A tribe of Native Americans will get their lands back, 160 years after the largest mass hanging in U.S. history

The Upper Sioux Agency State Park in southwestern Minnesota covers an area of about 5 square miles and includes the ruins of a federal complex where officers held Dakota supplies, leading to starvation and deaths. Here are also the tombs of the natives.

According to The Guardian, the state has taken the unprecedented step of transferring the park with a tumultuous history back to a Dakota tribe, seeking to repair the events that led to a war and the largest mass hanging in U.S. history.

“It’s a place of the holocaust. Our people starved to death there,” said Kevin Jensvold, president of the Upper Sioux community, a small tribe of about 550 just outside the park.

Decades of tension exploded in the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War between settlers and a faction of the Dakota population, according to the Minnesota Historical Society.

After the U.S. won the war, the government hanged more people than in any other execution in the country. A memorial honors the 38 Dakota men killed in Mankato, 177km from the park.

Jensvold said he spent 18 years asking the state to return the park to his tribe. It began when an elder of the tribe told him that it was unfair that Dakotas at that time had to pay a state fee for each visit to the graves of their ancestors there.

The state finally authorized the transfer this year when Democrats took control of the House, Senate and governor’s office for the first time in nearly a decade, said state Sen. Mary Kunesh, a Democrat and descendant of the Standing Rock Nation.

The fact that tribes spoke out about injustices helped more people understand how lands were taken and how treaties were often not respected, Kunesh said, adding that people now seem more interested in “doing the right thing and returning lands to tribes.”

But the transfer would also mean fewer tourists and less money for the town near Granite Falls, Mayor Dave Smiglewski said.

He and other opponents say recreational land and historic sites should be public property, not given to a few, though legislators have set aside funds for the state to buy land to replace transfer losses.

“People who want to make things right in terms of the injustices of history are often forced to support such action without thinking about other ramifications,” Smiglewski said.

“Some, if not most, state parks have similar sacred significance to indigenous tribes.?”

In recent years, some tribes in the US, Canada and Australia have obtained their rights to ancestral lands, with the development of the Land Back movement, which seeks to return indigenous lands.

The Minnesota transfer, which is expected to take years to complete, is included in several large bills covering several issues.

The bills allocate more than $ 6 million to facilitate the transfer through 2033. The money can be used to buy land with recreational opportunities and to pay for valuations, demolition of roads and bridges and other engineering work.