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While listening to National Public Radio's Morning
Edition
today, it struck me that I knew more about
Kosovo's claim of separation from Serbia than I did about
another independence declaration, one that was issued late
last year in the American heartland.
The American announcement came from The Lakota
Freedom Delegation,
which claimed that because the
United States had broken its treaties with the Lakota
people, they were withdrawing from the treaties. This would
remove their territory from American jurisdiction and they
could henceforth issue their own currency and
passports.
The boundaries of the new country would be roughly those of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851: the north half of Nebraska, western South Dakota, southwestern North Dakota, southeastern Montana, and northeastern Wyoming.
Of the Cowboy State portion of this territory, I can speak with some personal connection. In 1919 my maternal grandfather homesteaded therein, between Douglas and Gillette. He got a section, as did his brother. The brother sold out to him and went back to Nebraska. My grandfather stayed, narrowly avoiding starvation on his 1,280 acres that supported maybe 30 cow-calf units in one of those rare wet years. Most years, they got by on what my grandmother made teaching at one-room eight-grade country schoolhouses.
Anyway, last December in Washington, D.C., Native American activist Russell Means visited the U.S. State Department and a few foreign embassies to spread the word about this new country. The news flitted by one day, and that was the last I heard of it.
Was this yet another cover-up by the corporate media?
Out there on the high northern plains, were the angry residents actually organizing as the Confederates had in 1861, seizing military installations, drilling local militia brigades, appointing ambassadors, writing a constitution and otherwise preparing for independent nationhood?
And this was being ignored because it might embarrass the rich and powerful?
Or perhaps because no national reporter would venture to Mud Butte, N.D., in January when there was a presidential non-primary to report from Florida?
From what I could learn, we didn't hear any more about
it because there wasn't any more to hear about it. The
Lakota Freedom Delegation consisted of three people,
including Russell Means. The Lakota tribal government had
nothing to do with it. One tribal elder, Floyd
Looks-For-Buffalo Hand, called it a publicity
stunt.
So the 15 minutes of fame came and went. There are certainly some real problems on the Lakota reservations, among them poverty, high unemployment and low life-expectancy. But proclamations, no matter how high-sounding, don't even begin to solve such problems.
But there's another angle. If the United States is
somehow forced to honor its treaty commitments, I hope
someone remembers the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819,
wherein the U.S. forever renounced
all claims to
Texas. Just think how much better American politics would
be if we had kept our word.
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