“A Fight To The Death”: The Final Indian War In America About To Begin
South Dakota’s Republican leadership of John Thune and Kristi Noem always march lockstep with the other Republican robots. Neither of them care that South Dakota’s largest minority, the people of the Great Sioux Nation, diametrically oppose the Pipeline and they also fail to understand the determination of the Indian people to stop it.
The House vote was 252-161 favoring the bill. The bill was sponsored by Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) who is trying to take the senate seat from Democrat Mary Landrieu, They are headed for a senate runoff on December 6 and Landrieu has expressed a strong support of the bill in hopes of holding her senate seat.
Two hundred twenty-one Republicans supported the bill which made the Republican support unanimous while 31 Democrats joined the Republicans. One hundred sixty-one Democrats rejected the bill.
Progressive newsman and commentator for MSNBC, Ed Schultz, traveled to the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota this year to meet with the Indian opponents of the Pipeline. Firsthand he witnessed the absolute determination of the Indian nations to stop construction of the Pipeline.
He witnessed their determination and reported on it. Except for Schultz the national media shows no interest and apparently has no knowledge of how the Indian people feel about the Pipeline nor do they comprehend that they will go to their deaths stopping it. What is wrong with the national media when it comes to Indians?
As an example of the national media’s apathy, the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota have turned their backs on the $1.5 billion dollars offered to them for settling the Black Hills Claim and although they are among the poorest of all Americans, the national media does not consider this news.
Why do they protest the XL Pipeline? Because the lands the Pipeline will cross are Sacred Treaty Lands and to violate these lands by digging ditches for the pipelines is blasphemes to the beliefs of the Native Americans. Violating the human and religious rights of a people in order to create jobs and low cost fuel is the worst form of capitalism. Will the Pipeline bring down the cost of fuel and create thousands of jobs?
President Barack Obama has blocked the construction of the Pipeline for six years and he said, “I have constantly pushed back against the idea the somehow the Keystone Pipeline is either this massive jobs bill for the United States or is somehow lowering gas prices. Understand what this project is. It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. That doesn’t have an impact on U.S. gas prices.”
In the meantime Senator Landrieu conceded that it is unlikely that the Senate and the House will have the two-thirds majority needed to override an Obama veto.
Wizipan Little Elk of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and a coalition of tribal leaders from across the Northern Plains and the United States have pulled no punches on how they intend to fight the Pipeline to the death if that is the only way to stop it.
South Dakota’s elected leadership has totally ignored the protests of the largest minority residing in their state. They have also totally underestimated and misunderstood the inherent determination of the Indian people. This is a huge mistake that will have national implications and it is taking place right under their Republican noses.
What is even worse is South Dakota’s media has also buried its collective heads in the sand even though Native Sun News has been reporting on the Keystone XL Pipeline since 2006. Award-winning Health and Environment Editor for Native Sun News, Talli Nauman, has been at the journalistic forefront of this environmental disaster about to happen from day one and she has been rewarded by the South Dakota Newspaper Association with many awards for her yearly series of articles on this most important topic. Until this issue became a political football, the rest of South Dakota’s media had been silent.
The Keystone XL Pipeline that is being pushed by TransCanada may well be the beginning of the final war between the United States government and the Indian Nations. A word of caution to TransCanada and the U.S. Government: please do not disregard the determination of the Indian people when they say they will fight this Pipeline to their deaths if need be. They mean it!
When asked if he truly thought that a handful of Indians could stop the construction of the Pipeline, Little Elk simply said, “Try us!”
By: Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, is The Editor and Publisher of Native Sun News; (Note: This column will appear before the Senate votes on the Keystone XL Pipeline. The House has already approved the construction of the Pipeline): Published in The Huffington Post Blog, November 16, 2014
“The Death Of A Dream”: Celebrating South Dakota’s 125th Birthday — Or Not
South Dakota, like North Dakota, was named after a people; the Dakota or Sioux as they were misnamed by the French, missionaries and the settlers.
Before it became a state it was known as Dakota Territory, clearly identifying it as a land belonging to the Dakota. It became a state on November 2, 1889. One year and 57 days after statehood one of the worst massacres of innocent Indian men, women and children took place on December 29, 1890 at Wounded Knee, clearly within the boundaries of the new state.
Nearly 300 innocent victims died that December day many of them torn apart by the new Hotchkiss machine guns, the first time these deadly guns were used against human beings. When the young Nicholas Black Elk saw this carnage he later said, “And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard: A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”
This year on November 2, South Dakota will be celebrating its 125th Anniversary as a State. For nearly all of those 125 years the Dakota, Lakota, Nakota people who make up the largest minority in the state were excluded from participation in the state legislative body and were denied the basic freedoms accorded to every white citizen of the state.
They did not become citizens of the state until 1924 when the United States made them citizens of the United States. First understand that the state was named after a people; but Dakota is not only a people, it is a dialect. That is why those people erroneously noted as Sioux called themselves Dakota, Lakota and Nakota. Simply put all of the so-called Sioux spoke the same language with a slightly different dialect. Where the Dakota used a “D” the Lakota used an “L” and the Nakota used an “N.” For example the word for friend in Dakota is koda, and in Lakota it is kola and in Nakota it is kona.
Of course it is much more complicated than that. When one delves more deeply into it they will find that there were actually four dialects: The Santee, Yankton, Teton and Assiniboine and each of these dialects has slight differences, but not sufficient enough for all of the Dakota to understand each other.
According to a dictionary by the great Lakota educator Albert White Hat. Sr., Sicangu Lakota, the name Sioux came about in the 17th century by French trappers and missionaries when they adopted the last syllable of the Ojibwe term “nadowessioux” (literally “snake lesser”). Since the Ojibwe called their major enemy, the Iroquois, “nadowewok” (snake) “Sioux” was the last part of an Ojibwe word that meant in itself only “minor” or “lessor.” The tribes were further divided into the Oceti Sakowin or People of the Seven Council Fires.”
Most of what I write here are simple things the white citizens of South Dakota ignored or failed to learn and continued to shoot and murder the “Sioux” people because there was no law to stop them. The life of an Indian to them was no more important than that of a coyote. And we should never forget that the United States once placed a bounty on a “redskin,” much as they did on a beaver skin or pelt. And there are those out there who still wonder why most Native Americans hate the word “redskin.”
If you were a Lakota, Dakota or Nakota, how would you feel about celebrating the 125th Anniversary of Statehood for South Dakota knowing that you had been excluded, discriminated against, murdered and had most of your land stolen from you by the State of South Dakota?
I’ll leave it up to the Oceti Sakowin to decide that.
By: Tim Giago, Founder, Native American Journalists Association; The Huffington Post Blog, July 3, 2014
“Snyder’s Insulting Redskins Logic”: Irrational Insistance That Native Americans Are Somehow Being Honored
Fear not for the future of free speech after the Washington Redskins’ trademark fight. The legal dividend could be more free speech, not less.
A lot of my fellow First Amendment advocates sound nervous about cancellation of the Washington pro football team’s trademark by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this past week.
Even among those who sharply disagree with team owner Dan Snyder, who irrationally insists that Native Americans somehow are honored by a word that major English dictionaries call “insulting” and “usually offensive,” there is widespread concern that the patent office is deciding what trademarks are “disparaging” to Native Americans or anyone else.
The decision can’t force the NFL team to change its name, but it could hit Snyder in his wallet.
If the ruling stands up in court, he could lose the right to block other companies from selling caps, cups, jerseys and other merchandise with the name and Indian head logo.
Critics see that potential penalty as an infringement on Snyder’s First Amendment rights.
Yet, viewed another way, the decision can be seen as an expansion of everyone else’s right to do what the government’s trademark allowed only Snyder to do.
Sometimes government not only is allowed but obligated to decide what is not only legal but also proper. The states, for example, routinely ban certain words, numbers or names from vanity license plates that they view as obscene or insulting.
A Santa Fe man, for example, unhappily lost his New Mexico vanity license plate in 2012 after state officials declared its message, “IB6UB9,” to be unacceptably naughty.
But we have courts to temper such judgments. The New Hampshire Supreme Court in May overruled state workers who rejected a request for “COPSLIE,” according to news reports. State regulations allowed for vanity plates to be denied if they were deemed “offensive to good taste.” (This particular request, I would add, also violates good sense.)
All states bar plates that are “obscene, lewd, lascivious, derogatory to a particular ethnic group, or patently offensive,” according to Stefan Lonce, author of “LCNS2ROM: Vanity License Plates and the GR8 Stories They Tell.”
Similarly, the federal patent office is allowed to reject applications for trademarks that are disparaging to particular racial, ethnic or religious groups.
That’s why a federal appellate court in May upheld the patent office’s refusal of a trademark to the website titled “Stop! Islamization of America.” Although the owners contend the website only opposed “political Islamization” and not the Islamic faith, the court ruled, “The (patent office) board disagreed, as do we.”
Yet it is hard to see where the group’s free speech rights have been infringed. Their website and Facebook pages remain online. So do Web pages by civil rights and anti-hate organizations that oppose the group’s positions.
Snyder similarly remains free to use his team’s name, if the revocation sticks, but so can anyone else. He only loses certain government protections, such as preventing other users of the team name from selling or exporting team souvenirs and presumably cutting into his profits.
Of course, the Redskins’ name has seniority, as its defenders point out. The team has been using it since the 1930s. But words do change in their meanings and implications over time.
I am reminded of how tea party protesters used to display tea bags on signs and used “tea bagging” to describe their anti-tax protests in early 2009, until liberal commentators made a mockery of the verb.
As a sign of respect for the right of people to be called what they want to be called, I stopped using the term to refer to the movement after an avalanche of emails expressed outrage over the “obscene slur.”
Yet, I have been dismayed to hear some — although certainly not all — of the same people who were angrily offended by that T-word unable to understand why Native Americans are similarly offended by the R-word.
That’s why I am not very upset that the patent office decided to cancel the Washington football team’s trademark. I am only disappointed that the government had to be asked.
By: Clarence Page, Member, Editorial Board; The Chicago Tribune, June 22, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 