown that the U.S. courts and Congress are not going to return the Black Hills to the Sioux nation.
• The last remaining recourse is to buy the land back. Arguments that the Sioux tribes shouldn't have to buy what is rightfully theirs are not going to return the land.
• Buy the Black Hills, even if it's only one parcel at a time.
• The Rosebud Sioux Tribe's purchase of the Rapid City property and the presumably imminent acquisition of the Pe' Sla are a start.
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• The Daily Republic, Mitchell. Dec. 12, 2012
• Stand up, rural America
• A story in a recent edition of The Daily Republic has struck a nerve with us. The report noted how U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that rural America is

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