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Canada and the Soviet Union, other polyglot continental nations, are in danger of falling apart, so it should be no surprise that a separatist movement in the United States has declared independence.
The separatists, a small band of Lakota Sioux, also laid claim to about half of South Dakota -- everything west of the Missouri River, in accordance with an 1868 treaty which was grossly violated by the United States after gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874.
But why stop at the treaty of 1868? The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, also known as Fitzpatrick's Treaty or the Treaty of Horse Creek, set aside the entire Northern Plains for the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Arikara, Assinboine, Mandan and Gros Ventre.
However, the Crow, as well as the Blackfeet, Atsina and Hidatsa, will have to oppose a Sioux claim to any land west of the Missouri. They were already there when the Sioux invaded their ancestral homelands in the 17th and 18th centuries and pushed them west after many fierce battles.
The Sioux claim to western South Dakota has the same moral basis as the American claim -- the right of conquest by occupation, settlement and force of arms.
The Lakota have a superior historical claim to Wisconsin
and Minnesota, where they lived until the invading Ojibwa
(Chippewa) forced them out. (The word Sioux
is a
French corruption of the Ojibwa term nadowe-is-iw,
which means snake
or enemy.
The Sioux
sometimes called themselves dah-kota,
which means
alliance of friends
; it is pronounced Lakota
in their western dialect.)
The Ojibwa headed west to take Sioux lands because they were pushed out of their Great Lakes homeland by the Iroquois. The Iroquois began to move west because they were losing land to settlers from Great Britain.
Among those settlers were my ancestors, including one Elijah Quillen who arrived in America in 1744 from Ireland. They weren't Irish, though; they were descended from Lowland Scots who had been removed from Scotland and sent to Ireland by the English in the early 17th century. The native Irish hated them then, and still violently despise the Orangemen and Ulster Scots; will these ancient tribal conflicts ever end?
As for the English, the people who conquered Scotland and sent defeated Scots to another conquest, Ireland, whence some Scots migrated to America to put pressure on the eastern woodlands tribes so that the Iroquois displaced the Ojibwa who displaced the Sioux who displaced the Crow -- their claim to England is, again, merely that of a conqueror.
England
comes from Angle-land,
the land of
the Angles. The Angle and Saxon tribes lived in southern
Denmark and northern Germany until the 5th century, when
they invaded the British Isles and dominated the indigenous
Celts. Further, the Angles and Saxons represented a
westward migration and conquest by the speakers of
Indo-European, who may have originated in Lithuania, which
now wants to separate from the Soviet Union.
The Lakota declaration is only a start on a long,
complex process of putting us all back where we belong. My
friend Greg Truitt may have the solution: Once land is
stolen, it should stay stolen until somebody steals it
again. Things get too complicated otherwise.
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