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By Bornali Halder
© 2002 by Bornali Halder
Url: http://www.lakotaarchives.com/laklandpr.html
This article is based on the author's anthropological doctoral research on Lakota Sioux environmental activism at the University of Oxford and upon 12 months of interviews and research in South Dakota between 1998 and 1999.
Across the sweep of prairie, the Black Hills rise in a volcanic uplift that swelled to life close to a billion years ago. Older than the Rocky Mountains, the Himalayas and the Alps, the once magnificent range of mountain peaks eroded through time to the hills that now graze upon the Plains. The Black Hills is composed of granite rock that threads itself throughout the range and binds two worlds together: above, a forest of ponderosa pine; below, an intricate web of caves. Some seventy-nine miles of cave networks have been mapped so far, under a forest that stretches some 120 miles north to south and 50 miles across, covering 6,000 square miles in total. Dinosaurs, mammoths, grey wolves, camels, pronghorns, jackrabbits, giant bears, and much more, once roamed the Hills and surrounding grasslands, and today their remains are continually being unearthed.
The Lakota call the Black Hills He (those), or Paha (hill), Sapa (black): those that are black, or black hills, for they rise out of the prairie like a black cloud. The Lakota believe the "soup of life" began there: the beginning of space and time; the cyclical motion of life itself set in motion by Inyan, the Rock, whose remains saturate the ancient granite core of the Hills. According to ancient stories, the Lakota as the Pte Oyate (Buffalo Nation), lived under the earth, in a network of caves they called home. They emerged to the surface through an opening now concealed within federal land: Wind Cave National Park. The Lakota were born and they died in the Hills: it was a major burial site for them, along with the Badlands to the east.
Countless Lakota stories centre upon the Black Hills. One is the Racetrack Story.
One version of the Racetrack Story goes like this: One time, all the animals and birds of the universe gathered at the Black Hills to run a race that would decide who would thrive and who would struggle. The two-legged were considered with the birds on one side, and the four-legged were on the other. If the two-legged and the birds won the race, they would eat the four-legged, but if the four-legged won then they would eat the two-legged and the birds. The race began and the animals and birds ran around the Black Hills.
Because the race took a long time, a magpie decided to perch on the ear of a buffalo and stay there. At times a big gust of wind would hinder the birds' progress but not that of the four-legged; at other times a blazing hot day would render the four-leggeds useless but not seem to bother the birds. The birds were in the lead, until the rains poured down and killed some of them. Still the clever magpie was sitting on the buffalo's ear.
In the end, it looked like the buffalo was in the lead. All the four-legged began to cheer. Winning the race would mean the four-legged would have supremacy over all the other species. But as the buffalo neared the winning line, the magpie suddenly flew off his ear, up into the air and beat the buffalo at the goal.
The magpie had won the race on behalf of the two-legged and the birds. The Thunderbeing officially declared the magpie the winner and presented him with a rainbow - which is why the magpie's tail is today so colourful. He also declared that the birds could move as they pleased, all year round. The two-legged humans were presented with a bow and arrow. The Thunderbeing told their representative, "With this weapon the tribe shall grow and be powerful. Return to your tribe and teach them the making of these bows. Now you can hunt buffalo". The Thunderbeing also told the humans that the location of the race was the heart of the earth.
Some accounts of the Racetrack state that in the struggle and effort to run and then win the race, the animals and birds shed much blood. This blood created the colour of the track that circumscribes the Hills. Others say that the race itself created the Black Hills - that is, before the race the region was simply a lush and gentle uplift, but that the pounding of the ground by the racers so shook the earth that the track was pushed down and the ground within it rose even higher. Today, many young Lakota organise marathon races around the Black Hills to honour it and the first great run.
It is said that the Black Hills is the home of Wakinyan, the Thunderbeing whose belly rumbles and whose eyes flash with such ferocity that an adult can be killed, a tree can be split and a large area of forest can be ravaged by fire in an instant. Wakinyan resides at the granite core of the Hills, in the vicinity of Thunderhead Mountain, on whose face Crazy Horse has been caught and fixed; the jagged spires of the Needles, which climbers scale; and Harney Peak, whose 7,242 foot granite knob hikers climb daily during the tourist season.
Ceremonies, such as vision-quests, sweats and sundances were and still are performed there. Tobacco ties, plugs, and even cigarette packets; strips of cloth in the sacred colours of blue, green, red, yellow, black and white; beds of sage and braids of sweetgrass can be found throughout the region, especially around sacred sites such as Devils Tower and Bear Butte. But today 1.2 million acres of the Black Hills is under federal ownership. The remaining land is in private, individual and corporate, hands. Land prices are exorbitant. Although many Lakota come to the Hills regularly to pray, to meditate, to collect medicinal herbs, more public ceremonies such as sundances, inipis (sweats), and hanbleceya (vision-quests) require permission from the landowner.
Since gold was discovered in the Black Hills over a hundred years ago, the Hills are no longer the abode of the Lakota. As we shall see in this article, the Hills has become a corporate Disneyland, or a 'blind man's zoo', nurturing such industries as mining, logging and tourism, to name but a few. These have been a sore point for the Lakota, who have spent the most part of the last and present century in court trying to curb such activities and to reclaim He Sapa, the heart or cante of the Lakota nation.
The Black Hills are sacred for many reasons: it is the place of origin of all species, including the Lakota; it is the centre and heartbeat of Turtle Island - the continent, the earth, the universe; it is the abode of the supernatural; it is the ceremonial heartland; it was a major source of food, water and shelter for the Lakota, especially during the winter months, before the 1877 annexation.
The Black Hills region was an "incubator" providing the "building blocks" of life, according to one Oglala man who spoke with me during my field research. Over time, the hills came to harbour a complex network of streams and creeks, numerous species of animals, birds and plants. One Oglala elder called the Hills a "refrigerator" and told me that the Hills were given to the Lakota people by Wakantanka to take care of and to survive from. He said:
The old people, the old people a long time ago, called [the Black Hills] the purse, the mother's purse. Because it has everything in it. It had all kinds of jewellery and all kinds of gold. But that's for mother earth. That's part of the earth. It's the earth. And then, the Indian people go over there and they hunt, and they gather, in the summer time they gathered. It's a rich piece of land.
The Lakota followed the buffalo - their primary food source. The buffalo entered the Black Hills through a gap now known as Buffalo Gap, especially during the winter, where, like the Lakota, they retreated to seek shelter from the punishing Plains blizzards. Wild fruits, vegetables, water and meat were not the only things obtained from the Hills to furnish the Lakotas' survival. Lodge poles were also sought from the Hills to construct tipis.
For the Lakota, the Hills lies in the shape of a mother. One man told me that the Bighorn Mountains, just to the east of the Hills in Wyoming, are the backbone of Mother Earth, and the Black Hills are her breasts. Below the breasts beats cante, the heart. He Sapa is the mother who provides nourishment for the people. Indeed, she bore life there also. An elder told me:
We didn't come over the Bering Strait. We were always here. [That theory] was written by a white man. That was told by a white man. When I said we've always been here, we were underneath, in this beautiful Mother Earth. And as you can see, the Black Hills are very sacred to us because this is our home. This is where we've come from. And there was a trickster that went down inside the cave and promised them everything. And, like the white man, he told them all these beautiful stories of what could happen if you come to the surface. He promised them that they would always have food, they would always have a place to live, that they would never go hungry, that they would always be happy. […] When they came up to the surface, the trickster disappeared. And it wasn't what he promised them. They had to struggle. That was the beginning of our struggling, I think.
Ceremonially, the Black Hills have been described to non-Indians as heart, heartbeat, sacred, altar, tabernacle, cathedral, and white possession of it is likened to desecration. Such Christian terminology has been chiefly employed in the context of land claim hearings and meetings where the Lakota are trying to share with non-Indians their views of the Black Hills. Wakan, as a concept, defies understanding and cannot be explained in words. However, one man made an attempt for me by situating its definition in the context of the Black Hills. According to him, the term wakan describes the complex feelings the Lakota have for the Black Hills region. It expresses that which is sacred, powerful, dangerous, untouchable, reverential, unexplainable, incomprehensible. The Lakota's relationship with the Hills is as dynamic as that between two lovers: intimate, complex and suffused by the transcendental.
It is not only through formalised ceremony that the wakan nature of the Hills can be experienced and celebrated, but through simply being there. As one Oglala Lakota told me:
[E]verybody knows about the Black Hills, everybody who comes here, and how beautiful it is. You go in there and you sit for a few hours - you can feel a difference. It's who you are.
Through walking, sitting, mediating, or praying, the boundaries between oneself and the Hills collapse and the wakan dimension of life itself can be felt.
By the late 1700s, the Sioux were radiating out from the Black Hills to cover a vast area of the Plains that spanned from the Mississippi to the Rockies. By 1851, a treaty was signed between the US government and various Indian nations that diminished Sioux territory to a tract of land that still centered around the Black Hills, but which now included virtually all of the present states of Nebraska and South Dakota, much of Kansas, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming, and a small portion of Colorado. The Sioux land base was further diminished when the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty re-drew Sioux boundaries to include all of present-day South Dakota, west of the east bank of the Missouri River, including the Black Hills (just). Then, in response to the discovery of gold in there, the US government unilaterally annexed the Black Hills from Sioux territory, despite a stipulation in the 1868 treaty that 75 percent of adult male Sioux must comply to any changes of territory. What came to be known as the 1877 Act also further reduced Sioux land-holdings and led to a succession of acts which have culminated in the current Sioux reservations.
Angry, bitter, and exhausted from their physical and emotional battles with the US, the Sioux retreated to their diminished reservations and began to think and confer what steps they could take next. They had to wait a few years, however.
No mechanisms were open to the Sioux to litigate claims against the US until 1920, when legislation authorised the Lakota to sue the government "under treaties, or agreements, or laws of Congress, on the misappropriation of any funds or lands of said tribe or band, or bands thereof". The Sioux subsequently sued the US for having taken the Black Hills without just compensation, and in violation of the Fifth Amendment. When, in 1923, the Lakota entered their suit with the US Court of Claims, the US were clearly not expecting a refusal of monetary compensation in lieu of the Black Hills because they stalled their decision for nineteen years, entertaining motions and counter-motions, professing they were 'studying' the matter.
By 1942 it seemed the US had finally realised that the Lakota were not going to accept monetary compensation in lieu of land because the court simply dismissed the case, claiming the situation was a 'moral issue' rather than a constitutional one. They upheld previous Court of Claim findings that the Black Hills annexation had not violated the Fifth Amendment; that the taking was not unconstitutional because the US has merely exercising its plenary power; and that the 1877 Act had provided sufficient compensation to the Sioux in the form of 900,000 acres of grazing lands and $43 million worth of rations. The claims court decision was refused review by the US Supreme Court in 1943.
On 13 August 1946, the Indian Claims Commission Act was passed. The act defined bases upon which Indians could sue the government for lost lands, one of which included:
Claims which would result if the treaties, contracts and agreements between the claimant and the United States were revised on the ground of fraud, duress, unconscionable consideration, mutual or unilateral mistake, whether of law or of fact, or any other ground recognizable by the court of inquiry.
The Lakota refiled their original case with the Claims Commission in 1950. The Commission, however, decided that the case had been retired at the original 1942 Court of Claims dismissal and subsequent Supreme Court denial of certiorari. The case was dismissed again in 1954. On appeal from the Lakota to the Court of Claims in 1954, the commissions' decision was upheld.
Undeterred, a second appeal was entered by the Lakota, and this time, in 1958, the Court of Claims ordered the Indian Claims Commission to reopen the case on the grounds that the Sioux had previously received inadequate counsel.
In 1974 the commission entered a preliminary opinion that, in 1877, Congress had been exercising its "power of eminent domain" to take the Black Hills from the Lakota, and although, it had been thus justified in its actions, it was obligated to pay the Lakota "just compensation" for their loss. The Commission arrived at an award of $17.1 million without interest for the entire Black Hills and for gold extracted by trespassers prior to the 1877 Act. Against this award the government sought to 'offset' $3,484 in rations issued to the Lakota in 1877.
Both the Lakota and federal government objected strongly to the opinion, though for very different reasons. In 1975, the government appealed to the Court of Claims, securing a res judicata prohibition against the Claims Commission's proposed Lakota compensation package. The Court noted that the Sioux would be entitled to interest only if the acquisition of the Hills amounted to an unconstitutional taking.
The Supreme Court once again refused to consider a Lakota appeal to this. Invoking Article 12 of the 1868 Treaty, the Lakota then conducted their own grass-roots referendum. The result was a resounding rejection of the relinquishment of title to the Black Hills. This put the government in yet another embarrassing dilemma and, in 1978, Congress passed a bill enabling the Court of Claims to review the compensation package.
The Court revised the proposed award to $17.1 million, with a 5% simple interest calculated annually since 1877. This brought the total compensation package to $122.5 million. The Justice Department filed again in protest at the amount of compensation, but in 1980 the Supreme Court upheld the Claims Court's award of interest. The Supreme Court did, however, reject the argument that Congress had been acting in good faith and with good intentions in passing the 1877 Act which had appropriated the Hills, and it found that rations had been used to coerce the Sioux in to giving up their land. It recognised that the taking had deprived the Sioux of all means of livelihood and that it had violated the 1868 Treaty. The Court stated that the US must at last and finally be obligated to make a just compensation to the Sioux. The verdict proved to be the most strongly worded opinion to date in the Sioux case and was scathing in its assessment of US action. But it was not scathing enough.
In 1979, another grass-roots poll was conducted among reservations which showed that people still refused to accept the new compensation package in lieu of the Black Hills. The Lakota were back in court on July 18th, 1980, when the Oglala Sioux Tribe entered a claim in the US District Court seeking not only recovery of the actual land, but also $11 billion in damages. They argued that the taking of the Hills had been unconstitutional because the United States' exercise of eminent domain had been utilised for private rather than public purposes. The court dismissed the case because, they said, "the issue at hand has already been resolved". In 1981, the US Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the District Court's decision, and, in 1982, the Supreme Court declined once again to hear the Lakota's resultant appeal. The Court of Claims finalised its award of monetary compensation for the Black Hills and further recourse to US courts were extinguished for the claim.
However, all was not in vain for the Sioux Nation. The US legal system had both crushed and inspired Lakota hopes for their land. The rulings no doubt went against any progress toward regaining the Black Hills through the US court system, but at the same time this very same system had enabled the Lakota to keep the fight alive, and maintain a sense of unity and pride that might have been lost in the post-reservation days. Moreover, years of litigation had forced an admission from the Supreme Court that the whole affair had been a "national disgrace", and that, "[a] more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history".
The American Indian Movement (AIM) occupation of Wounded Knee cemetery on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1973 riveted international attention upon the Black Hills land claim and on the economic and political situation of the Lakota Sioux. It alerted the world's attention to the enormous vested economic interest the government had in the Hills, which underlined federal policy in the region. Such scrutiny brought criticism of the government and more support for the Lakota case. All of this contributed to the, albeit limited, legal concessions obtained by the Lakota in court during the 1970s.
In 1974, Lakota elders held a treaty conference at Standing Rock and charged the Oglala leader of AIM, Russell Means, with taking the Fort Laramie Treaty to the United Nations. AIM at that time had played an active part in Indian Country, raising Indian issues and concerns to public awareness. Means set up the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) to achieve an international presence, in the United Nations, for both the Lakota and other indigenous peoples around the world. This was accomplished in 1977 when delegations from ninety-eight American Indian groups made presentations before a subcommission of the UN Commission on Human Rights at Geneva.
In response to worldwide, indigenous pressure, the UN had established the Working Group on Indigenous Populations under the Commission on Human Rights. The Working Group provided a forum through which Native Americans and other indigenous peoples could air their concerns internationally and show how their basic national and international rights were being infringed by their governments.
The upshot of this meant that the United States could no longer conduct their affairs internally and in relative secrecy. The eyes of the world were upon them and the government were clearly embarrassed by what those eyes saw in terms of Indian policy and court decisions. To date, the IITC are still concerned with the Black Hills land claim, and in 1998 they held a meeting on Rosebud Reservation to which members of the Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council were invited.
More direct extralegal action was taken when Means orchestrated an occupation in 1981 of an 880 acre site near Rapid City - what became known as Yellow Thunder Camp. This 'physical reoccupation' by AIM of a part of the Black Hills threatened by mining, once again focused public attention upon the Lakota land claim and placed the government in a position to sue the Indians to leave what was claimed to be federal property under the control of the US Forest Service. AIM counter-sued on the basis that US Forest Service policies in the Black Hills violated the 1868 treaty and Lakota religious freedom under both the First Amendment and the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA). In 1985, the government was stunned when US District Judge O'Brien ruled in favour of AIM, arguing that the Lakota had every right to the Yellow Thunder site, particularly because AIRFA recognised entire geographic areas as well as specific sites to be sacred areas. However, in 1988 the Eighth Circuit Court reversed O'Brien's decision.
AIM's occupation of federal Black Hills land lasted five years. Other occupations of the federal Black Hills were sponsored, in 1981, by the tribal governments of the Oglala and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes. Though they lasted months rather than years, Crazy Horse Camp was established at Wind Cave National Park, and another camp set up at Craven Canyon in the southern Hills.
In recent years, several members of Congress have sponsored bills on behalf of the Sioux. These proved to be a change in tact of the Great Sioux Nation in that, this time around, only federal lands were sought. In 1987, for example, Senator Bill Bradley sponsored a Sioux Nation Black Hills Act to reestablish some 1.2 million acres of federal lands - including most of the Black Hills National Forest - to the Sioux Nation. It would also transfer all water and subsurface mineral rights within reconveyed lands. Privately-held lands would remain so and land held by the state, such as Bear Butte, would be included in the transfer, upon negotiations with the federal government. In addition to recovery of certain lands, compensation calculated since 1877 would be paid to the Sioux. A Sioux Park would be established to caretake the reconveyed lands, managed by a Sioux National Council. All existing mineral leases, grazing permits, timber leases and permits, contract rights and access to reconveyed land would remain, but the Sioux Nation would have exclusive jurisdiction over regulation of hunting and fishing. Criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians who committed crimes on re-established lands would be transferred to the Sioux Nation.
During the Hearings for the Bill, members of the Sioux Nation argued for the passage of the bill based on a mixture of legal and spiritual right. Of the latter, the return was a matter of the right to exercise Sioux religion freely - the Black Hills being an integral part of Sioux religion. They also argued on the basis that a strong, religious kinship to the Black Hills had existed for the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people since the beginning of time, when the Lakota emerged out of Wind Cave. Various sacred sites in the Hills were named and testimony supplied linking the Hills to Lakota Stellar Theology. Other arguments advanced included the assertion that return of a portion of the Black Hills would enable Sioux tribes to develop their economies in a self-sufficient way and to strengthen religious identity. To the latter's end, one Oglala testifier said, "I feel very strongly that with the return of the Black Hills, the bond of imprisonment would be broken. By that happening, many young Indian people, many adult Indian people, and many elderly people once again can start having a better perspective of who they are as Lakota people".
Not all Sioux members supported the Bradley Bill and its provisions, composed by a consortium of Sioux tribes, including the Oglala Sioux Tribe, known as the Black Hills Steering Committee. The Grey Eagles Society of Elders on the Pine Ridge Reservation felt that 73 million rather than 1.2 million acres of treaty land should be given back to the Great Sioux Nation and anger was expressed that they hadn't been consulted by the tribal councils.
In 1990, Congressman Matthew Martinez sponsored a Sioux National Black Hills Restoration Act. By this time the combined value of the 1868 treaty case and the untouched monies from the land claim had reached $300 million. The Act had backing from the Grey Eagles Society. The Grey Eagles Bill demanded restitution of all federal lands in the Black Hills. Other provisions included the establishment of a Black Hills Indian Reservation conveying certain rights - such as water and subsurface mineral rights - and interests in named area to the Sioux. All lands, water and mineral rights acquired by the Sioux would be exempt from federal, state and local taxation. All fish and game within the Reservation would be the property of the Sioux. A miscellaneous provision stipulated that the Sioux Nation would be represented in Congress. This bill was referred to the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, but, like the Bradley Bill, it failed.
Some Sioux tribes became disheartened by the slow progress of land restitution and began calling on the Great Sioux Nation to accept the compensation package awarded by the Supreme Court: "RAPID CITY, SD - Three Sioux tribes are moving to get the Docket 74-A money released, and many Sioux tribal members fear such a move brings the Sioux tribes one step closer to termination" (Rapid City Journal, 1996).
Docket 74-A funds refer to compensation monies for land taken from the original Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Nation. The three Sioux tribes are the Santee Sioux Tribe of Nebraska, the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe, and the Fort Peck Sioux Tribe, who had all asked the legislators to get Docket 74-A monies released. The Flandreau Santee Sioux tribal chairman argued that he wanted the money released because his people needed it:
Virtually it is not doing the tribe any good. From where we are sitting now, we need the money. The casino is not doing that good, looking at the ones in metropolitan areas, we are not doing as good as they are. We have a lot of expenses here that we have to try to get covered. If you need it, you got to get it. We have programs we have to cover, and we need the money. […] Right now our tribe is looking at the financial part of it. We would like to have the money here to support our people. Where it is sitting at right now, it is not doing us any good. We need it (Rapid City Journal, 1996).
Representatives of both the Oglala Sioux and the Cheyenne River Sioux tribes objected to the release and asked the above three councils to withdraw their requests. Mario Gonzalez, an enrolled Oglala attorney then working on the Black Hills claim, said that the Santee Dakota were not actually entitled to any of the compensation money as they were not parties to the 1851 Treaty and did not file a claim for the title area. He said that it was up to the Teton Lakota and the Yanktonai Dakota if they wanted to include the Santee Dakota in Docket 74-A or not (Rapid City Journal, 1996).
As of 1998, no Sioux tribe was asking for their share of the compensation package. Many people have argued that it is impossible to affix a monetary value upon the spiritual, cultural and historical value of the Black Hills. Furthermore, as a recent president of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe has said: "[B]y accepting the monetary payment, we sanction the stealing of lands which were guaranteed by the US Government for the Sioux Nation's continual, undisturbed use".
To date, all the tribes of the Great Sioux Nation feel that, until the issue is resolved, federal lands in the Black Hills should remain in federal trust, under the US Forest Service. To date, it is estimated that all award monies owed to but untouched by the Sioux have risen in value to around $400 million.
Today, two separate treaty councils in Sioux Country are concerned with the Black Hills land claim: the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council and the Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council. Though once demarcated along the traditional/progressive divide - the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council composed of traditionals, and the Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council an adjunct of tribal councils - the divide is not so apparent today as the Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council has distanced itself from tribal government and are claiming a traditional allegiance. But other distinctions remain. The Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council concerns itself purely with the land claim and is pursuing the matter through the international system. Moreover, it situates the claim within a decidedly international context of worldwide indigenous struggles and employs a similar language. The Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council, on the other hand, concerns itself with all national matters pertaining to 1851 and 1868 treaty boundaries - for example, the DM&E railroad, pollution and other environmental damages, the Missouri River water rights, and tribal land issues on the reservations. Both councils are composed mainly of elders. Indeed, elders on both Cheyenne River and Pine Ridge reservations are the most politically active and environmentally aware of all the people I met during fieldwork.
Out of the two councils, it is, perhaps, the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council that is the most politicised. First formed in 1894 to ensure the implementation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, for the last fifteen to twenty years, the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council have sent elders and other Lakota and Dakota representatives on behalf of the Great Sioux Nation to the United Nations to argue the land claim before such working bodies as the Working Group on Indigenous Populations and the Sub-commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. They have also been preparing documents for submission at the World Court in the Hague. Employing the strong language of colonialism, decolonization, sovereignty, human rights, indigenous rights, and identifying themselves and their case with all other indigenous populations fighting for land and independence around the world, their goal is that the Great Sioux Nation is recognised as a sovereign nation on sovereign land:
It is not our intention to take any course of violence but rather to employ the tools of diplomacy. It is our intention to proceed in every way by legal procedure in the name of justice, in the name of the memories of our Chiefs and Headmen who strived hard to make this a good place to live, and in the name of a future for our children, their children, and their children's children.
The Lakota concept of Seven Generations is an important one employed by all those campaigning for Lakota land rights and environmental justice. It is not a concept expressing a specific age group, but one that encompasses all generations and the specific need to act on behalf of future generations. As a Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe chairman said, "Quite simply, the Seventh Generation is all of us. It is a way of life. It is a way of thinking" (Rapid City Journal, 1996). He went on:
Seven generations ago our ancestors had a strong belief in the future of the Lakota Nation. They knew that they could not just live for their day. They knew that their actions and decisions had to be strong enough to last for seven generations; so that the people of the Lakota Nation would live long after they were gone.
For members of the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council, the land claim is a matter of human rights. Basically, this means complete sovereignty in government, culture, language, religion and territory. It describes the US as an imperialistic power that has sought to undermine, diminish and abolish not only the Lakota land base but Lakota rights to all kinds of self-sufficiency and self-determination. It accuses the federal government of "chemical warfare, disease and poverty". It accuses tribal government as being a tool of the federal government and thus not concerned with the affairs and rights of the traditional, typically full-blood, people who, it is claimed, are being cheated time and time again. The only government it acknowledges are the traditional political groupings or governments of tiyospaye.
In 1998, an Oglala elder told the UN's Commission on Human Rights why the Lakota had the right to be considered under international law. He argued that the Lakota Nation was a distinct one. He explained the original territory of the Lakota people ("[O]ur territory stretches across the high Plains of western North America encompassing parts of the states of North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana, Minnesota and Colorado"); he stated that the Lakota Nation has its own territory and its own distinct culture, including language; that the Lakota treated with the US government as a sovereign nation in all treaty negotiations; and that, as such, the Lakota joined all other indigenous nations of the world in seeking protection and reclamation of their human, cultural, spiritual and territorial rights. In short: self-determination (UN Intervention of Black Feather, 26 March 1998).
In his address, he urged the UN to pass its Draft Declaration of the Rights of the World's Indigenous People:
The passage of this document would be a first step in curing the ongoing abuse of indigenous rights. In the world today, it is the indigenous peoples who are still excluded from self-determination on our own lands, in violation of our treaties and decolonialization of our territory under the United Nations' founding principles. […] We want peace in our land through an end to the oppression and colonialization that enslaves us. We are here to urge you, along with us, to rededicate yourselves to this goal for the sake of a dying world. The threat to human rights, self-determination and sovereignty over our unique cultures cannot be tolerated at any level. No nation-state, despite its superior economic or military power, can be permitted to control the lives of the world's people. […] Historically, tactics of divide, starve and conquer have been used against our people […]. In 1890, at Wounded Knee on our territory, the 7th Cavalry massacred our people - amongst them the elderly, women and children, in an attempt to disarm our own nation and out of revenge for our own defense of our sovereignty at the Little Big Horn, when we defeated General George Armstrong Custer. […] We are sure the world wants peace. Adopting the Draft Declaration and defending the sovereignty of all nations would be a significant step in this direction. […] [T]he United States needs to be disarmed from colonizing our territory so that we Lakota/Dakota people may take our place at this table for the benefit of just and lasting international peace for all the Earth's people.
At the same meeting, a Dakota elder situated the claim within the context of Natural Law. Drawing on the Sioux belief that Wakantanka gave each racial group it's own particular territory and culture, he talked of the struggle the Sioux people have gone through, living under the confinement of a culture that is not theirs; a 'domination' that has stunted the Sioux's own abilities to develop:
In our homeland, the colonizer has been severely limiting our right to development. Before the colonizer came to our homeland, we did not have to refer to ourselves as 'indigenous'. We are and were Lakota, Dakota and Nakota, the Allies, living on the land for which we are responsible. We live by the Natural Law given to us by the Creator with instructions for the care of our people, our land, our culture and our natural world. From this Natural Law comes a way of life so beautiful it requires very little improvement. It is this Law that guides us in determining our systems for health care, shelter, economic and social programs and the institutions by which we are governed and live. When the colonizers came into our territories, we gladly shared our way of life with them. A cornerstone of our Natural Law is generosity and caring for those weaker than you. […] Soon we learned though that the colonizers came with the intention of taking our land and the natural wealth found on, above and under our territory. They take from us our medicinal plants, the gold and minerals inside the ground, and the water flowing over our territory. Our land was taken without our consent and treaties were signed and immediately broken when the conditions did not satisfy the colonizer's greed. Every inch of territory upon which the colonizer lives has been taken at gunpoint (Intervention of Grey Owl, 26 March 1998).
At a treaty meeting on the Cheyenne River Reservation, a Lakota man explained Natural Law as follows: "We had and still have a way of life so beautiful that we never needed drugs or alcohol because we had the connection to our land. Our Creator gave us this land to use and to take care of and he gave us ways to live with it. This is what we call the Natural Law". Other participants agreed with him that the way forward for the Lakota people was to return to Natural Law and traditional government. The tribal government, as 'wards' of the federal government, have no power to further the Black Hills land claim and no grounds for standing up for treaty rights.
In his Intervention at the UN, the Dakota elder went on to criticize the "political slavery" under which the Sioux have been subjected, as wards of the government, for the last 100 years. He lamented the culture of dependency that had been created under such conditions, whereby a once independent and self-sufficient nation can no longer provide for its own political and economic needs. He declared the concept of 'dependent domestic nation' a federal invention to justify the theft of Sioux, and other Indian, land. "What [the US] doesn't understand is that our territory is our way of life" (Intervention of Grey Owl, 26 March 1998) - but maybe the federal government understood this all too clearly when it forced all Indian nations onto worthless pockets of land and officially banned both Indian religions and Indian languages in a misguided attempt at assimilation and then termination.
The creation of the 'culture of dependency' was also criticized by another elder at a meeting of the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council on Pine Ridge Reservation in 1998. The Oglala man, who, as a teenager, had sat in on the earliest Treaty Council meetings in the early part of the twentieth century, stated:
When the children in our camps were hungry, our grandfathers lost patience and treaty after treaty was made to bring peace and preserve our way of life. The Pipe was used to ensure the sanctity of the agreement but unfortunately, the Long Knives [US government] never intended to keep their word. They began to make excuses and say that we were dependent nations, we were incompetent to control land, we had to obligate ourselves to them. Because of this attitude our ancestors knew that they had been wronged and that the reasons for which they had laid down their arms were being violated. To this day, we are not recognised for who we are and this mutual understanding is a necessity for true balance and peace between our nations. But with the Long Knives, we are constantly in the position to defend ourselves.
The disgust over dependency was repeated over and over at treaty gatherings. One man at Cheyenne River said:
I know we must cast off this cloak of dependency imposed upon us. We can do this because we are a rich nation with many resources that they owe us for taking. We can cast off these politicians. The people are sick and tired and frustrated with a system of dependency that has no avenue of escape. That's why we have such a high suicide rate with our young people.
Return of the Black Hills and the rest of the 1868 territory will guarantee the Sioux freedom from dependency, and a return to the self-sufficiency of old. But they are clear that though the land was stolen from them, the Sioux Nation are not a conquered nation: "We were never conquered. We never will be conquered. If we were conquered, we would not be able to talk our language, live our values and our culture" (an elder in 1998). And though the land being claimed was once in possession of the Sioux, it wasn't owned by them: "The Creator gave it to us to use. When we die, we die to the land. We are the soil. […] The land is vested with the roots of our native people. European roots are vested in Europe - not here".
Anger still surrounds treaty issues. At one Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council meeting, an Oglala man called the reservation a "POW camp", much to the muttered agreement of other audience members, including the Keeper of the White Buffalo Calf Pipe, Arvol Looking Horse, who called reservations "concentration camps". One young Oglala activist told me: "All Indian nations are under attack: politics, economics, the spiritual status is being attacked. […] We're not Americans, we're Lakota!. […] We're a Lakota Nation. […] We're not conquered - I refuse to believe that!".
At a treaty meeting on Rosebud Reservation in 1998, an man shared how knowledge of the treaty and land claim is learned from the older and passed down to the younger generations:
We must learn our traditions and our law from our grandfathers and elderlies. The political law on the reservation teaches us nothing. I sit down here with the elderly on the Rosebud and I learn about my treaty ways. Chief Thin Elk explained many things to me about treaties and now I sit down with the young people to explain it to them. […] [T]o sit with us and talk with us all together, this is the Lakota way.
In such a way, information on the Black Hills land claim and the language of its delivery is expressed by the old and the young. Unity of the original Great Sioux Nation is integral to the treaty council's success, elders claim. As such, the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council is composed of all of the original 1868 Treaty Sioux reservations. The same is true for the Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council. In fact, several of the elders who are members of the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council are also members of the Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council. This is a recent phenomenon and such unity on all levels is seen to be a positive step. As this man said at the Cheyenne River Reservation gathering of the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council: "This is treaty territory. There is one Lakota Nation treaty territory and therefore one purpose, one voice. We must find our unity in this. By keeping us apart, separate, [the US] can conquer us".
Sovereignty underpins all discourses of land and land reclamation in Lakota Country. Few are in doubt as to the current relationship between the tribal and the federal governments, which is based on imbalance and inequality. One Oglala man is emphatic:
[Some Lakota people] may think they are, or […] aspire to be sovereign, but […] we're not sovereign because we're wards of the federal government. Once you made the treaty you became a ward, so that was the dilemma. There's two ways to view things: the way of Crazy Horse and the way of Red Cloud. Red Cloud signed the treaty, Red Cloud established the reservation system, Red Cloud established our systematic relationship to the federal government. Now we're under their care. Now, if you oppose that idea, then you're considered hostile, and you're considered like the people of Crazy Horse - so we're outsiders, […] we never gave up. Those divisions are still maintained today.
For many Lakota this recognition of the diminished qualities of sovereignty under US rule in no way undermines the fact that inherent Lakota sovereignty still exists. Each Lakota has his or her own definition of sovereignty as each focuses on a particular aspect of it, but each revolves around the central axis of Wakantanka. For one young man, "sovereignty means that you have authority over your own life, control over your own economy, militia, you have your own boundary. You're a nation. Tribal government takes the standard definition from the dictionary […]". A member of the Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council, described it as "inherited sovereignty" - sovereignty that is "God-given", that begins with the individual self, then expands to include a whole society and then a nation and its entire, God-given, land-base. When a territory and culture are stripped away, sovereignty isn't taken away also. This is because "[s]overeignty is a basic human right given to us by our Creator" (an Oglala elder). The fact that no one but Wakantanka can give and take away this basic right to land and culture, gives the Lakota notion of sovereignty a supernatural, and thus eternal, quality. For the Lakota, 'sovereignty' goes beyond rhetoric. At a meeting of the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Arvol Looking Horse defined sovereignty as a total way of life:
We as people, we are sovereign. We've always been a nation. Many nations have seen us and recognise us. As long as we practice our ceremonies, we know the Great Spirit will allow us the future of our children. We have to remember we live according to the way of life - the good and the bad. It goes back nineteen generations, when the Sacred Pipe was brought. As long as we commit ourselves to these ways, there's no person who can tell us the Black Hills have been sold and doesn't apply to our ceremonies. […] Generations back, this Turtle Island was occupied by ceremonies. These ceremonies and this nation have always known each other as bothers, sisters, relations, because, when people go back to their ceremonies and keep to them, we know there is respect and honour amongst our people. […] We are a way of life, not a religion. Religion applies to the people with whom we made the treaties. Their religion and treaties brought us war (1998).
Within the overarching rubric of divine right, the Black Hills land claim and the fight for sovereignty is embedded in the context of cultural reclamation. Reclamation of land, ceremony, traditional values, traditional laws, language and other cultural systems go hand in hand for the Lakota. Many land claim and treaty activists, the majority of whom are over forty or elders, try to live as traditional a life as they can. Often this means living simply and sustainably on land that is treated with care and with as little chemical interference as possible; learning or continuing to speak Lakota; conducting or participating in ceremony; forming traditional governments and tiyospaye; reinstating traditional men and women's sodalities. Where land is concerned, politics, culture and spirituality can never be separated.
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