'Fighting terrorism since 1492'

Security Watch -
25 January 2008
‘Fighting terrorism since 1492′

American Indians have suffered under foreign invaders for 500 years. Now
the descendents of Sitting Bull are fighting back, withdrawing from
treaties with Washington..

“ The Native American Lakota Sioux tribe has declared independence from
the US unilaterally, citing a string of broken treaties dating back to
the 19th century. In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration declared a dual global
campaign, a war against terror and a US-led effort to promote democracy
around the world. The latter campaign has resonated within the US, with
secessionist movements agitating for the values that Washington
proclaims abroad: from American Indians through secessionist movements
in the two most recent states added to the Union, Alaska and Hawaii, all
the way to one of the original 13 colonies, Vermont.”

By John C K Daly for ISN Security Watch (25/01/08)

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a three-part series on separatist
movements in the United States.

The Native American Lakota Sioux tribe has declared independence from
the US unilaterally, citing a string of broken treaties dating back to
the 19th century.

In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration declared a dual global
campaign, a war against terror and a US-led effort to promote democracy
around the world. The latter campaign has resonated within the US, with
secessionist movements agitating for the values that Washington
proclaims abroad: from American Indians through secessionist movements
in the two most recent states added to the Union, Alaska and Hawaii, all
the way to one of the original 13 colonies, Vermont.

While the efforts have been largely ignored or ridiculed by the
mainstream press, because of the internet and the evolving global
communications network, their causes have attracted immense interest
abroad.

On 17 December, the Sioux “Lakota Freedom Delegation” delivered a
seven-page document of “unilateral withdrawal” from the US to the State
Department in Washington. The withdrawal notice was hand-delivered to
Daniel Turner, deputy director of Public Liaison at the State
Department.

The document, entitled “Lakotah Unilateral Withdrawal from All
Agreements and Treaties with the United States of America,” states:
“Lakotah, formally and unilaterally withdraws from all agreements and
treaties imposed by the United States government on the Lakota People.”

The eight-member group included Lakota Sioux activist Russell Means,
Women of All Red Nations (WARN) founder Phyllis Young, Oglala Lakota
Strong Heart Society leader Duane Martin Sr and Wounded Knee incident
veteran Gary Rowland.

Means, a long-time Sioux Indian activist, politician and actor, led the
group, which also visited the embassies of Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile and
South Africa to share the declaration.

According to Means, both Ireland and East Timor have expressed that they
are “very interested” in the declaration; Iceland and Finland have also
shown interest. Means said that the document would also be delivered to
the UN and to state and county governments covered by treaties.

Bolivian Ambassador Gustavo Guzman, who attended the press conference at
Washington’s Plymouth Congregational Church out of solidarity, took the
Lakotas’ declaration of independence very seriously.

“We are here because the demands of indigenous people of America are our
demands. We have sent all the documents they presented to the embassy to
our Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bolivia and they’ll analyze
everything,” he commented to those present.

Means’ group, based in Porcupine on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in
South Dakota, is not an agency or branch of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.
Means joined the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1968 and became its
first national director two years later. He has remained at the
forefront of Indian activism, leading AIM’s 1972 takeover of the Bureau
of Indian Affairs office in Washington, DC and the group’s occupation of
Wounded Knee a year later.

The Republic of Lakota, based on the 1851 treaty, includes parts of
Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.
Age of communication, age of recognition

While the US media largely either ridiculed or ignored the declaration,
it attracted intense interest abroad. In fact, The Republic of Lakota’s
website crashed after receiving more than 500,000 hits in the week
following the declaration.

The Lakota initiative builds on more than 30 years of activism,
beginning in 1974 with the first International Indian Council conference
held at the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, which lies on the border of
North and South Dakota. Five thousand people from 98 indigenous nations
attended and issued “A Declaration of Continuing Independence,” which
sought to address grievances and treaty violations dating back to the
beginning of the US.

At the time of the drafting of the US Constitution in 1787 there were
over 60 distinct tribes of Indians in North America. During the first
century of its existence the US government and Indian tribes concluded
more than 800 treaties between 1778 and 1871, but the Senate only
ratified 372.

The first agreement concluded by the US with an Indian tribe was the
Treaty with the Delawares of 17 September 1778, which even envisioned
that the Delaware and other tribes would ally with the US, form a state
and send a delegate to Congress. Treaties were concluded with the Sioux
nation in 1851 and 1868. In 1871, the Congress put a stop to the
practice of concluding treaties with the Indians altogether without,
however, invalidating the treaties concluded before that time.

The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty established the Great Sioux Reservation,
setting aside nearly 93,000 square miles for the Sioux in present day
South Dakota, Nebraska and Wyoming. The Lakota Declaration is based on
Washington’s violations of these two treaties under Article 6 of the US
Constitution.

Two years after the Fort Laramie Treaty was concluded the Black Hills
Gold Rush began in the Lakota’s Dakota Territory, peaking in 1876.
George Armstrong Custer led the first 1,000 prospectors into land owned
by the Sioux, who fiercely resisted the onslaught.

In 1876, Washington violated the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty by opening up
12,000 square miles in the Black Hills to white homesteaders and
commercial interests in violation of Article 12 of the 1868 agreement.

The white incursion culminated in the two-day Battle of the Little
Bighorn in June 1876. Sioux Indians led by renowned warriors Tasunka
Witko (Crazy Horse) and Tatanka Iyotanke (Sitting Bull) wiped out Custer
and 262 US 7th Cavalry Regiment soldiers in one of the US Army’s
greatest defeats of the Indian wars. Sioux Chief Tasunka Duta (Red
Horse) later told Colonel W H Wood that the Indians suffered 136 dead
and 160 wounded during the battle.

“They made us many promises, more than I can remember. But they kept but
one: They promised to take our land [...] and they took it,” Oglala
Sioux Chief Makhpiya Luta (Red Cloud) was quoted as saying in 1900.
Cause for grievance

The Sioux have never reconciled to the loss of territory promised to
them by federal treaty, and on 30 June 1980, won a legal victory in the
United States vs Sioux Nation of Indians case when the US Supreme Court
upheld an award of US$17.5 million for the market value of the land in
1877, along with 103 years’ worth of interest at 5 percent, for an
additional US$105 million. However, the Sioux nation declined the
compensation, as it would have legally terminated their demands for the
land’s return. In early 2008, the settlement with attendant interest
rose to over US$1 billion.

By any reasonable measure the American Indian population has legitimate
grievances against Washington. According to the US Census Bureau’s The
American Indian and Alaska Native Population: 2000, Census 2000 Brief,
of the 4,119,301 US citizens defined as “American Indian and Alaska
Native tribe,” 153,360 are Sioux.

While today 50 percent of all Sioux (defined as 25 percent Sioux
lineage) reside outside the reservation system, there still exists an
extensive network of reservations scattered across America’s northern
Great Plains states of Montana, North and South Dakota, Minnesota,
Nebraska, Wisconsin and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and
Saskatchewan.

The census found that 25.7 percent of all Indian households lived in
poverty, defined as income of US$13,738 for a family of three, the
highest percentage of all groups surveyed, with 34.5 percent of all
Indian children under five living in poverty along with 26.3 percent of
all Indians aged 75 or older. According to the census, 27.2 percent of
all Indian women live in poverty.

The situation at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation is typical. Pine
Ridge is the eighth largest reservation in the US, and also the poorest,
with an unemployment rate of around 35 percent and 61 percent of its
residents living below the federal poverty line. Teenage suicide is four
times the national average, while life expectancy is one of the lowest
in the Western Hemisphere, approximately 47 years for men and in the low
50s for women. Pine Ridge’s infant mortality rate is five times the US
national average.

Higher education is largely beyond the grasp of most American Indians. A
2002 National Science Foundation survey found that of the 39,665
doctorates awarded that year, American Indians received only 0.5 percent
of the Ph.Ds, the lowest percentage among the white, African American,
Asian/Pacific and Hispanic categories surveyed. Of associate collegiate
degrees, Indians earned 1.1 percent, bachelor’s 0.7 percent and master’s
0.5 percent.

Whatever form the Republic of Lakota might take, it could hardly have a
more dismal track record than governmental oversight of Indian affairs
up to now.
Means means business

The Sioux activists are not limiting their legal claims to US
precedents, however, also citing Articles 49 and 60 of the 1969 Vienna
Convention on the Law of Treaties and the non-binding September 2007
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Lakota representatives say if Washington does not enter into immediate
diplomatic negotiations, liens will be filed on real estate transactions
in the five-state region, disputing title over literally thousands of
square miles of land and property.

Means said the republic tried to file liens against property that the
South Dakota state government had seized for nonpayment of taxes on 1
January, declaring liens on real estate held by “foreign” governments
but not on private real estate. The county in which the attempt was made
however refused to accept the liens because it claimed not to know what
a “sovereign nation” was.

The State Department has handed the issue over to the Department of the
Interior, which oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). BIA
spokesman Gary Garrison dismissed the withdrawal announcement, saying
that it “doesn’t mean anything. These are not legitimate tribal
governments elected by the people [...] when they begin the process of
violating other people’s rights, breaking the law, they’re going to end
up like all the other groups that have declared themselves independent -
usually getting arrested and being put in jail,” according to a 4
January report.
Internal Sioux controversy

The announcement has stirred up controversy in the Sioux nation as well.

On 3 January, Rosebud Sioux Tribe President Rodney Bordeaux told
Indiancountrytoday.com that the group led by Means represented
“individuals acting on their own.”

“They did not come to the Rosebud Sioux tribal council or our government
in any way to get our support and we do not support what they’ve done
[...] Russell made some good points. All of the treaties have not been
lived up to by the federal government, but the treaties are the basis
for our relationship with the federal government [...] We’re trying to
recover the lands that were wrongfully taken from us, so we are going by
the treaties. We need to uphold them. We do not support what Means and
his group are doing and they don’t have any support from any tribal
government I know of. They don’t speak for us.”

Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Joseph Brings Plenty echoed those
sentiments: “What has been said by these individuals has been talked
about from dinner table to dinner table since I was a young kid; but the
thing is, these individuals are not representative of the nation I
represent. I may agree, I may disagree, but they have not gone out and
received the blessing of the people they say they are speaking for,” the
South Dakota paper Rapid City Journal reported on 7 January.

Means responded to these sentiments, saying: “I maintained from the
get-go I do not represent, nor do the free-thinking, free-seeking Lakota
want to have anything to do with, the ‘hang around the fort’ Indians,
those collaborators with the government who perpetuate our poverty,
misery and our sickness – in other words, our genocide. They are part
and parcel of that genocide.”

He does have his supporters; according to news reports, a representative
for the Pine Ridge Reservation’s council will “consider the proposal.”

Means believes that his movement’s struggle for sovereignty has spread
far beyond US borders, and international interest will support his
group’s cause; “If the US violates the law, the whole world will know
it,” he told the Rapid City Journal on 7 January.

During a 24 January telephone interview, Means told ISN Security Watch
that Washington had so far failed to respond to the declaration, but
“they longer they take, the better for us.

“It’s better for us because it allows us to strengthen our provisional
government, which includes investors in our energy company.”

When queried about the response from abroad and other Indian tribes,
Means said: “We have no concerns about the response from other
governments as yet because we are too busy being free. We have been
contacted by other reservations because other Indian tribes want to do
the same thing, including the northern Cheyenne in Montana and the
Objibay in Wisconsin.”

“We are making sure that we follow all the laws of the US Constitution
and international law, thereby avoiding any confrontation,” Means
emphasized.

In an interview with ISN Security Watch, Jerry Collette, the Republic of
Lakota’s provisional government interim attorney general, echoed Mean’s
observations, noting Washington’s silence by saying: “They have not left
yet. In spite of being given a very polite notice, they have continued
to trespass on Lakota land.”

According to Collette, other Indian nations have shown “overwhelming
support.”

As for foreign interest in the Sioux cause, Collette noted that the
greatest empathy was displayed by another long-suffering nation. “Our
most supportive response has come from the longest colonized people in
Europe – the Irish.”

America’s Indian population has waited 221 years for Washington to live
up to its treaty obligations. While it would be nice to see them finally
get justice, the current administration’s cavalier attitude towards its
international treaty responsibilities would seem to indicate that
America’s long-suffering indigenous population is in for a long wait.

Dr John C K Daly is a Washington DC-based consultant and an adjunct
scholar at the Middle East Institute.

Printed from http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?id=18570

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