Granite Falls, Minnesota - Minnesota is returning the stolen land which forms the Upper Sioux Agency State Park to a Dakota tribe in a big win for the Land Back movement!

The Upper Sioux Agency State Park, which stretches over more than two square miles in southwestern Minnesota, is being transferred back to the Upper Sioux tribe in an attempt to atone for crimes of genocide committed before, during, and since the US-Dakota War of 1862.

Over years, the Dakota people had been pressured into ceding large expanses of land to the US. The federal government's failure to uphold treaty obligations along with growing threats to Dakota people's survival set the stage for the 1862 uprising and its violent suppression.

In addition to sacred Indigenous burial sites, the Upper Sioux Agency State Park today contains the ruins of a complex where federal officers starved and killed Dakota people by withholding food and supplies and a monument to 38 Sioux people executed in what is believed to be the largest mass hanging in US history.

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"It’s a place of holocaust. Our people starved to death there," Kevin Jensvold, chair of the Upper Sioux Community, told the Associated Press.

Jensvold said he has spent the last 18 years fighting for the return of the land. He began his advocacy after learning that Sioux people had to pay a fee to enter the park every time they wanted to visit their ancestors' graves.

Now, the Democratic-led state government of Minnesota has finally agreed to transfer the land back to the Upper Sioux tribe, which has around 550 members living just outside the park.

The move is a historic first for Minnesota, which has never before returned state park land to an Indigenous community.

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It is also a testament to the growing power of the Land Back movement, a decentralized, Indigenous-led campaign to reclaim stolen lands from colonizer governments.

The full transfer of the Upper Sioux Agency State Park is expected to take place by 2033.