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When the Lakota Nation seceded from the U.S. in December a collective yawn went up from the mainstream media. No big deal, just some disgruntled Natives blowing off steam over fabricated wrongs done to them by Uncle Sam.
No one covered the story save a handful of bloggers, local Midwest media, and Fox News.
I shudder to utter it, but I respect Fox News for covering something that matters. Having a hard time suppressing the gag reflex.
To sum up the apparent non-news: political activist Russell Means led a delegation of Lakota leaders to deliver a statement to the State Department in Washington "formally and unilaterally withdrawing from all agreements and treaties imposed by the United States government on Lakotah People."
The declaration was also distributed to foreign embassies including Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile and South Africa, asking for recognition of their independent status.
"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,'' Means said in a statement.
This area includes parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. Means went on to invite anyone interested in renouncing U.S. citizenship to live on Lakota land tax free and said that the Lakota Nation would issue their own passports and driving licenses.
Many, including the U.S. government, seem to disregard this hubbub as a band of dissident clowns who have no backing among the people they claim to represent.
While it's true the "Lakotah Freedom Delegation" doesn't represent a tribal government, it isn't certain whether or not the majority of Native Americans living there support the motion.
Tribal leaders like Rodney Bordeaux, president of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, have said that Means's group wasn't authorized to speak on their behalf.
''They're 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,'' Bordeaux said in Indian Country Today (ICT), a leading Native American news source.
According to ICT, Means replied, "I maintained from the get-go I do not represent the 'hang around the fort' Indians, those collaborators with the government who perpetuate our poverty, misery and our sickness - in other words, our genocide."
While it's possible that Means and his supporters are merely an isolated faction of extremists, most tribal leaders have at least acknowledged that Means's declaration included accurate descriptions of broken promises the federal government made to Native Americans as well as the dire state of the Native American situation.
The Unrepresented Peoples and Nations Organization (UPNO), an international body that essentially serves as a UN for the disenfranchised, states that suicide among America's indigenous people is twice the national average, unemployment hovers at 80 percent and high school dropout rates range from 45 to 62 percent.
Instead of wondering if secession is what the Lakota people really want, we could ask why it is we don't have any idea of what they want.
Why is this 1.5 million people piece of the American pie, around 100,000 of which are Lakota, being largely ignored?
Maybe a few Lakota rebels are simply not interesting enough for the major media to bother with, although stories like this one never seem to see much print.
Native American issues seem too often buried on the last page, beneath our collective guilt over the lack of real recompense for the theft of a homeland.
Response to the Press Release by Russell Means concerning the treaty relationship between the Lakota Nation and the US government, by the organization of Lakota elders known as Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council, created in 1893 by Lakota Chief He Dog to address treaty matters:
"There is a provision within the Treaty of 1868 which our ancestors had included. Article 12 says that the Treaty of 1868 could not be changed except by three-fourths of the (Lakota) adult male vote. This was done expressly to protect the people, the land, and our way of life...
.. Russell Means is only one man and has not received the 3/4 adult male approval. His efforts, however, remind the world that we still have an international treaty with the USA.
Charmaine White Face, spokesperson, Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council |