A little insight into the Lakota Issue

Mythsaje

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Fri Dec-21-07 12:16 AM
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A little insight into the Lakota Issue

This is from an acquaintance of mine, an educator andd former BIA employee who has worked with several tribes in the past.

I posted the story to my local pagan list and he responded with this. I asked his permission and he said I could cross-post his reply to DU.

Here's what he has to say about the matter:

This is a very interesting article, http://nz.news.yahoo.com/071220/8/3db9.html , and one that should probably startle, supprize, and confuse most Americans who know nothing of the background behind the story. So here is a little of it, just to spark your interest.

The Lakota (Brother) Peoples were a confederacy of twelve tribes who inhabited the high plains from Western Wisconsin to Eastern Montana, and from South Dakota north into Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The Lakota spoke a Siouxan language and, along with many other tribes who were not Lakota, they were referred to by the French Canadian fur trappers who were the first Europeans to meet them, as the "Sioux."

In 1869 several of the Lakota tribes met with the United States representatives to negotiate a treaty at Fort Laramie, which the U.S promptly began violating. The treaty set up what was called "The Great Sioux Reservation," which, at that time, included most of North and South Dakota and part of eastern Montana. Other Lakota tribes living farther east, who were collectively called the "Dakota," had already signed treaties on their own with the U.S. several years before. In that treaty the U.S. agreed to respect the territorial soverginty of the western Sioux Nations. But when the government needed to put the Northern Pacific Railroad through the Great Sioux Reservation, and the deal with the railroad was a gift of every other section (a square mile) of land in a checkerboard pattern fifteen miles deep both north and south of the tracks, from St. Paul Minisota to the Puget Sound, which the railroad could use for lumbering, mining, and sale to settlers, then the government needed to take back a big hunk of the reservation. A plot was worked out that involved General Philip Sheridan and Colonel George Custer, and several other leading officials in the Territory to fake a gold discovery in the Black Hills, which were the most sacred lands on earth to the Lakota, the sacred Paha Sapa, the center of the world. A supposedly innocent survey party arranged the gold discovery using a few lumps of quartz, a hand-full of placer gold dust from Montana, and a shot gun, and when they returned to civilization with the evidence they deliberately let everyone know about it in the newspapers, thus starting a massive gold rush. The Lakota, of course, defended their lands against the invading gold hunters, and the U.S. Army, of course, was called in to protect the gold seakers, not the Indians. This started the war that culminated in the Little Bighorn massacre, and the flight of about half of the Sioux peoples into Canada that winter. The United States then terminated the Great Sioux Reservation and replaced it with a double hand-full of very small reservations scattered across the territory on some of the worst land the government could find.

Today, the various Sioux Reservations make up a collection of some of the poorest communities in America, literally third-world islands in the middle of the wealthiest nation on earth. By every measurement the U.S. Government uses to measure poverty, the Sioux Reservations are the poorest of the poor anywhere in the country. An Indian comedian once spoke of them as being "Behind God's back."

The problem for the Sioux, of course, is that they are as far away from any jobs or industry as you can possibly get in America. The problem for the U.S. is that the letters between General Sheridan and his other conspirators still exist, and they form a body of evidence proving the government's perfidy and bad faith. In the 1970's the Sioux nations filed suit in Federal Courts seeking the return of the sacred Black Hills to the Sioux peoples, something that is actually possible, as most of the hills are either national monument land, like Mt. Rushmore, or bureau of Land Management lands, and in federal ownership. But the courts, while they were forced to find for the tribes, given the solid historical evidence presented, they did not agree to order the return of the hills, but instead offered a three billion dollar land settlement, which all of the tribes, the poorest indians in America, have refused to accept for the last thirty years.

Now, to shift focus a little, back east in 1971 the Iroquois Six Nations of the U.S. and Canada, my people, sent delegats of the six tribes and fourteen reservations in two countries to the Wold Court at the Hague, where they filled suit against the U.S. and Canada, claiming that all nineteen of their treaties with the U.S. government and the British Crown had been violated, and that nothing specific in any of those treaties, all dating back to the eighteenth century, actually ceeded Iroquois soverignty to either nation. After six months of review, the World Court, citing international laws established in treaties to which both the U.S., Britain, and Canada are signatories, the Six Nations indeed never ceded their soverginty to anyone else, and the traditional government of the SIX Nations never actually ceased to exist and to conduct tribal and national business, and therefore we were still, by the standards of modern international law, a soverign peoples.

After that decision the Six Nations then filed an application for membership in the United nations (this is the honest-to-gods truth). They also began issuing their own passports and other official documents. Because of the complexities of worl politics at that time, a majority of the member nations in the U.N. actually approved the application, probably to irk the U.S., but both the U.S. and Canda vetoed it from the security Council. In a partial override of that veto, 80% of the member nations voted the Six Nations a "seat without voice" in the General Assembly, and Iroquois representatives have been sent to the U.N. every year since, and so far, seventy-three nations have recognized the Iroquois passports. The greatest achievement of this largely unheard revolution was the establishment in the 1980's of the U.N. Office of Indiginous Peoples Affairs, headed by the delegats of the Six Nations and of one hundred and fourty-nine other indiginous peoples from around the world.

Now of course, real sovereignty is a lot more than just issuing passports. An Indian nation can never be truly soverign, for example, as long as its citizens are still taking wellfare, and medical services, or any other services from the "foreign" government that has claimed their soverignty for the last two hundred years. Real sovere ignty is the day-to-day exercise of control over your own present and future.

For the past thirty years, the people of the little Onondaga reservation in central New York have done just that, they have refused to take one penny of federal handouts. Sadly, the other Iroquois reservations of New York have not yet had that much resolve, though they have all been working towards real economic and political independance. A similar "drop-out" movement has also dominated the politic and economics of the Six Nations Reserve of the Grand River in Ontario, and three other Iroquois reservations in Ontario and Quebec for decades.

Now back to the Lakota, inspired by a U.N. action, this is exactly what the Sioux reservations are contemplating here, the gradually increasing refusal of any and all state and federal services from the United States, and a campaign of acting like a "soverign" peoples in the world once again. No guns and no shootings like the tragic second battle of Wounded Knee back in the 1970's that first brought Russel Means into public recognition, at least no one hopes so, but rather a classic mobilization of peacful un-cooperation (Like Gandi's Civil Disobedience Movement in India) and exercises of economic and political independance. Good luck to them.

Courtesy of:

Chuck L, Ohstowe hajuks