The Badlands of western South Dakota is a region sculpted by erosion, militarization, dispossession, and preservation. Parceled out between private land, federal land, and tribal land—lands transformed by bombing ranges, settlement, agriculture, and other forces—the Badlands hold a storied and largely unknown past that is embedded in the land. The region is a checkerboard: man-made borders separate federally protected wilderness, sites of Lakota resistance, colonial-era settlements, forest service land, tribal land seized for bombing ranges, private ranchlands, nuclear missile silos, and industrialized prairies. This singular landscape provides an extraordinary lens into the histories and politics that have shaped so much of the North American landscape.