How Credible Is This?

Lakota withdraw from treaties, declare independence from U.S.

Sittingbull122007_3

The Lakota Sioux Indians, whose ancestors include Sitting Bull, Red
Cloud and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from all treaties their
forefathers signed with the U.S. government and have declared their
independence. A delegation delivered the news to the State Department
earlier this week.

Portions of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming
comprise Lakota country, and the tribe says that if the federal
government doesn't begin diplomatic discussions promptly, liens will
be filed on property in the five-state region. Here's the news
release.

"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," said Russell Means, a longtime Indian rights
activist. "This is according to the laws of the United States,
specifically Article 6 of the Constitution," which states that
treaties are the supreme law of the land.

"It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna
Convention and put into effect by the U.S. and the rest of the
international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to
be free and independent," he added during a press conference yesterday
in Washington.

The new country would issue its own passports and driver licenses, and
living there would be tax-free, provided residents renounce their U.S.
citizenship, he said, according to a report from Agence France-Presse.

The Lakota say the United States has never honored the pacts, signed
with the Great Sioux Nation in 1851 and 1868 at Fort Laramie, Wyo.

"We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived
by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children," said
Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference
on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977.

Means said the "annexation" of native American land had turned the
Lakota into "facsimiles of white people."

In 1974, the Lakota drafted a declaration of continuing independence.
Their cause got a boost in September, when the United Nations adopted
a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. The
Bush administration opposed the measure.

(1855 portrait of Sitting Bull by David Frances Barry, Library of
Congress)

How credible is this?

Matt Casey <mattcaseymatt.TakeThisOut@gmail.com> made an infinite number of
monkeys bang out the following:

> Lakota withdraw from treaties, declare independence from U.S.
<snip>

Not at all credible. Means isn't a representative of anyone but
himself and AIM, nor are any of those speaking up with him. He
and his has zero authority to speak for the Lakota nation.

Mind you, even if, purely as a hypothetical thought exercise, he
did, I don't recall all that many power plants on Lakota land,
nor much of the other things that are part and parcel of life
today. Food surely isn't natively (ahem) available, for the most
part. Outside of the casinos, most reservations don't really
have all that much in the way of revenue generation to buy things
from outside of them, if those outside supplies have assorted
export taxes connected to them.

In short, I wouldn't be surprised that life after such a
withdrawal would be, to borrow from Hobbes (no, not the tiger),
brutish and short.

Dan Poore
--
About the only difference between the wingnuts on each end of
the [political] spectrum is *which* civil right(s) they think we
can do without. -- Rowan Hawthorn, in alt.callahans (2/28/05)