From countercurrentnews.com: ‘While Americans Focus On DC, Cops Unleash Fury During DAPL Water Protector Eviction’, jan 22, 2017
“Cannon Ball, ND — All water protectors must leave the camps — and abandon plans to relocate to a higher elevation — the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Council wrote in a resolution passed during an executive session of a district meeting just before President Donald Trump took the oath of office.
Decisive, sharp consequences soon followed.
Journalist and livestreamer Jon Ziegler — known better as Rebelutionary Z — met the full force of the law enforcement coalition led by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department on the front lines of brutal and indicative attacks on peaceful water protectors opposing construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
“All the individuals at all the camps in and around Cannon Ball need to leave the district,” Standing Rock Sioux Council resolved. “The building of an alternative site for the camp(s) within the Cannon Ball District is not needed or wanted. If there is to be any kind of a ‘site’ for the commemoration of this historic event that took place with all the tribes, the people of Standing Rock need to vote on where, what and cost before any ‘shanty town is built.’”
According to the Bismarck Tribune, “The resolution, approved by the full council Friday, applies to all of the protest camps in the area: Oceti Sakowin, Rosebud and Sacred Stone […]
“Cody Two Bears, the Cannon Ball district representative to the tribal council, said the district is requesting federal law enforcement aid in removing protesters from the district and setting up posts blocking those who do not live or work in the district from entering. The district requests these actions be taken in the next 30 days.”
‘Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council Passes Resolution to Close Camps‘, NativeNewsOnline (@Native_NewsNet) January 22, 2017
Oceti Sakowin, considered the ‘main camp’ housing pipeline opposition, lies just south of Highway 1806’s Backwater Bridge — the site of fraught contention in months previous, after police fortified a makeshift barricade blocking access by emergency personnel to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
“We need to take the fire that was lit here and burns within us and go back to our own respectful reservations,” Lewis Grassrope told the council.
A lone dissenter on the resolution, Ed Blackcloud, stood against the unpopular actions of the tribe, stating, per the Bismarck Tribune,
“Very few people (at the camp) are the ones who agitate. I do not think all these people should be asked to go home when they fought for you guys, they fought for me, fought for my children, fought for your guys’ children … I feel sending these people home is wrong.”
Police and U.S. National Guard were quick to capitalize on the tribe’s resolution, moving in shortly afterward in yet more aggression against the largely peaceful group who’d maintained semi-permanent encampments near the banks of the Missouri River since last April.
Miserably parallel to similar uses of unnecessary force, law enforcement inflicted targeted attacks against the both the unarmed and journalists documenting the scene Wednesday night.
Despite previous confrontations on Backwater Bridge, police remained behind their barricade to the north — until that night — when they crossed into the south side, in order to remove a tipi.
Water protectors quickly demanded officers return the tipi, and — upon being refused — began to construct another in its place.
As The Daily Haze reports, “Police reportedly went to the south side of the barricade once again and began using rubber bullets against water protectors to prevent them from being able to assemble the second tipi. This led to a standoff that went on for hours, until the police would cross the barricade for the third time.”
Ziegler livestreamed that crossing — and paid the price.
As his own camera recorded heightening police aggression, Ziegler noted the judiciously militarized police moving into sovereign land where no U.S. law enforcement would have a right to be according to centuries’ old treaties between Native Americans and the government.
For some time, the situation remained mostly a battle of insults and screams — until the journalist learned firsthand the telling portent of the incoming administration. Someone yelled his name.
Audio seeming to emanate from the officers’ ‘side’ sends a chilling and direct portent of events immediately to conspire. An authoritative voice — quickly echoed — grunts, “Jon Ziegler!”
Mere seconds later, this wall of officers opens fire on the peaceful water protectors — the second or third rubber bullet fired hitting Ziegler in the hand and leg, as if a last resort to shut down the activist’s live stream.
“Fuck!!” he yells, “they’re hitting me in my fucking camera — you assholes!”
Ziegler immediately calls for medics, but ‘less-than-lethal’ force had already done its damage — he had to be transported to the local hospital for a viciously broken finger. Apparently, law enforcement purposefully targeted his camera — caring little for his personal safety.
My finger just now getting some color back after turning blue.. nurses say shot to my leg looks like a burn?!?
pic.twitter.com/UYsNQLZsqz
— Rebelutionary Z (@Rebelutionary_Z) January 19, 2017
Ziegler tweeted just after midnight on January 21, “Surgery went good (twice as long as expected). I’ll be elevating my hand at hotel for a day or 2. DR-’like a chicken bone smashed w/ hammer.’”
Surgery went good (twice as long as expected). I’ll be elevating my hand at hotel for a day or 2.
DR-“like a chicken bone smashed w/ hammer”
— Rebelutionary Z (@Rebelutionary_Z) January 21, 2017
Rebelutionary Z wasn’t the only person seriously injured in that confrontation — an unnamed water protector shot at close range by a rubber bullet was left with a gaping hole in the leg — proving less-than-lethal a purely relative description of such police weaponry.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
But from Rebelutionary_z yesterday:
Note: this is the transcript of the interview truncated Rebelutionary_Z was on 6:30 Chris Berg; I don’t see what he heard.
“DA:
No, there was never a plan to remove the protesters. What we were doing was trying to help them understand what they were doing to mother earth and ask them to voluntarily leave, and we didn’t sit down with the governor, didn’t sit down with the federal government, we didn’t sit down with anybody to ask for their assistance to remove anybody. We were just trying to come up with a way to clean the area and relocate the campers if they were there or ask them to leave. So we were working on that. But today, things changed and we’re always going to have to explore our options as the saga evolves.
CB:
Cody Two Bears is a member of your council has asked for federal law enforcement for help to remove protesters. Would you be willing to ask federal law enforcement to remove people for safety and security?
DA:
Cody is a councilman of our tribe and this is something the membership of his community was asking for because they were concerned for their safety if they made this decision. But the important thing is just trying to work with everybody and build relationships, positive relationships with everybody and as they evolves, everything changes.
CB:
Would you be a proponent of having more BIA officers on the ground?
DA:
We had more BIA officers on the ground since this whole thing started. That was something I requested from day one. If you understood what was happening, and that’s the problem is nobody really understands. If you understood what was going on prior to all of this, we had the federal resources that came to Standing Rock for law enforcement was minimal. We had eight officers total to police an area the size of Connecticut. So eight of them. They can’t all work at the same time. So when this thing started, I said we need more officers to make sure the communities throughout our nation are safe.”
Pretty muddy responses, imo.
I reckon by ‘asking protectors to leave’ he meant that the tribal council had voted to bull-doze the camps to deal with any detritus that might flood downstream during the spring melt, and had promised to clear the snow off a spot higher up for a new camp, then reneged on that… No more camps, you ruffians!
LaDonna Brave Bull Allard was none too pleased that they’d meant her own privately owned camp, as well (h/t TarheelDem), not to mention that the council would use the donated $3.2 million to pay off tribal debts.
Zo: if he said it, what changes today? And who’s woofin’? Dave or the Bismarck Times? Was there any causality between Cody Two Bears’ statement about asking for law enforcement help to remove ‘protestors’ and bloc entrances to the camps and the ensuing attacks with rubber bullet fire? I didn’t include the photos of the grisly ‘non-lethal’ wounds; take a look if you have a strong stomach.
From thefreethoughtproject and valleynewslive.com: ‘Morton County officials respond to executive action to advance DAPL’, Jan 24, in part:
“The Morton County Sheriff’s Department is monitoring the area of the camps in the event that protestors choose to gather in opposition to the executive action. While the department does not release details of its operational plans and strategies or confirm the number of law enforcement it has available to respond at any given time, the department does have plans to respond and deal with any potential protest actions that may become unlawful. This is prudent when it comes to what the department does and how it prepares for situations.”
“I would like to remind any protesters to please remain peaceful and lawful in your actions. Protesters have a right to take a position on the pipeline, but they do not have the right to break the law. To introduce rule of law within the camp, we will be asking the Trump administration for much-needed law enforcement support and public safety resources, requests that were ignored by the last administration. North Dakota residents expect us to hold these unlawful actors accountable; even the Standing Rock Sioux tribe – who has hosted the protest camps – have asked the protestors to leave out of fear that their presence could pollute the waters they claim to protect. This is not about the pipeline or the protests, it is about the rule of law.”
And Kirchmeier wasn’t the only Morton County official to mischaracterize the largely peaceful and unarmed Dakota Access Pipeline opposition in that statement.
“We are hopeful that this announcement brings us closer to finality in what has been an incredibly challenging time for our citizens and law enforcement professionals. Having dealt with riots, violence, trespassing and property crimes, the people of Morton County are looking forward to getting back their normal lives,” said Morton County Commission Chairman Cody Schulz. “This decision is encouraging because it shows that the federal government is finally interested in the rule of law. It is said that America has a ‘government of laws, not men.’ There is a legal and regulatory process in place for a reason – so everyone knows what the rules are, and those rules are applied objectively.”
As mr. wd said, if some of the protectors really mean to see this through to the end at Standing Rock in the spirit of Crazy Horse…one shudders to imagine what escalation might look like, and how many might get hurt…or worse. Smudge the protectors with sage or sweet grass, pray for them, and keep them safe as you can.
Mitakuye Oyasin! (All My Relations!)
Rebelutionary_Z had tweeted this heartfelt polemical FU song by dee snider w/ awesome images:
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
g’ nite.
‘morn. Thanx for the report.
I remember watching Dee testify after John Denver and Frank Zappa to the Senate commission on record labelling or whatever it was. Tipper Gore’s pet project on which commission her hubby sat. His was the best testimony. “Excuse me, Senator. Are you gonna tell me you’re a big fan of my music, too?”
mornin’, davidly. i confess i’d had to bingle dee snider to discover that he is/was twisted sister. ;-)
but how fun on his question to the washington wives. here’s da wiki on the hearings. john denver? ah…’rocky mountain high’…gotta be weed, eh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center
in a piece at counterpunch today, there were some interesting links, many of which i’ve shown here. but a baffler is his bad news concerning “an EPA investigation found that 40,000 pounds of rat poison were illegally distributed on ranches very close to the Standing Rock camps.”
but the barn-burner polemic was courtesy of ancestral pride/red warrior society. you may remember that they left the camps a couple months ago due to an apparent tasking from dave archambault, iirc.
“At this time though it is certainly clear that the Leaderships wishes and the grassroots people of the Tribe are vastly different. Thousands of people from all over the globe answered the call out for support and help from founder of the Sacred Stone Camp LaDonna Tamakawastewin Allard and Dave Archambault Chairman of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe himself. In fact the SRST website still has a donation button on their website fund misappropriation? even though they are issuing an eviction notice for January 30th, and have officially pulled support in early December including the Porta Potties.
In act of Neo Colonialism and lateral violence that is almost incomprehensible the Council passed a unanimous resolution to accept a resolution from the Cannon Ball District to evict all the camps including Sacred Stone, the real betrayal is that according to Cody Two Bears they are asking for federal assistance to evict the Water Protectors within the next 30 days, to top it off we receive a slap in the face from native run NGO’S that are aiding and abetting in this betrayal”, and so on. see the rest here.
working backwards to find more info on laDonna’s plans, i did find this great depiction at whitewolfcamp.com w/ stellar images:
“LaDonna Tamakawestewin Allard, founder of the original encampment, the Sacred Stone camp, was in Park City, Utah for the release of the documentary series RISE at the Sundance Film Festival, which features the struggle at Standing Rock.
In a brief telephone interview, she said the encampment on her private land would stay intact. Sacred Stone Camp founder LaDonna Brave Bull Allard said Sacred Stone has formed a 501c3 and has plans to build a permanent “green energy” camp.
She said their are plans to put a tower in place for cell and Internet service. There are buildings for a dormitory, dining and to store equipment. The camp has a tractor and plow for moving snow. It has also purchased 40 yurts, 40 teepees (tipis) and three greenhouses for organic farming. She said these are all services to be shared with the community.” (look at the rest here)
Unfortunately, Sage (brush) IS $till In teh machine ! : http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/01/20/22/3C543D9A00000578-4140810-At_last_a_wave_Hillary_perked_up_as_the_former_first_couple_wait-a-11_1484952531339.jpg
that’s quite a stretch to try to make that relevant to this diary, not to be grouch. oh, well yes, exactly to be a grouch.
Mother of the gods; the view from the hermitage is horrifying.
How long before the jack booted, goose stepping, parades start?
high-larious and so timely, v arnold. it took me twice to enter comment a sir ian’s just now, luckily i had most of it on a word doc: “but it just might be that he needs more ‘enemies’ to justify his buildup of the USian military and ‘our wangs are bigger n yer wangs’ parades. ♪ i love a parade.♫
Yep, I had trouble posting as well.
I saw your comment, relevant as usual.
RC has become an absolute prick over there; out of control ad hom’s and rants. Something seriously wrong with that one.
He’s on my ignore list.
Cheers
at least reality checker admits it’s by way of sport. by ye gods n little fishes: he wants to murder everyone he reckons needs killing. how creepy that he seems to believe he should be the arbiter of justice. when we began to fade on one another, his accusations were…horrific, i guess i’d have to say. the old saw about a conservative being a liberal who got mugged doesn’t stretch to his new personae and self-invention; it actually grieves me, to say the truth.
cheers back, and sleep well in the hermitage.
Well RC still reads your blog; he posted an angry response to my post at Ian’s re: my post here.
What a maroon…
He still reads you WD.
lol. largely to raise his ire quotient further, i reckon. did you mean to type ‘moron’, not to put words in yer mouth?
No maroon. You know, Bugs Bunny? What a maroon…
egads, yes. “a bee…a bee…that’s all folks!” well, staying out of his line of fire might be healthy, but difficult. but again: how sad it is.
No, not difficult; I’m not afraid of impotent assholes.
My response was; Hahahahahahahahahah……..
And yes, he’s a very sad case with no cure in view.
Life goes on regardless, no?
oooo, ouch. ;-) o-bla-di, life does seem to go on. here it goes on brrrrr-d-cold. minus 3 degrees, 9 below closer to the river. all the white album versions have been pulled, sadly…
if that new camp being built needs someone to sit around during happy hour & spout sophisto BS, tell ’em i’m available. sounds like good news in a rather depressing story of betrayal.
more relevant on the #fuckHRC meme, she voted for all these pipelines already, right? oh, and trump’s wall.
having been ill a few & looking at people’s idiotic FB posts, i’m more certain than ever that Trump is, well, not the rabbit out of the magician’s top hat, more like the gremlin. instead of feeling warm & fuzzy, we (using “we” loosely) feel repulsed & horrified, but it’s the *same goddam trick.* somebody at CP pointed out that not one big-named Dem could be bothered to show up at the women’s march b/c they were all otherwise engaged at inaugural galas laughing it up w/trump’s donors. despite him being a Putin-stooge, the CIA embraces him w/open arms. etc., etc.
holy crow, am i glad to see you here after so many long days. i’d wondered if you’d been uploaded by aliens for experimentation; second choice was…sick. while i’m sad you were ill, i’m almost glad that you’re still on the earth, or at least were brought back. for now, as i’m exhausted from RL projects and need to take a bit of a siesta, let me send you love peace, and solidarity for now.
thanks. being sick is no fun, but as one friend said, what if you are single mother? a mother w/no sick leave? or, etc., etc., etc. fortunately i have a few people who would run to the store for me (who stocks up on o.j.?) and why doesn’t our country have an army of people “running to the store” for the sick, elderly, etc.? b/c it’s a grand guignol nightmare shithole, that’s why.
it’s good to hear you have friends to run errands for you; i wish we’d been as fortunate the only time neither of us could even get out of bed to tend to our wee chirren. so it was some influenza bug then? lung/bronchial? everyone seems to have their own cures, i reckon. mr. wd sure does…
but as far as the recent tales of camps closing, yesterday brenda norrell put up a missive allegedly for the lakota, dakota, and nakota leadership at standing rock alerting people who can be self-sufficient to come to the camp, w/ penty of caveats and warnings, and goo on them. if not, stand and fight where you are, sort of message. the cheyenne river sioux have leased private land for a new camp. we will practice traditional values.
but i can’t find the source anywhere, which is vexing. norrell guards everything she publishes only too well, disables copy/paste, etc. i can’t even get in to ask questions w/o an open id or google mail.
i looked everywhere i could think of, but in the end…it will be on facebook. i don’t use that, so i can’t even enter their hallowed halls. but it is good news. no: great news.
http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2017/01/message-alert-standing-rock-camp-from.html
Guignol; what a splendid word and new to me, thanks.
i’d needed to bingle and found this. it works to a T.
don’t some of those Guignol plays sound great?
how did they stage this, i wonder? it was a different esthetic, the BS ethos of “realism”, esp. in contemporary movies, really needs to be crucified. i mean, barring wormholes or whatever, people will never cross the speed of light barrier, so why does warp speed have to “look realistic” in sci fi? just for one example? what’s the ideology behind cinema “realism” when it comes to special effects? obvs such “realism” alleviates the imperative to produce “realistic” characters & even semi-plausible plots.
this is OT, but while sick i caught up on my Rifftrax & watched this:
i’m sure more than 11 minutes of this would get tedious quick, but i really like the color palette & the naive playfulness of the silly special effects. endearing & charming. now listen to the same gang riff on the remake of “Clash of the Titans” and note how boring that shit is despite its (pseudo) realism.
it’s all pseudo-realism cuz, e.g., life doesn’t have soundtrack. movies by definition are artifice. so again, why all the emphasis on “realism”? is it so that art can be forced to be intentionally & knowingly “anti-revelatory”? i’m not saying every movie has to be super serious or whatever, but why do i come out of a Star Wars/Trek or Avengers movie feeling stupider? is that part of the plan?
as jay dyer would, i think rightly, say, there is a “religious” or “numinous” component to film (& music and and and….) watch the end of Close Encounters. afterwards, or in the moment, do you believe in alien encounters & abductions? look at the angelic ecstasy on Dreyfuss’s face! life now has meaning! after seeing this life-affirming magical film, i can go on. i must go on. maybe a kind of alchemical or even eucharistic function, transmuting some higher truth onto a baser, more material plane?
anyway, blabbering on…
oops. all this should be under open menu…
Looking at the political machinations between the tribal council, district council, non-governmental organizations, and an innovative initiative, the dynamics are so authentically Cannon Ball and were there 40 years ago. Likely they are true of many reservation communities lacking political power, economic prosperity, and still rebuilding what is left from a suppressed culture.
District Council politics is inter-family politics of shifting alliances. The Brave Bull family and the Two Bears family 40 years ago were mostly on the same page. Seems like not as much now. Individual biographies have their own implicit political interests that come into conflict. The District Council always claims to speak for the community but without a public meeting and council vote (or public referendum) it is hard to say who they speak for.
Tribal council has to deal with what the Feds want as well as the politics going on within the district councils. And all of that is separate and apart from what is going on with the traditional leadership.
And 501c(3)’s are yanked around by their major donors.
Relations with the State of North Dakota are with a foreign jurisdiction that co-resides in your geographic territory, a superimposition of territorial states on traditional kinship cultures. The white residents of Sioux County ND and the Lakota families of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe that just so happens to have territory recognized by the United States of America to which the State of North Dakota must agree to protect as if it was white-owned through registration and so on of township and range deeds in Sioux County and the Tribal Council. The Tribal Council then recognizes three types of land: common trust land (essentially tribal government land); individual trust land (essentially land assigned by the tribal council to an individual and revocable under certain conditions; fee simple land (essentially “private” land in white terms, irrevocable for the most part.) Not knowing the status of the LaDonna Brave Bull Allard land, it is hard to tell what the pressure might be; from her tone of assertion, it sounds like fee simple holding.
The village proposal that the Sacred Stone Camp is working on seems to be moving toward self-reliance, an economic situation that threatens federal control over Indians no matter how much the Feds say that that’s what they want to see. That’s a project that I suspect the Governor and the Tribal Chairman are in alignment of interest on, whether they have ever communicated the specifics of that alignment. They both would be threatened by its success.
Myself, I hope it succeeds. It could be a prototype for replacing the existing federal housing, now approaching fifty years old, with design more frugal and adapted to the weather in a fossil-fuel-free community.
good to see you, stranger. thanks for the inside baseball histories and council terms. i tried to look up ‘fee simple holdings, but everything relevant was a pdf. too much to consider reading. but you likely know that this is
LaDonna Tamakawastewin Allard on facebook, in case she says more there.
https://www.facebook.com/earthw7?fref=ts
i’d seen this tweet by michael wood, jr., poked around, and if i understand correctly, ‘rise’ is more than one episode, maybe more. funny that they honored dave archambault at the premier in…park city, was it?
but i found it on youtube, and begins w/ ladonna as narrator.
i love her permanent camp, too, and agree that it will threaten the other powers you’ve named. making intentional communities is always a threat, but this one may be a bigger one, given the status of her land, and the location that’s so under fire. lots of jests out there that ‘america first’ trump is er…hard into moving ugly oil from the tarsands in…canada. do you recall when the old law prohibiting the exportation of oil was reversed, by chance?
Watched the first two RISE episodes on Standing Rock. Excellent history integrating the AIM movement and traditionalist movement of the 1970s. The second part is full of details that I hadn’t known about Cannonball and the Cannonball River despite our efforts to understand the history of the place. I find it significant that the town was prior to 1868 on the north side of the Cannonball River, that there are burials on an island in the River (maybe not an island before Lake Oahe). LaDonna BraveBull Allard does powerful history and so does another Lakota historian. The history of the veterans in the US’s 20th century wars and what they came back to is striking as is the argument that the origins of community dysfunction lie in the traumas of government boarding schools and the shame of third-class US citizenship. Also how getting clarity on history released people to re-engage in movements for change and protection of the environment.
And the ritual of forgiveness that Wesley Clark, Jr. and the veterans whose arrival coincided with the decision to not permit the crossing of the Missouri until after a full environment impact statement had been filed does not lose its symbolic power with knowledge of the cynicism of some of the motives or of subsequent events. Even at that point Archambault felt the heat of the people instead of the heat of the BIA. But apparently no longer. My suspicions are that it has gotten harder to sell out because the number of buyers have diminished and, for now, the Cannonball District and Standing Rock Reservation have no assets by water and that is already owned by the Corps of Engineers.
oh, my; i wnt to watch, and will try to make time for them soon! thanks so much for the brief synopses, and esp. arrrgh to the boarding schools. brenda norrell had reported that there was pushback to the razing of the last one left standing; wish i could remember its name and location still. the indian reorganization act was one further step in first american immiseration, genocide, sociocide… i really do love to hear ladonna speak. such power and grace and knowledge!
Not up on oil law. I didn’t know there was a prohibition on export.
The Facebook page says they are going forward with constructing the yurts. LaDonna Bravebull Allard is recovering from a cold. And at least within the past day, those are the major news items.
On Trump, I would watch out for a repetition of the Dawes Act. How the original reservations became swiss-cheesed with white ranchers on the best land by the 1970s.
I suspect that the eviction of 1873 had something to do with providing a defensible boundary to Fort Abraham Lincoln some 10 miles to the north (today a historic site with a reconstructed Mandan village, obviously sourced from Catlin paintings, across highway 1806 for tourist convenience).
as it turns out: ‘First U.S. Oil Export Leaves Port; Marks End to 40-Year Ban’, bloomberg, dec. 31, 2015 loads of proponents for it, obviously, among the usual suspects. kinda puts the mockery on the ‘drill baby, drill’ energy independence calls.
but thanks for the news from ladonna, and i did wiki the dawes act for more memory. of course it was what created the navajo checkerboard. but along the way i found:
““In 1906 the Burke Act (also known as the forced patenting act) amended the GAA to give the Secretary of the Interior the power to issue allottees a patent in fee simple to people classified “competent and capable.” The criteria for this determination is unclear but meant that allottees deemed “competent” by the Secretary of the Interior would have their land taken out of trust status, subject to taxation, and could be sold by the allottee. The allotted lands of Indians determined to be incompetent by the Secretary of the Interior were automatically leased out by the Federal Government.”
wonder what those metrics were, lol? interesting on fort abe lincoln, too. it would make sense that trump would do that, given the sagebrush rebellion bill passes by the house r’s, eh?
it’s begun: ‘New North Dakota Wants Congress to Modify Indian Reservation System: Turn Over Power to States’, Levi Rickert, January 28, 2017, bbsnews.net
“Two North Dakota state representatives think they “know best” for the care of American Indians. The two Republican representatives believe their political party’s mantra to give power to states with less federal government intervention.
the bill opens:
“A concurrent resolution urging Congress to modify the Indian reservation system by vesting the states with the ability to engage in relations with Native American tribes and with the responsibility of developing plans to improve the failed Indian reservation system, advance and elevate the quality of life on Indian reservations, promote and increase literacy on Indian reservations, and help Indian reservations to achieve economic stability and independence.”
Devolution of power to states is part of the agenda. It is more difficult for the opposition to organize 50 separate campaigns that one huge campaign. Billionaires can control states by putting their people in one at a time.
North Carolina and a lot of other states have their own Indian Affairs offices, which have registered and provided a state recognition for extended kinship networks with documented histories who never were on reservation and thus excluded from Dawes Act censuses. In North Carolina, these are remaining small bands of tribes that survived in swamps and on the fringes of Piedmont and Coastal North Carolina society. In the 17th and 18th centuries, these ancestors of these communities provided safe havens for Negroes and common whites who had run afoul of the local government or vigilantes. There was enough intermarriage for some of these communities to have darker skin and be identified by others as Negroes. Racial prejudice on the part of the reservation tribes in Southern states often blocked applications to the federal government for recognition. State recognition was generally driven by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists who found sufficient documentary and genealogical evidence to convince courts and state legislators of their claims. Gerald M. Sider’s Lumbee Indiian Histories: Race, Ethnicity, and Indian Identity in the Southern United States.is about one community that has sought recognition for a very long time. These tribes were crushed early as settler colonialism rolled from Virginia southwestward.
So what would a preferable state policy look like if there was sufficient public pressure to accommodate tribal organization within the state’s political geography. Would it look like ex-officio including people like David Archambault II in the North Dakota legislature? What would it look like? What this sounds like is the state of North Dakota regulating schools (most are in mixed districts with white, or were when I was there; the state already does that). Does that mean the Sioux County sheriff having responsibility for all land in the reservation? What does this mean for the county health department and Indian Health Services? The “failed reservation system” is more mission accomplished than mission failed.
Especially what does it mean when the Trump administration is cutting domestic spending on the federal level, much of which passes through the states?
i haven’t the imagination to answer your questions, but i do sense the scent of ALEC in some of these issues, this included. i hadn’t known how many states have BIAs, although indian commissions: yes. but the golden tones of the effort: they left out ‘democratization’ and ‘civilization’.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmBGbIivCoo
the native american/black/european mixes in the swamps between lousiania and florida must be similar to south carolina’s, which led to the mardi gras indian ‘battles’ this song speaks to.
jockomo translates either as: ‘kiss my arse’ or ‘it’s ll good’, depending… ;o-)