Lakota People to U.S.: No longer!

December 20, 2007 4 Comments

Yesterday, representative members of the Lakota Native American tribes presented formal declaration of their withdrawal from the any and all treaties between the Lakota and the United States of America, but also enacted their right to secede from the United States of America. In their declaration and follow-up comments, they had this to say about the treaties:

“repeatedly violated in order to steal our culture, our land and our ability to maintain our way of life,”…

“We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children,”

Source: AFP: “Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US”

I have some thoughts and concerns about this:

Location

Color me ignorant, but how much land, and how many locations did the United States give the Lakota people back in the day? I ask because will this mean that they consolidate their various reservations into one big lump of acreage and settle there? Or does each Lakota community suddenly become its own independent nation? A web search to find a quick answer to this reveals conflicting answers.

Economy

Printing their own currency shouldn’t be a show stopper, but how will they back the currency so that it’s usable outside of their independent nation? Perhaps they’ll bring back the barter system, which I think would be awesome! For those of you who don’t know, the barter system works like this:

I have bow staff skills.
You have football throwing skills.
I need a quarterback for my football team.
You need some protection from the rival teams’ rowdy thugs.
We each trade what we have, which the other lacks, so that we can both walk away satisfied, having our needs met.

Travel

Will the Lakota be able to have their own airport, once their economy can sustain that industry? I have a better, cooler idea: Trebuchets. Have each of their independent nations build massive trebuchets, that way, instead of wrangling the cost and hassle of an airline industry, and the headache of obtaining permission from the FAA to enter their airspace, one could just be flung to their destination!

Labeling

Is it now unacceptable, by the Lakota people, to label them as “Native Americans”? Will they consider it an act of disrespect do call them such?

In all seriousness, I really hope this works out for the Lakota people. Native Americans, in general, have been beaten down and stabbed in the back by our government for far too long. It’s about damn time they started standing up and holding the United States accountable.

My last question is this: When will California follow suit?

Ramblings of the Dan

Transcript: Larry King Interviewing Damien Echols

Larry King Live and Damien Echols: Re-air

http://ianferrel.wordpress.com Ian

I think this is a really interesting situation, legally, but, practically, it will probably work out much worse for the Lakota.

While they may have the right to secede from the US under law (I don’t really know; US Indian law is very strange), I doubt it will result in what they want.

The problems they have now are due to poverty, broken families, and chronic alcoholism. None of those are going to go away with this change. My impression is that they will get worse. Right now, they have a pretty good deal with the government. They are mostly self-governing, but they still get some federal aid money. I agree that they’ve been treated unjustly in the past, but it’s far to late for legal redress of those problems.

I see this more as a political statement than a substantive change, but I’d like to be pleasantly surprised.
http://burrowowl.net Burrowowl

Bravo, Lakota tribes. I hope this doesn’t boil down into some kind of land war when they decide to re-take their 1868 borders.
http://blog.logtar.com logtar

Can I become Lakota?
http://www.aaanativearts.com aaanativearts

Well, this is really a rhetorical question, since the lawsuit was filed by political activists to make a political statement and has no official backing from the Lakota governing council, or the governments of ANY official Sioux tribes, which are many different tribes, and are already sovergn nations, which means they are already in essence their own countries. That means members of the various Sioux tribes already have dual citizenship in “their country” as well as US citizenship.

But if they were to denounce their US citizenship and negate all their treaties with the US, they would still own most of North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Montana, the several million acres included in the treaties that would now be null(er) than they already are.

Course, deporting all those white folk would still be a problem for them, but they have better weapons now, and all the immunization shots the white folk do, so who know how it would go the second time around?

Since those areas hold Glacier National Park, Mt Rushmore and many other tourist attractions, they would still have plenty of US dollars from the tourists to spend outside of their country. Assuming they continued to allow outsiders in and let them pay with US dollars. A lot of countries will do that. I live on the US – Canada border, and you can spend either kind of dollars in either country, so I’m sure they could work out a similar arrangement.

The Sioux tribes own about 1/2 a million buffalo, so they could just tear down all the fences, throw out the white fok, turn their buffalo herds loose and live off the land again if they don’t want to take their US dollars.

There aren’t any airports now on any Sioux reservation I know of, so nothing would be new there. Maybe they’d need a passport to board a plane in the same off rezervation cities they drive to now when they want to fly?

You probably couldn’t become a Lakota, but I hear there are some bogus tribes on the east coast that will sell you a membership if you are gullible enough.