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,
but I think it's the fact that the land itself is life-giving.
That's what makes it sacred.
That's what the Black Hills represents to me.
And honestly, that's what all land represents to me.
Is life.
It is one of the oldest places on the Earth,
over 5 billion years old.
So we say we came from the Black Hills.
And the Wind Cave is that place,
that opening on this Mother Earth that breathes.
And we followed the buffalo out to see this place.
This is why we say we are pte oyate.
We are "buffalo people."
For Lakota people, specifically,
the Black Hills is a place of emergence.
Not just the physical creation of life itself,
but the emergence of ourselves as a nation.
Especially in relation to the United States government.
The Black Hills represents our Mecca.
This is the most sacred place in the world.
How do you say it? I can't even express it.
I can believe it, think it, feel it.
It's in my spirit.
But how do you put that even into English?
The land and the people...
Oyate...
Are inextricably connected.
Not only is it central to our creation stories,
it's central to our understanding of ourselves
as a nation, as people.
And we are nothing without the Black Hills.
That's why the Black Hills are not for sale.
Because we are not for sale.
How can you sell your very identity
of what makes you an indigenous person?
And remember, Lakotas, we have no ending.
That's the beauty of our culture.
That's why we're survivors.
We have a beautiful, innate, inherent right of life.
Deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota
stands one of the biggest and unlikeliest monuments
on the face of the Earth.
A feat of modern engineering.
Its size, its remote location,
its compelling oddness begs the question,
how did it get there?
Mount Rushmore represents
and is, like, the ultimate shrine to White supremacy.
Our sacred mountain, the Six Grandfathers,
of course they carved four racist White men
into our sacred mountain, who believed in slavery,
who actually removed us from our lands.
No matter how long the faces are there...
And it could be a quarter of a million years...
To the American Indian, they will represent
our government's deceit and dishonor.
After the murder of George Floyd,
there was a series of tearing down of colonial statues
all across the so-called US,
and the calling of White supremacy of what it is.
We are watching statues being toppled,
symbols of White supremacy being toppled.
For us, there's no flag you can take down.
There's no statue that you can topple.
President Trump kicks off the 4th of July weekend
a little later today with a trip out to Mount Rushmore.
And all of a sudden, the president wanted to come
in the middle of a pandemic
to the heart of the Black Hills, to the hesapa.
The Lakota Sioux still believe
that it belongs to them and they want it back.
And come to Mount Rushmore and put on a big show.
My message is, is that this is no longer about equality.
This is a radical rewriting of our history,
and in South Dakota, we won't stand for it.
Now, for the first time in history,
Homeland Security is using rapid deployment teams
to protect national monuments across the nation.
We've seen this lawlessness over the past four weeks.
This is an aggressive response
- by the Trump administration. - The key, I think,
is what you just said. It's federal property.
That's absolutely right.
We have people prepared, trained,
ready to go with the air assets to get them there quickly.
We can't think of anything better than to celebrate
and have a little fun on July 3rd
with a fireworks celebration at Mount Rushmore.
That's where we were like, "This is an opportunity."
This is an opportunity for us to connect
this moment of racial uprising
and reckoning of the very heart of this country
to the struggle of indigenous people's land
and to the struggle right here in the Black Hills
that is one of the longest places of resistance
in this nation.
About 25 or 30 Indians
demanding that the Black Hills of South Dakota
be returned to the Sioux Tribe have climbed Mount Rushmore
and camped a few hundred yards
from the gigantic carved likenesses of George Washington,
Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln,
and Thomas Jefferson.
They say they have a right to the land.
Do you think maybe that's why you're letting them stay there?
You know, there's a 50% chance they're right.
- Testing, testing, one, two. - Can you guys hear me out there?
We're in Keystone, South Dakota,
at so-called Mount Rushmore.
It was an opportunity for us
to reignite the fight for the Black Hills.
And reignite the fight to return these lands in the Black Hills
back to our people.
It's a beautiful day on hesapa.
- Whose land?! - Our land!
- Whose land?! - This is totally fucked up.
...assembly. Please vacate the premises immediately.
Get ready!
- Think about it. - This is our sacred Black Hills.
This is the land of [speaks Lakota].
And we're prepared to stand our ground.
Members of the Lakota Sioux Tribe have been protesting.
They say that this land
is theirs and should be returned.
NDN Collective, an indigenous nonprofit,
staged a protest on the road leading out of Keystone.
More than a dozen people were taken into custody Friday,
many of them held for the weekend.
Including organizer and NDN CEO Nick Tilsen.
Cal, you spoke with Tilsen before Trump's rally.
What did he tell you?
When you're dealing with places
of extreme pockets of poverty
and big struggle, it's hard to find a unifier.
Because what happens with poverty,
what happens with struggles, it separates the people.
It creates further distance between us.
But when you talk about the Black Hills to a Lakota,
when you talk about landback in the Black Hills to a Lakota,
there's not anybody you're going to find
that's going to be against that.
The bigger picture is, what was the trespassing
that these folks were doing?
The Black Hills is supposed to be Native American land.
That was decided as recently as 1980 by the Supreme Court.
I've been asked a lot about what brought me to organizing,
what brought me to activism, actually.
And I always say, like, it was never a choice.
I was born into it simply
because of who I am as a native person,
- as a native woman. - You stole this land!
- I'm just trying to exist. - You stole this land!
I always say that I wouldn't recommend this
and I wouldn't choose this life if I had a choice.
My preference would be literally just being at home,
drinking the clean water that still comes out of springs
in my lands.
But it's because I was called to do this work,
because I can't do that work without people coming in
and telling me that it's not okay
to be who I am, without education systems
saying that my history doesn't exist.
Every single day,
every piece of our life is impacted by White supremacy.
And because of that, I can't just be home.
And, so, for me, that's what resistance is.
Don't it thrill you just to look at them hills?
Sure does.
No wonder the Injuns fight so fierce
- to hang on to this country. - Hmm.
♪ Take me back to the Black Hills ♪
♪ The Black hills of Dakota
♪ To the beautiful Indian country ♪
♪ That I love
♪ Lost my heart in the Black Hills ♪
♪ The Black Hills of Dakota
X marks an agreement.
Whatever name one uses to refer to the Black Hills,
it is unquestionably the place of our beginning.
And another X marks this land as ours,
unquestionably, by treaty.
The federal government non-natives
always call us the wild people.
They always call us that.
What do they say? We're wild. They say, "Be careful.
They're going to cut your heart out
and show it to you before you pass away,
and they'll even eat it."
So they made stories up. Stories. Stories.
But, actually, we're the good-hearted people.
Most of the 500-plus tribes,
federally recognized tribes, have treaties
with the federal government.
And they're all under the War Department.
In 1851, the Sioux Tribes
were given most of the western Dakotas
and northwestern Nebraska.
That was ceded as Indian territory.
No non-Indian could set foot within the boundaries.
Within that is the sacred Black Hills.
Hesapa. The Black Hills.
Brave men came from the north,
the east, the south, the west by the tens,
the hundreds, the thousands in their wild quest for gold.
Somebody gave news reports back on the East Coast
that up and down the West Coast,
there was nuggets of gold just sitting everywhere in the sand.
The pioneers keep coming.
Men and women of many faiths and many countries
are joined in a common adventure for freedom and security.
The continent that lies before them will forge a character,
the character of a new people, the character of a new country
they are making in the wilderness.
There was expeditions, you know, sent out.
And it'd start bringing non-natives
across into Indian country.
The Greater Sioux Nation, abiding by the treaty,
they warned people that you can't travel through here.
Wagons at that time on the open prairie
just went destroyed the earth.
People by the thousands were just coming through,
devastating the land, not really caring about the earth,
destroying everything along the way.
But one thing on their mind was this yellow rock
that made them crazy.
For centuries uncounted, men have sought,
fought, and died for gold.
The federal government knew
that they were breaking the 1851 treaty,
and they built three forts along the Bozeman Trail.
They called it the Bozeman Trail.
It was a superhighway.
The grandfathers told each other at that time,
they said, "If we don't stop these people,
our way of life is going to come to an end."
You may or may not have heard about the Dakota 38.
If this is the first time you've heard of it,
you might wonder, what is the Dakota 38?
The Dakota 38 refers to 38 Dakota men
who were executed by hanging under orders
from President Abraham Lincoln.
To date, this is the largest, quote,
"legal mass execution" in US history.
The hanging took place on December 26th, 1862,
the day after Christmas.
This was the same week that President Lincoln
signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
In the preceding sentence,
I italicize, quote, "same week" for emphasis.
There was a movie titled "Lincoln"...
Buzzard's guts, man.
...about the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.
I am the President of the United States of America,
clothed in immense power!
The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation
was included in the film "Lincoln."
The hanging of the Dakota 38 was not.
In any case, you might be asking,
why were 38 Dakota men hung?
They were hanged for the Sioux Uprising.
After the Civil War,
the Federal Army was occupying the South
to ensure the gains of Reconstruction,
to ensure equality.
They began to withdraw those troops.
They didn't just disappear. They were sent west
to finish the westward expansion of the United States.
The war on the plains is being created
and carried out at the same time
that the United States is saying, "No more slavery."
So we've got these moments of progress
in one way in United States history
and almost a stepping backwards in another way.
From 1851 to 1868,
there was major wars throughout the Northern Plains here.
One of the upcoming young warriors at that time
was Thasúnke Witkó, meaning Crazy Horse.
My grandfather,
he took up arms in the spring of 1866.
Started with bows and arrows
and start, you know, defending the earth.
The United States military forces
tried everything in their power.
They had all the weaponry and that,
but the federal government was getting whooped.
The spring of 1868, the federal government,
they decided that, okay, we got to have, you know, peace.
And grandfather, at that time,
he said, "I don't want to talk peace.
I don't want to talk treaty.
I don't want to talk peace treaty at all.
Until the superhighway shut down
and the forts are burnt to the ground.
Myself and my people are going to have charcoal
on the soles of our feet
before we even think about coming to Fort Laramie."
Memorials help focus our memory
on particular people or events.
Often, memorials come in the forms of plaques,
statues, or gravestones.
The first signatories came in on April 29th of 1868.
Other bands, headsmen, you know,
chiefs, bonnet wearers came in with their people,
basically put an X there in support of their peace treaty.
X marks the heart of our treaty,
which we generally agree upon as land.
X marks the strange ways of time.
How a century ago can feel like yesterday.
And, quote, "from this day forward" feels like never.
Nonetheless, we have contractually agreed
from this day forward.
Okay. Article one of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.
"From this day forward, all war between
the parties to this agreement shall forever cease."
"The government of the United States desires peace,
and its honor is hereby pledged to keep it."
"The Indians desire peace,
and now they pledge their honor to maintain it."
X marks this contract in which the United States
solemnly agrees that
"no persons, except those herein designated,
shall ever be permitted to pass over,
settle upon, or reside in the territory
described in this article."
"The United States hereby agrees and stipulates
that the country north of the North Platte River"...
..."and east of the summits of the Bighorn Mountains
shall be held and considered"...
..."to be unceded Indian territory."
X marks the verbose legal language used to distract
or dull the senses.
To this, beware. A poet is especially alert.
It says, "The United States will pledge its honor.
The parties to this agreement will lay down their weapons
and live in peace."
But the Black Hills question is also that.
It's a question of honor.
And whose honor are we talking about?
X X X X X
X X X marks eight months,
April to November, to assemble our leaders
to travel to various locations,
to translate the terms of the treaty,
and to collect or coerce 135 Xes.
X marks a reminder I offer students
about our beloved leader, Red Cloud,
who refrained from signing the treaty
until the final month, November.
Red Cloud, who is quoted as saying,
"The Whites, who are educated and civilized,
swindle me, and I am not hard to swindle
because I do not know how to read and write."
X marks the swindling made possible
only because of a language they could not read or write.
Grandpa, he was the very last one to come in.
He came in November 6th of 1868, and sure enough,
their moccasins, their hampas were all charcoal black.
They went through and made sure
that all of these forts were burnt to the ground.
I think he was a good man.
From what I know of Custer, he was a unique individual.
One that probably was given to eccentricities.
Custer was rough and tough, and he was a man.
I think he was a very crazy man.
- He was a military man. - And he was the best.
As far as I can see, I think Custer
was a psychopathic killer.
Clinically, I had the kind of a feeling
he was a paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur.
He believed that 20 White men
could kill a thousand Indians any day.
They tried.
You know, he really was kind of unrealistic.
It's...
It amazes me that someone so stupid went so far.
You must have something I'm right for.
- Well, what do you want? - I want action.
That brings us back to the Indians.
There on the land and we want it.
Plain robbery. You won't be able to tell yourself
you're fighting for a noble cause.
You'll be fighting against the best light cavalry in the world.
And you'll have to chase those devils
over the roughest country in the world.
Deserts, mountains, prairies.
You know, Custer, you could become a living legend.
Or get yourself killed.
Dead men make better legends.
So, Custer was sent to a place
called Fort Abraham Lincoln.
It's also important to remember that Custer, you know, himself
was a seasoned Indian fighter.
The tactic that he had kind of pioneered and mastered
was to essentially attack noncombatants
to force the surrender of enemy combatants.
So, on the field of battle, against indigenous people,
Custer wasn't really a proven, you know, man-to-man fighter
because he pretty much attacked women and children.
Custer is the villain in the mythology of Lakota people.
For the past eight years,
the Battle of Little Bighorn has been reenacted
on a site near the original battlefield,
which today is a national monument.
The Sioux and Cheyenne, who won the battle,
take no part in this reenactment.
It is staged by the Crow Tribe, who fought alongside Custer,
together with White farmers in the area.
Is this reenactment just a commercial enterprise,
or does it lead to a deeper understanding
between the races?
- We're not all one people. - We don't all get along.
But I think the fact that we're not getting along
is keeping us from being conquered.
♪ O say does that
♪ Star-spangled banner yet wave ♪
♪ O'er the land of the free
♪ And the home of the brave
There was an expedition to the Black Hills
to look for gold.
Fort Laramie Treaty or no Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868,
the light-eyed people still entered Indian territory.
There was gold in them thar hills.
- Oh? - Gold?!
- Gold?!
Gold on the mountains, in the rivers,
and in the dark depths far below the surface of the Earth.
Custer led a military expedition
into the Black Hills in 1874
and "discovered" gold near a town that now bears his name,
which led to the impetus to seize the Black Hills
from the Lakota to essentially develop it as a gold mine.
In 1876, Washington directed the Army
to round up the Sioux and Cheyenne Tribes
and bring them onto reservations.
The 7th Cavalry, led by General George Armstrong Custer,
joined this expedition.
Prior to the Battle at Greasy Grass,
Sitting Bull had a vision.
Of hundreds of mila haske,
the "long knives," falling into a camp.
The stage is now set for disaster,
for there is bloodshed on the move.
This was June 26th.
The United States was preparing to celebrate
its century of existence on July 4th.
The Greater Sioux Nation,
the Ochéthi Sakówin, they were unified.
And they were powerful.
Custer, in his arrogance,
believed that, if he charged down the hill
and took the center of the camp,
where he believed women and children were,
that he could give a present to the United States
by this historic defeat of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.
But what happened instead
is that this historic alliance of indigenous people
blew out the birthday candles for the United States.
Custer attacked with his regiment
split into three columns.
At the Little Bighorn River, the Indians wiped out
Custer's entire column of 225 men.
The reason for the defeat is still a controversial subject.
Military historians rate the battle
as the greatest single defeat of the American Army.
It was an inglorious defeat of a modern military
by so-called savages and primitives.
The US has never really forgotten.
My grandfather was in a battle.
Wooden knife.
He was 18 years old when he fought.
He took two scalps, one here and one up,
and he took a gun and spurs and money.
And we fight back once, just once.
That one.
We lost all the rest of the wars and everything.
But that one, we... we fought back.
♪ For the lies that were spoken ♪
♪ For the blood that we have spilled ♪
♪ For the treaties that were broken ♪
♪ For the leaders you have stilled ♪
♪ Custer died for your sins
♪ Custer died for your sins ♪
♪ Now a new day must begin
♪ Custer died for your sins
Everything is in the language we use.
For example, a treaty is essentially a contract
between two sovereign nations.
The US treaties with the Dakota Nation
were legal contracts that promised money.
It could be said this money was payment
for the land the Dakota ceded,
for living within assigned boundaries, a reservation,
and for relinquishing rights to their vast hunting territory.
Which, in turn, made Dakota people dependent
on other means to survive.
Money.
The previous sentence is circular.
Akin to so many aspects of history.
At the center of all the treaties
the Lakota have signed with the United States government
is the Black Hills.
The supreme law of the land forbade the United States
from taking it.
And when the tribal nation said,
"No, we're not giving you this land.
We're not exchanging it. We do not agree to that,"
they simply passed a law that just took the land.
Custer's historic defeat impelled Congress
to pass the Black Hills Act to crush Lakota resistance once
and for all in terms of protecting the Black Hills.
The 1877 Act was the taking of all of the hunting territory,
all of the unceded territory, and some of the western
and northern portions of the reservation.
The Black Hills Act of 1877,
which "ceded," formally ceded the Black Hills
to the United States government,
didn't match the necessary numbers
required by treaty for consent.
It said it had to be three quarters of the adult males.
The United States got nowhere near that number.
I mean, we can use that act as a... as a pin to mark
when that land was legally taken.
But the duress the people were under was pervasive.
And it was in all these other aspects of culture.
There was no actual intention to honor those treaties
because, meanwhile, they were murdering off the buffalo,
and they were murdering off the buffalo
because it was the main part of the economy.
If you can make the people suffer
by destroying their economic system
and their societies and their culture
and their languages and their spirituality,
then you can try to conquer a people.
The United States forced Lakotans into dependency
on the United States for everything.
It seems that, at that moment, in 1877,
is when this dependency was implemented.
They tried every way they could to subjugate these Lakotas
and could not.
They tried everything and they could not do it.
So they made Lakotans dependent upon them.
And then we have all of the social ills
that we have today that are tied to dependency.
What the United States did was took away
their weapons and their horses.
Now, that was critical. They took them away
so that the Lakotans could not feed themselves.
As you may have guessed by now,
the money promised in the turbid treaties
did not make it into the hands of Dakota people.
In addition, local government traders would not offer credit
to Indians to purchase food or goods.
Without money, store credit, or rights
to hunt beyond their tract of land,
Dakota people began to starve.
And you were told to get off your horse,
and they'd take your horse and they shoot it.
And they handed you a shovel and say, "Go be a farmer."
The Dakota people were starving.
This is the region where people resisted the longest.
And because we resisted the longest,
some of us got treated the worst.
The Dakota people starved.
In the preceding sentence,
the word "starved" does not need italics for emphasis.
One should read "the Dakota people starved"
as a straightforward and plainly stated fact.
White settlers had gained
a lot of territory in the United States.
However, tribal nations still, communally,
through their traditional forms of governance,
had their reservations,
and they controlled millions of acres of land.
The United States all of a sudden kind of sat back
and said, "Huh?"
The Dawes Act was passed in the 1880s,
and they didn't want to just call it a land grab,
even though that was the goal.
So, in order to make it a little bit more palatable
for even Americans at that time,
they said, "We're going to do this to civilize the Indians."
So let's examine the structure of American capitalism.
There are three great pillars.
The first and foremost of these is...
Who can tell us?
Isn't it the principle of private ownership of property?
Yes, it is.
This principle of private ownership
is undoubtedly the most fundamental element
in the structure of American capitalism.
Allotment policy was created
to essentially assimilate native people
into the values of Anglo-Saxon property ownership.
Under this act of Congress,
this tribal nation will no longer actually own its land.
That land will now be broken up.
And they just took out a map and carved out little squares.
- They surveyed the land. - They have a census.
Then they allot the land.
By giving each Indian his own 160 acres,
that individual ownership, that will civilize those heathens.
The "surplus" land, quote-unquote surplus,
then was open to settlement, and settlement
by almost always non-Indians.
All of the pretenses were really just clever excuses
to justify another land grab.
And it was wildly successful.
In 45 years, they got 90 million acres of American Indian land
across the United States.
♪ Home, home on the range
♪ Where the deer and the antelope play ♪
♪ Where seldom is heard
♪ A discouraging word
♪ And the skies are not cloudy all day ♪
♪ The red man was pressed from this part of the West ♪
♪ 'Tis unlikely he'll ever return ♪
♪ Turn to the banks of Red River ♪
♪ Where seldom, if ever
♪ Their flickering campfires burn ♪
♪ Home, home on the range
Yea, though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
For thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff,
they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me.
In 1882,
in the administration of Chester Arthur,
there was a proclamation that Indian religion was outlawed.
There was a notion in America
that all civilized people are Christian,
and Indians need it to become civilized,
and therefore, they should be Christianized.
X marks English words that function
as both nouns and verbs.
As in,
X marks the noun civilization,
an established and vibrant culture or society.
They outlawed our language.
They made our ceremonies illegal.
They criminalized us for living our way of life.
X marks the government's order to ensure the civilization
of the Indians entering into this treaty.
Thus, the necessity of colonizer education is admitted.
X marks the mandate to pledge themselves,
the, quote, "Indians," to compel their children, male and female,
between the ages of six and 16 years, to attend school.
From as long as I can remember, I had something.
You know, I'd ask my great grandpa.
I said, "Teach me Lakota. I want to know the language."
Him being a product of residential schools,
he would say, "No, that's not good for you.
You're never going to make it in this world
if I teach you how to be this way."
I often ask my parents why we weren't raised
with Lakota being our first language.
But it always goes back to that trauma
that they endured with the boarding school.
Both of my parents
are survivors of the boarding school era.
Upon entering the boarding school,
everything that you had with you was taken from you.
They cut your hair, which was a symbol of loss and grief.
You were scrubbed down,
sprayed with chemicals to kill any bugs on you.
You were given White man's clothes
and an English name.
Punishment was given down to you
whenever you were heard speaking your own language.
They were beaten and they were traumatized
in all of the ways...
Mentally, physically, sexually...
For holding on to their unshakable faith
and our Lakota spirituality.
By the year 1900, thousands of children
were attending close to 150 boarding schools
throughout the United States.
"Kill the Indian and Save the Man"
became a model for a new government policy
of assimilation through education.
And when you look at Richard Henry Pratt,
a general in the US military, who opened and designed
and administered Carlisle, the boarding school
that all the other boarding schools are modeled after,
who did he pick to bring into that school?
He targeted the tribes that were still fighting the US military.
And took those students against the will of those nations
and their families who fought the removal of their kids.
It was nothing other than kidnapping.
But the goal was very clear.
Richard Henry Pratt told Congress,
"This will be a more effective means of taking those lands
than continuing to fight on the battlefield."
At that time, you had about 80% of the children
taken from their families and put into boarding schools.
Hoping to ease hunger and to reunite with their children,
Lakota leaders began signing agreements
such as the Great Sioux Agreement in 1889,
which opened up about 9 million acres for White settlement
and created the six modern Sioux reservations
of Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Cheyenne River,
Standing Rock, Lower Brule, and Crow Creek.
There is even this exchange back and forth
during the allotment negotiations where the headmen
were petitioning the Indian agents to stop off at Carlisle
so they could see their children.
And what they saw when they arrived there disgusted them.
They said, "This isn't a school, this is a boot camp."
X marks the history of these schools
to, quote, "educate," said, quote, "Indians."
The Christian churches charged with this duty,
the thousands of children removed from homes,
an intentional killing from the inside out.
This X completes a formula with a dependable result.
The people with the yellow index cards marked with an X,
please step off the blanket.
You represent one of the thousands of children
who died at the schools.
Everyone else with yellow cards,
you represent those whose connection
to your family and community
was completely broken by your experience in boarding school
and you never made it home.
X marks my bodily reaction...
High blood pressure, fever, nausea...
When I researched this history,
the sordid brutality, then attempt to summarize genocide
for a reader.
Though I feel a responsibility to share facts,
my exposure to colonizer sickness boils me into illness.
Those who survived absolutely left the boarding schools
with a mentality that was not their own,
and it was "Kill the Indian, Save the Man."
As far as I can remember,
my parents continued to talk to me about living in both worlds.
My mom and dad had thought the best thing
they could offer me is an education.
And so I grew up on the west side of Rapid City,
where they felt the best schools were.
It took me a while to forgive my parents
for not knowing how to be parents
because they thought they were doing the best thing for me.
They provided a home and there was food
and there was no abuse and there was no alcoholism.
And I think they didn't see that there was...
...that they were putting me through hardship
that they didn't even comprehend at the time.
♪ Look in the sky
♪ Look at the stars shining down on us tonight ♪
Going through that school district with the igluwasicu,
the White man education,
and every day, I knew that there had to be
something more than just me being,
you know, from the res, not going to make it anywhere.
And I never really, you know.
Grew up knowing any different,
but other than I was Lakota
and this is who I was going to be my whole life,
looking at my arms and seeing how brown they were
and just being so happy that I was born this way.
I knew the one way that I could empower myself,
the one way that I could beat these racist parents
who were calling me names
and who would tell their children to spit on me,
I knew that I could beat them with my voice.
And, so, I'm still doing that today.
So, from a Western perspective,
land is seen as a bountiful object
that you can extract resources from to your benefit.
From a Lakota perspective, this is not an inanimate object.
It's a living entity.
And this living entity doesn't belong to any one person
or even any one nation.
While the Indians are barely surviving,
because the 7 million acres of the Black Hills
have been taken away,
the Whites in the Black Hill region
are getting fabulously wealthy off the gold deposits there.
That wasn't just any gold strike.
That was as rich a gold strike
as probably there's been in the history of humankind.
Water trickling down from the Black Hills
is piped over the mountains, through miles of tunnels,
to drop nearly 700 feet below
into one of Homestake's hydroelectric plants.
It became the home to the Homestake Mine,
which yielded many, many hundreds
of millions of dollars of gold over time
and became the foundation of the Hearst family fortune.
The Hearst family, being one of the most powerful families
in the history of the United States.
The original site of the Homestake Mine has disappeared,
and in its place has risen a thriving industry
geared to modern progress.
Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.
There go thousands of tons of coal,
one of nature's greatest servants.
Timber.
From the grizzled prospector of yesteryear
to the great Homestake organization of today,
yes, men are the most important thing at Homestake.
Men seeking life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
under our flag and Constitution.
The Black Hills claim was the longest running litigation
in the history of the United States.
It went on in court for 57 years
and is still, in many ways, unresolved.
As early as 1890, the leadership on the various reservations,
they begin to meet and agitate over what had happened to them.
Members of the tribes who have gone
to these Indian boarding schools,
like the Carlisle School,
develop an understanding of the US government
and the possibility of trying to do something.
Now you should have a good idea
of how the Constitution sets up
the three main branches of our government.
Ralph Case files 24 cases on behalf of the tribe in 1923
under the 1920 Jurisdictional Act.
He thought, in his heart of hearts, that, at some point,
in some way, the government would do right by his clients.
Ralph Case was an enormously well-intentioned person,
but the complexities of the Black Hills claim
outstripped his abilities as a lawyer.
He didn't just lose the Black Hills claim
in the court of claims.
He lost all 24 of the cases that he filed there.
His appeal to the Supreme Court is not accepted.
And in 1942, the tribe finds itself out of court.
Today we set the home of the Oglala Lakota.
The people of Red Cloud and Crazy Horse today
were known as 344 Concentration Camp.
CC Camp 344.
The whole reservation system, right,
was designed to move tribes out of the way.
It's a long history of dispossession
based on the notion of keeping the races apart.
The attitude in places like Rapid City was one
to keep native people out of sight and out of mind.
Our Indian young people want, just like anybody else,
a chance to have a choice to do what they want, a chance,
an opportunity to be educated, to be professionals,
to be whatever they choose to be.
The reason why I left here
was there was no economic opportunities.
There was no jobs here. I couldn't go to work.
I had to leave to provide.
So I was up and down the East Coast,
West Coast, cities in between.
My profession was structural steel.
I helped build many of the manmade wonders,
and I spent many years out there on the construction field.
Sitting up on on high rises, looking down,
people just moving about quickly as possible.
Wherever I was, I would gaze on over in the direction of home,
thinking about home, thinking of how the people were doing,
how my relatives were doing.
I come from a family of generations of military.
My grandfather was a code talker.
47 code talkers from World War I.
17 code talkers from World War II.
So we're very much military background.
As a young person, and as a woman,
I went to work for the United States government.
I was part of a training.
And there were three native men who did the in-service training.
One was a Mohawk.
One was an Omaha and the third one was Russell Means.
- Hello, my relatives. - I am an Oglala Lakota,
and I come from a very sacred holy land, the Black Hills.
American Indians are human beings.
We are supposed to be citizens of the United States of America.
So I left the State Department.
And I went to work for Russell Means.
I was part of Cleveland American Indian Movement we call CLAIM,
and we were the most active AIM chapter in the country.
For 500 years, we have had to fight and resist.
They called us Indians and said that we didn't have any rights.
They called us Indians and said that we were no longer people.
They called us Indians and they used
their manifest destiny mentality
to justify their genocide against us.
The beauty of our people is the survival of our people.
We have survived incredible odds.
This is a country where all men are created equal
and it's the land of the free and the home of truth
and justice and liberty for all.
Well, we want to know why that doesn't apply to us.
Hopefully, we created a footprint with our activism,
protesting, demonstrating, marching,
by any means necessary.
We did it all in our lifetime to make the change.
You have to understand
that people were sick and tired of living
the way they were, just sick and tired of everybody else
enjoying the so-called American dream.
And they themselves have nothing.
They're still the most poverty stricken people
in this whole country.
They're still the most sickest of all the people
in this country.
People were getting routinely killed.
Women were routinely being raped.
People were routinely being belittled,
made to feel like less of a human being.
It was not very pretty pre-1973, let's put it that way.
That atmosphere needed to be pierced
and done away with, or at least recognize it.
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.
The village has at least symbolic importance today
to the militant American Indian movement.
Indians call it their My Lai.
This was a very sore spot where they massacred 300 men,
women and children, unarmed and in the middle of winter.
So that's why Wounded Knee happened in 1973.
- We have declared... - Wounded Knee
an independent country.
By returning to Wounded Knee to fight for tribal rights,
it was like with a bullhorn.
The majority of the American citizens agreed with us,
that the government was in the wrong
in its dealings and treatment of native peoples.
It resonated, and you can read and hear them talk
about the idea of the ancestors being there.
The energy that was used to create Wounded Knee
had an equal energy that pushed back.
It was bolstered by the FBI.
It was bolstered by the National Guard system
to quell the Indians because they're unhappy again.
Webster Poor Bear got shot clean through the left hand.
What were they doing when they got shot?
They were laying on their belly because we were being shot at.
The standoff continues at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
200 Indians still occupy that small community
and federal marshals still surround them.
In other words, they have complete total power
or in their interpretation of it, over us.
This is how they look at it.
Now, they have never been challenged.
One danger I do see for Indians...
That's getting legalistic and relying on the courts.
But let me assure you, these courts are so adroit
that the last thing I would expect
is that you would be able to get into any court
on any basic issue.
My father, Arthur Lazarus,
was a specialist in the field of federal Indian law.
He was convinced beyond a shadow of any doubt
that the Sioux tribes had a righteous argument on the law.
He was hired to take on the Black Hills claim in 1956.
That Black Hills case...
it stayed laying there dormant for almost 70 years.
When he took the case over together with his partner,
Marvin Sonosky, they come to two conclusions.
One is that there's a lot of potential merit to the case,
and the other is that they're in a desperately bad position
because the case has been lost in 1942, lost in 1954
and lost in 1956.
Through a series of almost legal miracles,
they were able to resuscitate that claim and take it to court.
The land originally belonged to the Sioux Indians.
In fact, an 1868 treaty decreed the land to the Sioux forever.
They decided that the best theory was to claim
that the taking of the Black Hills by the 1877 Act
was a violation of the Fifth Amendment
of the United States Constitution,
which says that government cannot take private property
without paying just compensation.
At the Court of Claims, the tribes finally win,
and that's in 1978.
The government, they can only appeal
to the U.S. Supreme Court.
That's all that's left.
The court only reviews a small percentage of all the cases,
but decides that it is going to review the case.
My father was sitting there nervous about the fact
that they had even taken the case.
They could have let
the Court of Claims' positive ruling stand,
and that would have been the end of it.
We'll hear arguments next in United States
against the Sioux nation of Indians.
I was in college at the time, so I sat anxiously by the phone.
Custer lost to the Sioux in South Dakota's Black Hills
more than 100 years ago.
Today in a case growing out of that campaign,
the U.S. government also lost to the Sioux.
Today, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1
that the land really belonged to the Indians.
The order means that the Sioux Nation
will now get over $100 million.
The largest court settlement ever won by any Indian tribe.
"It is," wrote Mr. Justice Blackmun,
"an obligation that must now at last be paid."
Back in the day, we were very...
unsettled with that.
On Sioux reservations in the Dakotas,
Indians are debating a recent court-proposed settlement.
The U.S. government is offering $105 million
for the Black Hills.
It's not justice to say I'm gonna steal your car
and then I'm gonna give you 10 cents on the dollar
and keep the car.
In 1934, the gold alone was $80 million alone.
When that decision came down, it came out to maybe a dollar
an acre, $2 an acre, no compound interest,
no kind of inflationary costs,
nothing based on the finance picture
of the richest country in the world,
the United States of America.
Old-timers like Chief Charles Red Cloud
and Bill Horn Cloud say the land should not be sold.
The Hill was held sacred by the Indian people,
and it means a lot to them in a spiritual way.
It's not just a monetary question.
It's not a land question. It's none of these.
We are fighting for the integrity of our people
and we are fighting for the honor of our people.
And we are waiting for the White man to do the same.
So we said, "We don't want the money."
The Supreme Court of the United States
has already ruled that they should be awarded the money,
but the Sioux don't want it.
They want their sacred land.
I've been here for the past 27 years now,
been home.
And when I hear people talking about the Black Hills,
they still stand their ground.
The Black Hills are never for sale.
It's intermission.
Rise and stretch time.
Time to refresh yourself and visit our snack bar.
Showtime will be announced loud and clear
to get you back to your car in time.
Hey. You guys must be Arapaho.
How did you know?
The way you walk.
Mosey.
Hey, you guys look like hostiles!
Where you from?!
On Saturday, December 19, 2009,
U.S. President Barack Obama
signed the congressional resolution of apology
to Native peoples of the United States.
No tribal leaders or official representatives
were invited to witness and receive the apology
on behalf of tribal nations.
The apology was folded into a larger,
unrelated piece of legislation
called the 2010 Department of Defense Appropriations Act.
I am a citizen of the United States
and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe,
meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation,
and in this dual citizenship, I must work,
I must eat,
I must mother...
...I must listen...
...I must observe.
Constantly I must live.
I didn't grow up having the freedom to worship.
In 1978 was the first legal Sun Dance.
After 60 years,
after three generations of people,
we were allowed to be the only people in the country
that needed an act of Congress to grant us freedom of religion.
I lived on the river all my life.
Before and after they removed me.
So you go back and as long as we have the collective memory
of that connection,
we'll go back
and we'll understand what's there for us.
I was at a crossroads within my life.
I ended up on this long journey and then returning home in 1995.
And I had a calling for the land within myself.
I went up on a hill.
I took a mini vision quest of one night.
I'll watch the sunset and all the beautiful stars.
So much stars.
Once you're out in the country
where there's no light pollution,
man, that's magical.
Oh, I was up all night sitting there
thinking in the bed of my truck,
hearing the different animals throughout the night.
And then I saw the... the sun was...
It was headed towards morning.
The first star of the day was the Morning Star.
Oh, that was beautiful. Just beaming.
Just beautiful.
Never saw anything so beautiful in such a long time.
I sat there and watched it.
I saw the life-giving force coming up over the horizon.
I reached out with my arms.
I reached out to Anpetu Wi
and offered a song.
The song goes something like this.
Solar is our way of life.
It's our ceremony.
It's our song, our dance, our annual Sun Dances.
We send our prayer to Anpetu Wi [indistinct] Waka,
the life-giving force of the sun.
I said, "This is what we ought to be doing.
Taking this new way and honoring the old way
and then becoming sustainable."
Some of us, we put our hand to the earth.
We put our hand there, and we don't feel anything.
But some of us, we put our hand on the earth,
and we can feel something pushing back.
I was born in the middle of winter in January,
and the day before I was born, my mom was out riding horse.
So she tells everybody that I was almost born on a horse.
Thank you, Alex.
I think the first time I saw you
after, like I said, years had passed,
it was on horseback at Standing Rock.
And what I witnessed that day
will probably always live with me
the rest of my life.
I think you might know the day I'm talking about.
There was some sheriffs guarding the road.
Well, when they put the call out,
we were watching online.
They put a call out for horses.
And then right then I knew, "Okay,
well, we're gonna... We're gonna do this."
I took a horse.
She was given to me, and I kind of always kept her.
But I never really did anything with her
as much as just riding on the ranch.
So this was her first real trip,
and I didn't know what was gonna happen.
We're 250 miles south of Standing Rock.
We left our house at 4:00 in the morning.
And all the way up, I was like, "What am I doing?
This is crazy because this horse hasn't been off the ranch
maybe a handful of times and never 250 miles."
And when they called us, we were riding up.
She seen the cars and she stopped.
And I had my daughter with me. And I was thinking, "Okay,
if my horse doesn't go, her horse probably wouldn't go."
But they brought the elders over with Johnny Eagle,
and he came and he azilyad... smudged.
And when he did, my horse dropped her head.
And when they prayed, she just sat there.
And then she took over.
When we were coming, she was walking by the cops
and I said, "I'm sorry, but you guys might have to move."
That first akicita, she took off and she ran a circle.
She ran around again.
Third time she came around,
I just took her back around in a circle
because I said, "Maybe she's gonna get wild."
When we were coming around that fourth time,
I stopped her in front of the barricades
and I lifted my arm and I leled.
And then she took off.
I thought she was gonna kill a cop.
I honestly did, because she wasn't gonna stop.
And she picked out the one that was saying
some pretty awful things to us while we were riding up.
And she stopped right in front of him.
And that's when they turned and ran.
And the people went over the barricade.
Her doing that, never being off the ranch,
never really in a crowd,
she knew what she's gonna do.
She was a warrior horse that day.
She knew. She had it picked out.
And I was just a passenger.
But when they moved and when the people followed us back
over the barricade, right there,
that's when the movement shifted for me.
Because then and there,
for the first time in over 150 years,
the Oceti Sakowin came together.
And not only the Oceti Sakowin,
but indigenous nations from across the world came.
And at that moment in time, that day, we were one,
and it was perfect.
When the peace treaty was made of 1868,
the grandfathers put their pipes together
and said a prayer.
Their prayer was upon seven generations,
everything will be back to normal and harmony.
Before they even thought about
putting an X on a piece of paper,
they were sending their prayers forward.
You know, today I'm the fifth generation from that era,
the fifth direct descendant.
So, "Oh, my God." I said...
Hi. Hey, baby.
Hey, hey. Hi. I'm your Gaga.
I'm the grandfather of that sacred seven that they...
That they put their pipes together and said the prayer.
So we're just living within that prayer structure
that they made at that time.
You can jump, too, huh?
Yeah, you can.
Jump, yeah.
You're trying to smile.
Are you smiling at Grandpa?
The last time indigenous people got together
was to repel White invasion
and we won at the Battle of Greasy Grass.
We are now gathered together to prevent another invasion,
this time in the form of oil and gas development,
this time in the form of a pipeline,
this time in form of the black snake.
But instead, at that time, when nobody cared about Indians,
we have non-Indians with us.
And that's the biggest difference.
In those first days when the people were coming,
we told them our stories.
We need to protect Mother Earth.
We are her keepers.
We have suffered. We have given.
We have paid the price.
No more.
There will be no black snake going through our homeland.
We are Lakota, Dakota and Nakota.
That word means "ally."
Doesn't mean frozen tundra or Fargo.
It's ally.
People were just flooding in.
Every single day, the camp was growing.
I'm a veteran, right?
And so, you know, I went to work doing the thing
that I was trained to do.
And that's, like, logistics, to run a camp.
I've been going down that route ever since.
That's what set the foundation for now
for the work that I do now with the landback campaign.
When you walked through the gates of Standing Rock,
it didn't matter if you were indigenous,
non-Indigenous, whatever, you became a water protector.
We are building the world that we want to live in.
The future already exists.
When I say things like, "Me, ma Lakota,"
"Me, I am a Lakota."
Someday your people are going to depend on you.
One of the old men told me one time,
he said, "Hoksila," he said.
"Hoksila" means boy, you know, a young man.
Telling me that, you know,
maybe I need... I'm going to learn more, know more.
He said, "Hoksila... [speaks Lakota]
This road that you're on."
He says, "Even a dead...
a dead dog deserves your respect."
To be a common man in [speaks Lakota]
is probably one of the hardest things you can do
because you have to put the needs
of other people before yours.
When somebody is sick, you try to heal them.
When somebody is crying...
you wipe their eyes.
When somebody is hungry, you feed them.
When a child is crying, you comfort them.
First in battle...
the last to eat.
All these things.
So...[speaking Lakota]
The people will learn to depend on you
because you stood up for the rights of the people.
Yeah. Thank you, Milo.
Thank you so much.
Ladies and gentlemen, I want to welcome all of you here
on this very special occasion, and particularly our guests
from all of the western part of the United States
who have come a long way to be with us.
If you look at the 1980 Black Hills case,
it only allowed for monetary awards.
So it was essentially trying to settle these outstanding claims.
However, there is precedent with executive orders
and executive actions, as we know,
with the return of Blue Lake to the Taos Pueblo by Nixon.
I trust that this will mark one of those periods
in American history
where after a very, very long time,
and at times a very sad history of injustice,
that we start it on a new road.
But the return of Blue Lake to the Taos Pueblo
happened in the context of mass uprisings of indigenous people
during the red power movement.
So the policy change was happening alongside
the insurmountable pressure put on two administrations
to essentially cave to demands for land return.
Right?
We are in an era of mass indigenous protests.
"'X' marks a line I once wrote.
Everything is in the language we use,
and 'X' marks my humble correction.
At critical moments,
everything is in the language we do not understand."
"'X' marks the question I ask my students.
What does it mean when someone
signs a document with an 'X'?"
"'X' marks the silence in our classroom
when I ask this question."
"'X' marks the reason for silence,
a pause before answering,
the deep breath before an immense psychological,
emotional and spiritual lineage rolls out before us.
The responsibility to rectify."
The organizing principle of any settler society
is elimination of the native.
They don't hate us because of our language,
because of our culture, because of our spirituality.
The intent of treaties, the intent of removal,
the intent of boarding schools
has always been the elimination of native people
to gain access to the land.
It may seem reductive,
but when you look at the arc of U.S. history,
that is fundamentally the intent of the United States
is to gain access to native land.
We know for a fact that when indigenous peoples are back
in relationship with our lands
and back into managing our own lands,
that it benefits all peoples.
So us fighting for clean water
is not just so we have clean water on the reservation,
it's so that there's clean water all downstream
and for all living beings.
When a lot of people here landback,
their immediate response is, "All of it?"
You know, when you say landback, right away,
people's White fragility goes into effect.
"Landback."
"Oh, shit. They're coming for my house."
I would say the first argument
that's always put against native people
is that you're going to do to us what our ancestors did to you.
We have to move beyond the realm of representation
and recognition.
You can recognize that you did harm in this way,
but does that make Flint's water clean and drinkable?
No. Like, you actually have to have material transformation.
Landback is a reparations framework,
and it's about repair.
Like, at the heart of reparations is repair.
We want everybody beyond indigenous spaces,
beyond just organizing movement spaces,
but general public to be talking about landback
and to be talking about it in a way
where there is no fear attached to it.
But there's a sense of justice.
Your voice is power, your body is power.
Be proud to be Lakota.
Be proud of where you come from.
This country has only gotten better
when people resisted the powers that be.
Our work here is about not just reclaiming land,
but reclaiming power.
I'm fighting for prosperity.
Our goal is not to just go back and live in teepees.
I grew up listening to Tupac.
It's about building a future
that this next generation can see themselves in.
I think the best days of my people are in front of me.
I think the best days of the Lakota
are in front of us and not behind us.
When I hear landback, I think of the...
...just return of what was taken from American Indians.
Want to welcome everyone
to this press conference this morning.
We're here to talk about peace and mutual respect.
Thanks, Karen, and thanks, everybody,
for speaking here today.
The mid 1800s... we really lacked the sophistication
and the technology and the education
to have in place systems of conflict resolution
that we do today.
Sometimes in those days, we would have a duel
or a lynching or something of that.
You know, our... our times have changed.
When we think of the past as just being in the past,
we actually do harm today
because until we address what happened in the past,
understand it and seek to create remedies
and redress it, we're doomed to repeat it.
I want Rapid City to know
that we're not gonna take their racism anymore,
their criticism.
I lived here about my whole life.
My children were born here.
My oldest daughter,
she would get spit on every day
and there would be White kids driving by, barking at her,
throwing things at her every day.
I just want to see a little change, you know?
We just want people to see us.
We're people. We're humans.
I am tired of the heartache.
I'm ready to hold my heart out and to be strong.
And so that's what I'm showing my daughters
when I'm standing out there,
when I'm standing on those front lines,
when I'm marching.
I am protecting our sacred ways of living.
I am empowering that intention of healing
from this historical trauma.
We're not going anywhere.
This is our ancestral land,
and we'll continue fighting for it, by all means.
It's not always one spectacular resistance
or a battle or the defeat of Custer. Right?
Resistance movements really bring together spaces for us
to remake ourselves and for us to be Lakota,
for us to be Dakota.
None of us achieve liberation without each other.
We can work towards indigenous landback and Black reparations.
This is not an either/or situation
and we do not live in a world of scarcity.
To be honest, I don't want to achieve my liberation
and my sovereignty
unless I bring my relatives with me.
- Hey, everyone. - It's Krystal Two Bulls,
director of the Landback campaign.
Myself and a crew of four indigenous climbers
just now completed climbing over 100 feet
on the side of the Dakota Mill silo.
All this land is indigenous land.
Landback is a war cry
for the liberation of my people.
And I believe that down to my heart.
I pray on that. I live my life for that.
I sacrifice for that.
What I like to tell people is we're still here.
You know, as Oglala Lakota people,
we're the last of the fighters.
We held on so hard for so long and we continue to hold on.
Step out of line.
Don't be waiting when you know deep within your spirit,
that is the right direction to go.
What is often seen from the outside
is just a protest camp.
It forgets that, in those spaces,
there are also campfires.
And there are also families in Tiospaye
who get together and tell stories.
Forgets all the joy, all the love
and all the laughter
that accompanies these resistance movements.
Those are forms of joy that we have in this beautiful struggle.
Because that's what it is. It's a beautiful struggle.
I have to own America.
I have to give credit where it's due
and give hell where it's due.
I started this piece
because I was interested in writing about grasses.
So there is one other event to include,
although it's not in chronological order,
and we must backtrack a little.
When the Dakota people were starving, as you may remember,
government traders would not extend store credit to Indians.
One trader named Andrew Myrick is famous for his refusal
to provide credit to Dakota people
by saying, "If they are hungry, let them eat grass."
There are variations of Myrick's words,
but they are all something to that effect.
When settlers and traders
were killed during the Sioux uprising,
one of the first to be executed was Andrew Myrick.
When Myrick's body was found,
his mouth was stuffed with grass.
I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota Warriors a poem.
There's irony in their poem.
There was no text.
But on second thought,
the words "Let them eat grass"
click the gears of the poem into place.
Things are circling back again.
Sometimes when in a circle, if I wish to exit,
I must sleep
and let the body swing from the platform
out to the grasses.