Lakota Withdraw from Treaties, Declare Independence from U.S.
December 21st, 2007Via: USA Today:
The Lakota Sioux Indians, whose ancestors include Sitting Bull, Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from all treaties their forefathers signed with the U.S. government and have declared their independence. A delegation delivered the news to the State Department earlier this week.
Portions of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming comprise Lakota country, and the tribe says that if the federal government doesn’t begin diplomatic discussions promptly, liens will be filed on property in the five-state region. Here’s the news release.
“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” said Russell Means, a longtime Indian rights activist. “This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically Article 6 of the Constitution,” which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land.
“It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the U.S. and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent,” he added during a press conference yesterday in Washington.
The new country would issue its own passports and driver licenses, and living there would be tax-free, provided residents renounce their U.S. citizenship, he said, according to a report from Agence France-Presse.
The Lakota say the United States has never honored the pacts, signed with the Great Sioux Nation in 1851 and 1868 at Fort Laramie, Wyo.
“We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children,” said Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977.
Means said the “annexation” of native American land had turned the Lakota into “facsimiles of white people.”
In 1974, the Lakota drafted a declaration of continuing independence. Their cause got a boost in September, when the United Nations adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. The Bush administration opposed the measure.
I do believe we’re about to get our first real look at how the USSA will handle serious seccession movements in the years just ahead, and seemingly as ever, native Americans are going to be the ones taking it on the chin.
How do the Lakota hope to enforce their territorial claims in today’s land of the free and home of the concealed weapons permit?
Will the Feds just ignore them, diminishing and marginalizing with damning silence, or are we looking at the Wild West meets Waco, circa 2008?
If the Lakota push, this will not only be revealing in an eye-opening sort-of-way for many folks still cowering under the illusory umbrella of mainstream media manipulation. Maybe make those few who still have conscience left to feel such things — and not doped down with psychopharmica — to wonder if perhaps there isn’t really a team worth backing left in America but the home team.
Where will the “indigineous” populations fit into the North American Union, if at all? Or will they become the gypsy population of the Americas, forced into the refugee lifestyle full-time? I don’t see Zapatista’s, and their eventual counterparts within current US borders, taking to the idea kindly.
Just when you thought there weren’t enough bits of feces flying at the fan, the universe winds up and delivers a real curveball.
Oh no, they say it’s time to go,
Go Go Lakota!
(to the tune of Godzilla, by Blue Öyster Cult)
An admirable move by the Lakota, but my feeling is if they garner too much positive PR, they’ll be set up — blamed for some atrocity and then taken down.