BEFORE JON EAGLE SR. began working for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, he was an equine therapist for over 36 years, linking horses with and providing support to children, families and communities both on his ranch and on the road. The work reinforced his familiarity with the land and allowed him to explore the rolling hills, plains and buttes of the sixth-largest reservation in the United States. But when he became Standing Rock’s tribal historic preservation officer, he learned that the land still held surprises, the biggest one being that much of it didn’t belong to the tribe: Standing Rock straddles North and South Dakota, and both states own thousands of acres within the tribe’s reservation boundaries.
“They don’t talk to us at all about it,” Eagle said. “I wasn’t even aware that there were lands like that here.”
On the North Dakota side, nearly 23,500 acres of Standing Rock are owned by the state, along with another 70,000 subsurface acres, a land classification that refers to underground resources,
