Lakota Nation vs. United States

The struggle for the Black Hills

has been a generational struggle.

I was raised up with that ideology.

We entered into treaties with the United States government

that were made at a time of war.

And, so, that made them peace treaties.

Nation to nation.

The great Lakota Nation was an equal

to the United States government.

The treaties themselves were violated

as soon as they were created.

When they illegally took the land from our people,

it wasn't just the land itself that was taken.

It was a part of a process to assume control over us.

It was part of a process to colonize our people.

It was a part of a process to strip our identities from us.

And, so, as soon as these treaties were made,

they were violated.

At the time that they were violated,

it meant that the peace part of it was over.

That's why we're still at war today.

About 25 or 30 Indians

demanding that the Black Hills of South Dakota

be returned to the Sioux Tribe have climbed Mount Rushmore.

American Indians began gathering today

at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, for a weeklong protest

against what they call anti-Indian racism

and brutality.

In Wounded Knee, South Dakota, today, there was an exchange

of gunfire between federal officers and militant Indians

who seized control of the historic settlement

on the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation last night.

These demonstrations reflect a new sense of ethnic pride

and self-confidence in the American Indian community.

The Indians said, through a spokesman,

that they are willing to die, if necessary, to bring about

federal action on their grievances.

This is a fundamental issue that has to be understood.

They are within the United States of America.

There's only one sovereign.

For the moment, both sides remain stalemated.

You may like to know I do not consider this a, quote,

"creative piece."

I do not regard this as a poem of great imagination

or a work of fiction.

Also, historical events will not be dramatized for a, quote,

"interesting read."

Therefore, I feel most responsible

to the orderly sentence, conveyor of thought.

That said, I will begin.

Keep in mind, I am not a historian,

so I will recount facts as best as I can given limited resources

and understanding.

500 years ago,

there were people on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean,

but neither knew about the other.

On the eastern side, in Europe, the people were white-skinned.

They had learned how to build houses and large sailing ships,

but they still didn't know much about the rest of the world.

In fact, most of them believed the Earth was flat.

I want to tell you about the Sioux Uprising...

...but I don't know where to begin.

I may jump around and details

will not unfold in chronological order.

The United States' history, as it tells itself,

is that of Indian people being in the past,

that we are a phase, right?

We are a branch of the larger US or American history.

The United States has a history of making agreements

or treaties with the Indians, which dates back 137 years.

Fred Briggs has a report on how well they've been kept.

I begin the history, when I tell it, of Lakota people

with the arrival of the United States.

When an Indian prays, he gives thanks to the land.

Land is quite sacred to Indians,

literally Mother Earth in their religion.

At one time, of course, the entire country

belonged to Indians. Then the colonization began,

and with it, the retreat westward.

Treaties are the reason the United States exists today.

If not for the treaties that the United States

signed with tribal nations,

the world would not have legitimized

the sovereignty of the United States.

Because President George Washington knew

that one of the ways to tell France, Spain, England,

all these countries that, hey, the United States

is a legitimate country just like you are.

You're signing treaties with these tribal nations,

and so are we.

The first large-scale treaty reorganizing Indian land

wasn't really a treaty at all.

It was the Commerce Act of 1836,

which more or less gave the Indians

all the land west of the Mississippi.

But each treaty made after this, nearly 400 of them,

amounted to a whittling away of Indian real estate.

During the 1800s, when the US expanded territory,

they, quote, "purchased" land from the Dakota people

as well as the other tribes.

But another way to understand that sort of, quote, "purchase"

is Dakota leaders ceded land to the US government

in exchange for money or goods.

But most importantly, the safety of their people.

Some say that Dakota people did not understand

the terms they were entering or they never would have agreed.

Even others call the entire negotiation trickery.

But to make whatever it was official and binding,

the US government drew up an initial treaty.

In 1851, the Sioux Tribes were given

most of the western Dakotas and northwestern Nebraska.

This treaty was later replaced

by another more convenient treaty.

A treaty in 1868

said the land would belong to the Sioux forever,

but the treaty was broken nine years later

when gold was discovered.

And then another.

By 1889, the Indian lands were greatly reduced

through a series of schemes and illegal actions.

I've had difficulty

unraveling the terms of these treaties,

given the legal speak and congressional language.

As treaties were abrogated, broken, and new treaties

were drafted one after another,

the new treaties often referenced old defunct treaties

and it is a muddy switchback trail to follow.

This week, the Supreme Court ordered a sum of $122.5 million

be paid to the Sioux Indian Nation,

the largest settlement to Indians in American history.

But the Sioux don't want it. They want their sacred land.

Although I often feel lost on this trail,

I know I am not alone.

When you look at histories of peoples

from different parts of the world,

they all like to talk about something

called a cradle of civilization.

In Judeo-Christian history,

we look at the birth of Jesus Christ

as the place when time began.

Hesapa.

Hesapais kind of the Lakota word

for the Black Hills.

It is our cradle of civilization,

the heart of everything that is.

It's a love of this land born out of thousands

and thousands of years of living on and near the Black Hills.

In Lakota, we say, wi cho ni.

"Wi" is a sun.

"Cho" means beautiful.

"Ni" is to live.

So when you say, "Miye wi cho ni,"

that means, "I live in the beauty of this creation."

A lot of people just don't understand.

Because some people see the Black Hills as commodity,

a place to make a dollar bill.

US history is a branch of a larger tree of history

in the way that we understand it.

Not the other way around.

But it's that covetous branch that thinks it's the tree.

All right.

War...

is never any good.

But we go to war...

for peace.

Peace is through death.

Much of what we've learned about the battle for the plains

comes from what we've seen in Hollywood movies.

When we saw the Indian defending his land,

we cheered for the White man's soldiers.

The best way to kill people is to dehumanize them,

right, to make them into caricatures.

Whether it's Peter Pan,

whether it's John Ford's "The Searchers,"

which is considered not just the archetype of Western movies,

but one of the great American films.

And this is a classic Hollywood trope...

...that makes invasion look like self-defense.

You know, we weren't obsessed with the United States

the way that the United States was obsessed with us.

And, so, if we reimagine our history

from the perspective of Lakota people...

...we get a different set of questions

and a different set of answers.

- Good evening. - Our focus tonight is on a story

that has been with this country since its very beginnings.

It deals with a continuing struggle over land

between the White man and the Indian.

If it was ever easy to delineate the good guys

and the bad, it isn't anymore.

I mean, I think

resistance is always defined as being militant

or it's always looked at

as something that's very aggressive.

But for me, resistance, I'm just trying to exist in this world

as who I am as an indigenous person,

as someone who comes from this land

and who came out of this land.

For me, the sanctity and the sacredness of the Black Hills

isn't just that it's a sacred site,