Jun 14, 2018 - Sicangu Treaty Council responds to Tapio’s comment on ending Indian Reservations

Rosebud, SD, June 11, 2018: We would like to respond to former candidate and state Senator from Watertown Neal Tapio’s outrageous crazy talk calling for an end to the reservation system for Native Americans. This is still part of the genocide that Native Americans have endured where millions of Native Americans where killed and slaughtered throughout US history as part of the Doctrine of Discovery or a better descriptions is the Doctrine of Domination.

In Dum Diversas of 1452, Pope Nicholas V exhorted king Alfonso of Portugal to go to the Western coast of Africa and “invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue…all Saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ,… reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, [and] take away all their possessions and property”;

In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued several papal documents reaffirming Christendom’s claim of a right of domination against non-Christian nations and peoples, including in the “New World,” and calling for “the propagation of the Christian empire” and for “barbarous” non-Christian nations to be “reduced”;

In 1496, King Henry VII of England issued a royal commission to John Cabot and his sons using the domination language of the papal bulls, authorizing the Cabots to “seek out, discover, and find, whatsoever isles, countries, and provinces of the heathens and infidels that before this time have been unknown to all Christian people” in the “New World”;

In 1823, the United States Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice John Marshall, issued a unanimous decision in the case Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh, affirming for the United States “a right to take possession, notwithstanding the occupancy of the natives, who were heathens, and, at the same time, admitting the prior title of any Christian people who may have made a previous discovery”.

Ironically this year is the 150th Anniversary of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty where the US promised that the Great Sioux Indian Reservation would be home to the Sioux Nations and that no white man could enter this area without the permission of the said Indians, this reservation was parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana.

Article 1 of the United Nation’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples states that “Indigenous peoples have the right to full enjoyment, as a collective or as individuals, of all human rights and fundamental freedoms as recognized in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and International human rights laws.

Article 2 of UNDRIP state’s that Indigenous peoples and individuals are free and equal to all other peoples and individuals and have the right to be free from any kind of discrimination, in the exercise of their rights in particular that based on their indigenous origin or identity.

By promoting a unilateral reservation termination to “help us poor Indians” is about as paternally racist an idea to help American Indigenous Peoples that has been proposed -since the 1887 General Allotment Act, which resulted in the “bad faith” unilateral takings of approximately 200 million acres of land in bad faith. It is important to point out that these types of unilateral actions by the U.S. are in violation of article 6 of the U.S. Constitution and of the “laws of nations.”

If S.D. House of Representative wants to unilaterally address the reservation issues of poverty and oppression, the Sicangu Lakota Treaty Council suggests that he uphold the last vestiges of the Fort Laramie Treaty rights of the Great Sioux Nations Peoples (Oceti Sakowin Oyate) as both federal and state officials are required to do, under Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution.

He could also 1) promote the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota regulatory authority and criminal jurisdiction over non-Indian fee lands and unceded territories of the Fort Laramie Treaties; 2) Stop the state’s taxation of individual Lakota, Dakota Nakota business owners; 3) Stop the illegal permitting of water by state officials to CAFO’s and mineral extraction companies; 4) Stop State corporations from stealing the Oceti Sakowin Oyate surface water and ground water aquifers; 5) Stop the continuous attempts to tax Tribal Nation business transactions in Indian Country territory; 6) Remove the barriers to economic freedoms; 7) Stop pipeline trespassing through Indigenous communities and other forms of contaminate trespass; or 8) Provide a dual Governor position in South Dakota for the Oceti Sakowin Oyate. These are just a few suggestions for Mr Tapio. If he wants to come talk to the Sicangu Lakota Treaty Council, we open the door for him to learn even more approaches he could unilaterally promote.

There are many problems associated with reservation termination. For example, reservations are the only lands where it is clearly and unequivocally the exclusive civil regulatory and adjudicatory jurisdiction of the Great Sioux Nations Peoples (Oceti Sakowin Oyate). Reservation lands are the strong holds of American Indigenous cultures which is the true measure of America’s wealth.

Furthermore, the only way reservation termination could possibly have an increase in the quality of life of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate; is if it resulted in the Indigenous Peoples becoming independent Sovereign Nations, with clear and unequivocal acknowledgment U.S. acknowledgement of exclusive title and jurisdiction, the same as any Nation, to their territories (land, airspace, air spectrum, subsurface, rivers, riverbeds, lakes, lake beds, aquifers, minerals, natural resources, cultural resources, burials, sacred sites, plant foods, plant medicines, their citizens, non-Indigenous and non-citizen Indigenous Peoples within their borders, and so on). Make America great again return it to the its rightful owners, stop the legalization of illegal acts of congress.