The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: no consensus. There isn't a consensus for the term "theft", but there also is a developing consensus that just describing it as a "land claim" is possibly a bit too euphemistic to the point of NPOV violation given the context of the 1981 Supreme Court case.

This particular RM is, hence, a "no consensus" close, however, I can see a possible consensus for "Seizure of the Black Hills" as a compromise title. A new RM to formalise this consensus can, and I believe, should be created without prejudice to this result. (closed by non-admin page mover) Sceptre (talk) 23:31, 5 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Black Hills land claim → Theft of the Black Hills – This article describes the theft of the Black Hills in the 1870s, not just the current land claim (which is a response to that theft). The land claim presupposes the theft. The new title more completely describes the scope of the article. Finally, the Google Ngram shows that "Theft of the Black Hills" is the WP:COMMONNAME, and this is a compelling reason to move the article. Larataguera (talk) 09:44, 26 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have notified all of the listed WikiProjects of this move request. Larataguera (talk) 09:52, 26 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support as nominator, for the above reasons and those elaborated by Freoh in the discussion preceding the move request. Larataguera (talk) 09:46, 26 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support per nom, the new title accurately reflects the article content and it's the WP:commonname.
   oncamera  _{(talk page)} 14:15, 26 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Neutral based on process. An RFC - a discussion - would be the more appropriate start, rather than jumping to a 'vote'. It's best to bring onboard uninvolved - even disinterested - editors to avoid bias. Once wider (more than four editors!) discussion has taken place, my vote will change to 'support'. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 18:27, 26 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

My word choice and 'vote' were not well put. As I originally stated, I've no dog in this hunt. So suggesting that I'll 'support' the change after XYZ is silly. I have no vote, I was trying to prod deeper discussion before just jumping to a vote. We have a fair bit more discussion now. I still think an RFC is the right way to go, because when only "interested" editors chime in, it's not uncommon for the vote to be little more than a popularity contest among partisans. But I digress. I have no vote to tally. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 18:36, 2 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose How is 'theft' not editorializing? How many other instances of military conquest based on dubious reasons are described as 'theft' on Wikipedia? AlexiusHoratius 21:50, 26 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  It's not editorialising because the Sioux won in court. If there are other instances where the "conquering" country's own courts ruled against them, we should call that theft too. Larataguera (talk) 22:35, 26 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose and restore the earlier lede which was phrased better. Nearly all of the American continent was forcibly taken and conquered. The proposed title reads like a nefarious criminal somehow removed the hills from South Dakota and moved them elsewhere. What is true is that the Federal Government acted illegally, yes, but that just sets up the modern land dispute. SnowFire (talk) 23:15, 26 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Since the matter is to this day still unresolved, I wonder if a possible compromise title would be "Black Hills land dispute".
  Or not. I'll go with whatever is decided. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 02:11, 27 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  This honestly should be added to List of territorial disputes under North America. A number of similar articles use the term dispute as well, so I would support this compromise.  oncamera  _{(talk page)} 02:41, 27 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Thanks for thinking about compromises. Another possibility would be to keep the current title and begin the article with this:

  "In 1876, The United States government claimed the Black Hills – a mountain range in the US states of South Dakota and Wyoming – in violation of the Treaty of Fort Laramie which they had made with the Sioux Nation..."

  This way, the word claim refers to events in the 1870s that are within the scope of the article. Larataguera (talk) 02:52, 27 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Huh? It's incorrect to use the word "claimed" for land that was illegally seized.  oncamera  _{(talk page)} 03:06, 27 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  

• Support move. This article is about the theft and subsequent response; it is not about the response itself. Reliable sources describe it as theft, and as far as I can tell, no reliable sources dispute this characterization. I think that this new title is clear and neutral, and it would violate WP:NPOV to try to make ethnic cleansing sound less nefarious. (Also, Anastrophe, there are now more than four editors, so you may want to change your bolded text.)  — Freoh 11:08, 27 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I wrote Once wider (more than four editors!) discussion has taken place predicated on an RFC, in order to bring in uninvolved/disinterested editors. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 18:01, 27 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. "Seizure of the Black Hills" would be the more NPOV term for the original incident, and the style that we'd generally use for other similar incidents. But since this is about everything that's happened since as well, I think the current title is the best. -- Necrothesp (talk) 12:12, 27 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Editorializing and confusing. Title does not indicate who is doing the "theft". The Federal government via the legislature or the Sioux via the courts? Phrasing can be interpreted either way and is unnecessarily confusing. Walrasiad (talk) 13:57, 27 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  How is Black Hills land claim any less confusing? The first sentence clears up any potential confusion.  — Freoh 21:10, 29 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Any potential confusion is immediately cleared up by the first line in the article. Do we ask “who was doing the massacring?” for articles such as My Lai Massacre? Paragon Deku (talk) 00:06, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, any argument that the wording is loaded is moot given that the Supreme Court has long since decided it was indeed a theft. With both de facto and de jure labeling as a theft in reliable sources, the move seems perfectly logical, especially since the event itself is the primary focus of the article.

Paragon Deku (talk) 00:09, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

No, this is disputed land claim, where a court found in favor of one party rather than another. These decisions happen every day in civil court. People sue each other for land claims and violations of contract all the time, and a court decides which one has the superior legal claim. That's all that happened here. Losing a property dispute does not make one a criminal.

Theft, however, is a crime. Who did they arrest for the theft? Where were criminal proceedings instituted? Who is the lead prosecutor?

This is just litigation over land title. It is property law, not criminal law. The Sioux won a lawsuit, that's all.

This is proposing entirely moralizing language, not legal language. There is no crime of theft involved or suggested.

What is being proposed here is an entirely emotional POV term. You can do so at the personal level if you'd like, but it has no place here. I can understand the emotion. In my indignation, I might call my neighbor a "thief" if I think his fence goes over my property line. But a court does not, and neither do the police. This is a land dispute, not theft. It is up to me to sue him in civil court and prove my legal claim, not a crime to be investigated by the police and prosecuted by the Attorney General. A court might decide the lawsuit in my favor and order him to move his fence, but he will not be arrested and charged with the crime of theft.

This proposal to replace an accurate NPOV descriptive term with misleading POV language smacks of WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS, which has no place here. Walrasiad (talk) 05:48, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

WP:RGW is being misused in this discussion. RGW is about adding unsourced information. Sources describing these events in the 1870s as "theft" have been provided, and are in fact quite common – and what the government did was not nearly so passive as building a fence. Surely you are aware this isn't an apt analogy?

You make an interesting point about civil vs criminal language, but in the end what matters is what the sources say.Larataguera (talk) 11:23, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What source? I have been looking and can't really find any. Googlebooks brings up a grand total of 3 hits for phrase "Theft of Black Hills", only two of which are relevant but hardly unbiased. By contrast, there are 105 hits for "Black Hills land dispute", 846 for "Black Hills land claim", 2690 for "Black Hills claim. Walrasiad (talk) 16:07, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

We're talking about over 1,000 hits on Google Books for "Theft of the Black Hills". Also over 500 for "Stole the Black Hills". These are not hard to find, so suggesting only 3 sources exist seems odd to me.

The number of hits for "Black hills land dispute" isn't totally relevant, because no one is saying that there isn't a dispute. People are saying that "claim" or "dispute" is not the word for what happened in the 1870s. Literally no one says that the government "disputed" the Black Hills in 1876! Larataguera (talk) 18:20, 2 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ah. I guess "the" was missing. Still, "Black Hills claim" is "2820, nearly three times more. Anyway, not sure why you're obsessing about the federal government. The federal government is not the subject of the phrase, the Sioux nation is. It is the Sioux who disputed it. "Black Hills claim" refers to the legal claim by the Sioux nation on land previously assumed to belong to the federal government. It's not the federal government doing the claiming. The Sioux were the plaintiffs, not the defendants. The Sioux filed the lawsuit in the Court of Claims, the Sioux made the legal claim, and the court found for the plaintiffs. Most of this article is about what the Sioux did, how they got their land claim through, not about what the federal government did. Which is another reason why this title is awful and ambiguous. There's no subject in the sentence, and can be read as if the Sioux "stole" the Black Hills via the courts! Or, at even the most generous, make it seems as if this article is about the federal government, rather than the legal achievements of the Sioux. It has a rather patronizing tone, as if it is only what the federal government does that matters, that the Sioux are just some passive bit players in some moral drama about the sins of the US federal government. Walrasiad (talk) 02:45, 3 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Compromise split?

It seems to me that this article is analogous to the murder of George Floyd. (Is murder editorializing?) Both describe an exceptional use of government force where the government's own courts later ruled the actions illegal, and in each case, the response is probably notable enough to warrant its own article. How would people feel about splitting this article into two? We could have both the theft of the Black Hills and the Black Hills land dispute, just like we have both the murder of George Floyd and the George Floyd protests.  — Freoh 21:10, 29 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is a suitable split and the GF analogy is a great argument of previous article title involving crimes by the govt or policing bodies that were proven illegal activities.  oncamera  _{(talk page)} 02:44, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, "murder" is editorializing if there is no criminal charge of murder. Wikipedia article titles use the term "Killing" for homicides which have not been charged or convicted for murder. Even if you feel it's murder. The article was under "Killing of George Floyd" for a long time, until the conviction for murder, whereupon it was changed.

I don't see any point to splitting or what you're asking to be split. This should be in the same article. There was a land dispute, a lawsuit was filed, legal title was decided in court, and now there remains implementation. It is all the same topic. Walrasiad (talk) 05:56, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Your statement, There was a land dispute, a lawsuit was filed, legal title was decided in court... is not quite accurate. It is more accurate to say "There was a theft, a lawsuit was filed, damages were awarded 110 years later..." The implementation is contested, leading to the present land dispute. Continuing to call the theft a "land dispute" is indeed similar to continuing to call Floyd's murder a "killing". Larataguera (talk) 11:07, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support It is a reasonable fact and legally speaking the theft is recognized by the supreme court and not under dispute. There remains some dispute about compensation but not about the original land which was stolen but that is not relevant to the article title. Jorahm (talk) 23:16, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Strongly oppose (but support alternatives Taking of the Black Hills or Seizure of the Black Hills). The alternatives I have listed are both more common than the current or proposed title according to Google Ngrams (WP:COMMONNAME). And it is not true that the Supreme Court declared this a "theft" (contra nom, Paragon Deku, Freoh, Jorahm). That term has legal meaning: It's a criminal offense. When the government takes something (with or without valid legal claim) relevant terms include a "taking" (5th Amendment) or "seizure" (4th Amendment). There is not ordinarily any crime for a government taking, even if it is held to be unlawful. Indeed, what the Supreme Court held was that this was a "taking" of property without just compensation. (As such, the Court held that the United States must pay just compensation for the taking, not that the taking was void to effect a transfer of ownership — as would be the case for stolen property.) SilverLocust (talk) 10:22, 4 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Thanks SilverLocust for this analysis. You make a pretty good argument for Taking as the common name, based on the ngrams. I would add the caveat that the word "theft" doesn't only describe a criminal offence. "Theft" also means "The act of stealing", or "to take without permission or right"[1] more generally. The word refers to the crime, but also the action; and reliable sources frequently use "theft" in this general (dictionary) sense to describe the Taking/Siezure/Theft of the Black Hills. Lawyers don't own this word, and if we cut through the legalese, the Court didn't just rule that it was a "taking". It was an illegal taking: ie, a theft according to the dictionary definition of the word.

  So while I wouldn't strongly oppose the title Taking of the Black Hills, (it's better than not having an article about these events at all!), and I agree that the word "Taking" should be used specifically in legal contexts (ie, to describe the supreme court ruling), the word "theft" would still be a legitimate descriptor for these events in a more historical context (ie, to enable varied prose and to concisely describe the "illegal taking"). Larataguera (talk) 15:07, 4 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Unlawful government takings are not generally called theft other than as a POV term. Here are several notable cases when SCOTUS has held a government taking of property illegal: Tyler v. Hennepin County (2023) (keeping entire proceeds of tax sale) (opponents call it "home equity theft" but news sources often put in scare quotes), Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid (2021) (regular union intrusion on private farm land), Horne v. Department of Agriculture (2015) (raisin reserve), Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States (2012) (causing flooding of private property), Babbitt v. Youpee (1997) & Hodel v. Irving (1987) (law reverting fractional private ownership of reservation land to tribes), Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987) (public access through privately owned beaches), Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp. (1982) (TV lines). SilverLocust (talk) 00:47, 5 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]