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Black Hills, Mining, Land and the Lakota
Aug 22, 2012
I hear cries in the occupied wilderness this week.
The Lawrence County Commission met in Deadwood today to consider Valentine Mining's application to dig for gold in Spearfish Canyon. Some Black Hills locals spoke in favor. Some spoke against. All were white folks.
After three hours, an Oglala Sioux woman, Charmaine White Face, took the microphone. She urged the commission not to approve the permit. Among other reasons, White Face questioned the authority of any white person in the room to approve this mine. She read back to us President Grant's 1875 order to the Army to stop blocking miners from entering the Black Hills, the effective abrogation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. This treaty violation, said White Face, means no white person really owns any part of the Black Hills. No white commission can exercise any sovereignty over this stolen land.
The organization leading the fight against the 21st century miners calls itself the Spearfish Canyon Owners Association. Owners. Perhaps I project, but White Face's white allies in the room seemed to remain uncomfortably silent through her talk.
Meanwhile, an hour to the south, some of White Face's compatriots want to buy 2000 acres of grassland in the heart of the Black Hills. The Lakota call this place Pe' Sla; we call it Reynolds Prairie. Pe' Sla is as sacred to the Great Sioux Nation as Bear Butte, Harney Peak and Devil's Tower. It goes up for auction Saturday.
"The Black Hills are not for sale," the Sioux declared in 1980 when they refused a hundred-million-dollar settlement of their demand for the return of the Black Hills. But the Black Hills are for sale, say the white owners of Reynolds Prairie. To save Pe' Sla from the sacrilege of subdivision, tribal activists are raising money to bid in Saturday's auction and take back their country by the white man's rules of gold and green.
In Deadwood, a Native woman says we whites cannot own, let alone mine, the Black Hills. Just down the road, Lakota people believe that, to protect the holy land, they must buy that which is not for sale from those who do not own it.
We cannot speak of the Black Hills without contradiction.
Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School. A longtime country dweller, Cory is enjoying "urban" living with his family in Spearfish.
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Comments
Bear Butte looks more like it did before European settlement: she's beautiful as she comes back in aspen and oak.
Rewild the West.
150 years ago Populus tremuloides was the predominant deciduous tree species on the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountain Complex. Aspen, the most widely distributed deciduous tree species on Earth, is critical to the survival of the Black Hills’ unique ecotones. Beaver communities rely on aspen to slow runoff and store water supplies.
Paha Sapa ("hills that are black" may have been a reference to burnt timber instead of the accepted, "seen from a distance") hasn’t been a natural forest since 1863 when a nearly Hills-wide fire (likely set by humans hoping to clear pine), opened grazing for distinct historic ungulates. Aspen shoots are favorite browse for elk and bison.
Mycologists report disruption in the fungal communities associated with aspen: the oyster mushroom, pleurotus ostreatus, is in steep decline. The saprophytic mushrooms often associated with human consumption are the most important bioremediators of toxins presenting on the Forest.
Morels fruit after fires in mixed pine/aspen habitat to entice animals to deposit organic material; bison and elk will crawl on their knees and loll their long tongues for morels growing under dead-fallen pine trees. The suppression of fire threatens that relationship, too.
The Forest Service manages about 1.25 million acres in the Hills, most of the other 5.5 million acres of the Black Hills hydrologic region are privately held lands whose owners largely blame forest failures on Federal or State mismanagement. Ponderosa pine draws water from deep sources in ore-bearing formations and transpires both water vapor and heavy metal oxides downwind, aspen stores more surface water. Pine needles absorb heat and shed snowmelt, aspen leaves reflect sunlight in summer and hold snowpacks.
That’s when it hits me right between the eyes.
When those words were being written, thousands of cultures inhabited a continent that seemed to keep growing huge ripe plums just waiting for Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and the rest to pick and pick and pick and pick. Already, the Chesapeake Bay estuary had been mostly denuded of native vegetation, not to mention of its former human inhabitants. Slaves tilled the fields and built the infrastructure, the ancestors of the Lakota and other Siouan groups that had been forced westward out of North Carolina generations earlier, traded with the Spanish and French while forging their own alliances (and marriages) with other indigenous peoples.
So, we’ve come a long way, init?
While the Palestinian homeland looks like holes in the slice of Swiss cheese analogous to the illegal Israeli state, progress toward resolutions of Native trust disputes would have far more political traction after tribes secede from the States in which they reside and then be ratified to form one State, the 51st, sans contiguous borders with two Senators and two House members as there are an estimated 2.5 million indigenous.
It’s time for all Americans to enjoy the protection of law by being part of one nation: erase the artificial borders and grant Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to all the people of North America…Mexico, Central America, Canada, even the Caribbean if they’ll have us.
When will spikes in human misery finally compel action on the failures of anthropogenic biomanipulation on the environment?
President Obama: buy out the private ownership in the Missouri River Basin, drain the dams, remove them from the face of the earth, restore the basin all the way to Yellowstone and freeing her to a historic role in healing the water cycle by rewilding the corridor.
Replace the dams with small hydro. Build overflow impoundments for floodwater to fix estuaries, to pump into geothermal generators, provide water for pulp mills that make packaging from beetle-killed trees, and irrigate truck crops.
Connect the corridor to the USFWS Dakota Potholes Initiative, to Thunder Basin National Grassland, and with national grasslands into traditional winter grazing in Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico.
In summer, herds could migrate into an international corridor extending to the Yukon River in the north.
Ernestine Chasing Hawk, Native Sun News Managing Editor sent this story to the Missoula-based Buffalo Post:
"The 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty gave the Sioux 60 million acres of land west of the Missouri. Gonzalez points out that the Sioux were never militarily defeated by the U.S. and would never have signed the 1868 Treaty had they thought they were ceding any land to the U.S. Arriving at Fort Laramie via Cheyenne in November, the Commission under General W. T. Sherman was dismayed to find no Sioux to parley with as planned. Red Cloud refused to come in until the garrisons at Forts Reno, Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith were withdrawn. The Commission acceded and in March, 1868 the President ordered their abandonment.
The legal battle over what has been referred to as Docket 74-A which began in 1922 is based on the argument that the Sioux never gave up any land and that the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty was treaty of peace, not a treaty of cession. In 1980 Supreme Court said the Sioux were entitled to a mere $40 million dollars (Docket 74-A) for the “ceded land’ and na-cu (using a Lakota lexicon, na is and, cu is dew) the government wanted money back for the rations and other annuities they gave the Sioux in the 1800’s. "
You are a little off the mark and most 11th grade history students in South Dakota could tell you that. The United States Supreme Court in 1980 recognized that the Sioux should be compensated over $17 million for the loss of their land from the violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. The U.S. Supreme Court never said the Sioux had to pay anything. The Sioux have refused the money because they want the U.S. government to honor the Fort Laramie treaty by returning the Black Hills back to the Sioux Nation.
A formally persistent commenter over there (yep, guilty) is convinced that President Obama should issue an executive order reassigning the Black Hills National Forest and the Custer National Forest to the Forestry Division of the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a compromise seeking to settle the Claims lawsuits. These lands would be managed by professionals on a par with the current USDA protocols. Besides, how could they muck it up worse than the Forest Service has?
The Black Hills National Forest should cease to exist and the proposed Tony Dean Wilderness should be folded into a deal for National Grassland under a cooperative Park Service/BIA charter with input from each stakeholder. I'll say it again: the Forest Service should come out of the USDA and look more like the Bureau of Reclamation.
Thunder Basin National Grassland west of Devil's Tower is at risk to the 1872 Mining Act, not to mention the ground impacted by another Canadian invasion in the form of a proposed strip mine for rare earth minerals north of Sundance. Wyoming blasts through treaty lands and leaves mercury trails in its wake.
The Otter Creek coal development would carve wide swathes through southeastern Montana burial sites. Mal-named Custer National Forest should be under Northern Cheyenne and Crow care although this blogger has witnessed that the pine bark beetle has moved deeper into the Pryors now, too.
The EPA recognized the Havasupi as a state under Section 303 of the Clean Water Act as an essential function of tribal governance.
So when will the Sioux permit the Cheyenne to sue the Sioux in Sioux Tribal courts to return the stolen Black Hills?
Fact: they won't.
There's principle in [English] common law called the doctrine of clean hands. You you cannot come to court and argue that the court should decide in a favorable way when you have acted in an opposite way. You cannot expect a court to do what you have not done in relations to others.
The Sioux have dirty hands when it comes to the BH.
Leading the charge against the taking of private property by a private company is Debra Medina. She’s a former Republican candidate for governor and head of the property rights group “We Texans.”
A Republican that's not an earth hater? Seems incredulous.
A Texas judge dissolved the restraining order; now movements toward construction continue.
I hope the tribe will be able to preserve their sacred space.
As a teacher, this is surprising. The Court did not consider whether there was any violatiom of the Ft. Laramie Treaty. The Court considred TWO (and only 2) issues:
1. Could the Sioux's claim for interest on the compensatiion for the BH be re-litigated (Holding: Yes)
2. If so, how much interest on the compensation be awarded (Holding 5% per year= about $88 million at the time)
The Court did not consider whether the Treaty had been violated, since it was well-settled that Congress could unilaterally abrogate ANY treaty. Nor did the Court consider whether the Sioux still owned the BH--that was clear: THEY DID NOT.
Wow, a teacher?
Supply some DNA, LK, and we'll find out.
--I hope the tribe will be able to preserve their sacred space.
I hope liberals hold to their claim that there is a wall of separation between religion and the state.
Beware the lame duck.
The U.S. Supreme Court might not have stated directly that the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 was "violated" but the fact the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that the Sioux Nation was entitled to monetary compensation suggests that the U.S. Government did not honor all of its obligations under the treaty. I am glad you read the decision.
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/08/19/inside-kimberly-craven%E2%80%99s-cobell-appeal-to-u-s-supreme-court-130062
No, the 1980 decision does not suggest that. The Constitutional basis for the suit was that the 5th Amendment rights of the Sioux were violated in that just compensation was not given to the SIoux when their land was taken (Takings Clause). The Court held that the Sioux were not properly compensated; the Court affirmed a lower court's calculation of the value of the land, the gold, and interest.
The Court did NOT consider let alone find that the US did not honor all of it obligations under the Ft. Laramie TREATY--the Court held that the US did not honor its obligations under the 5th Amendment of the US Constitution to provide just compensation when taking property.
--I am glad you read the decision.
I would invite you to read it ASAP, instead of making up stuff. It's really not that difficult to understand the issues before the court and those not before the court. Unless fo course you have an agenda to further, but one would hope as a public school teacher, you'd avoid being a crusader in the classroom.
I'd be happy to sit down over coffee to discuss issues like these, but you should know that NOTHING in history is black or white, evil or good, right or wrong. It's true for the Sioux as well as the settlers & miners.
http://www.lastrealindians.com/2012/08/22/sale-of-the-sacred-how-pe-sla-may-test-the-uncharted-waters-of-the-undrip/
The SCOTUS also ruled that as to the matter of just compensation, the Claims Court's decision that the Sioux had not been compensated should stand.
In addition, the SCOTUS recognized the AUTHORITY OF CONGRESS TO RECLAIM THE LAND (i.e., the Black Hills) in question, noting that Congress has "...paramount authority over the property of the Indians,"
But in addition, The Court ruled that Congress must make a "...good faith effort..." to give the Sioux " ...the full value of the land," and that, heretofore, it had failed to do so.
So far the Sioux have refuse to accept the Court's settlement as it would amount to acceptance of the ruling and therefore LEGALLY TERMINATES Sioux demands for return of the Black Hills.
Eventually the Sioux will have to accept the Courts ruling and give up the land. I assume they may be entitled to additional interest but maybe not as the delay is one of their own making.
All the histrionics, posturing, hand waving and name calling by the Larry Kurtz's of this world will not change the facts of the matter.
http://www.lastrealindians.com/2012/08/22/sale-of-the-sacred-how-pe-sla-may-test-the-uncharted-waters-of-the-undrip/
http://www.lakotacountrytimes.com/news/2009-09-01/local_news/008.html
The agreement creating naval base at Guantanamo Bay was vacated by Fidel Castro yet the US has chosen to ignore the sovereignty of the Cuban government.
American exceptionalism sprouts from the barrels of guns.
/O.CON.KUNR.FW.W.0026.000000T0000Z-120825T0600Z/
NORTHWESTERN SOUTH DAKOTA PLAINS-SOUTHWESTERN SOUTH DAKOTA-
BADLANDS AREA-SOUTHERN CAMPBELL-NORTHERN CAMPBELL-
LOWER ELEVATIONS OF CROOK AND WESTON COUNTIES-
1207 PM MDT FRI AUG 24 2012
...RED FLAG WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT MDT TONIGHT
FOR LOW RELATIVE HUMIDITY...GUSTY WINDS...AND COLD FRONTAL
PASSAGE FOR WYOMING FIRE WEATHER ZONES 259...297...AND 298...
ALONG WITH SOUTH DAKOTA FIRE WEATHER ZONES 261...263...AND 264...
Gaia: be merciful
By using the eminent domain clause of the 5th Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court was acknowledging the property rights of the Sioux Nation. The land belonged to them under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and then was seized after 1877 by an act of Congress. Either way, the Black Hills were taken from them without their consent.
Coffee? I like Nebraska or wherever you are from. Next time I visit Pine Ridge, White Clay and Chadron I will give you a call. Can we invite Charlotte Black Elk?
http://interested-party.blogspot.com/search?q=cattle
On Bernie Daniel's statements that Congress had the authority to take the Black Hills... well, Congress has the authority to declare war, but that does not make every declaration of war just. We as a nation made a deal, and we broke it. We need to come to terms with that... but I'm not sure there's a practical or moral way to do that. Do we just declare some sick form of jubilee, declare our own debts forgiven, and say to Native Americans, "Deal with defeat"?
But it would be awfully hard to turn down six million to ten million dollars... and it's awfully hard to find buyers with that kind of money who aren't interested in top-dollar exploitation of the land.
As I have shown, he has been consistently and factually WRONG about what the US Sup Ct said & did not say. Perspective? He completly failed to acknowledge that the Sioux "stole" the BH from the Cheyenne. Why? Because that "perspective" does not fit into his (and your) whitey = evil = perps; NAs = noble = victims template.
Then he tries his smarmy, "I know better because I'm a teacher" BS. How embarassing.
No, "we" did not--the gov't did. Time and time again, our gov't is not us;your so-called social contract is an illusion no matter how hard you try to invent something to which most individuals do not and will not sign off on.
--We need to come to terms with that
Again no, "we" do not. If you feel it's necessary to assauge your white guilt, go ahead, but don't for a second tro to drag the rest of us into your psychosis.
"The Republican National Committee (RNC) is standing by a top leader with the organization who said that Col. George Armstrong Custer was “dishonored” when New Mexico’s governor met with American Indians earlier this year.
The embattled RNC executive committee member is Pat Rogers, a GOP lobbyist and partner with the Modrall law firm of Albuquerque, New Mexico. He wrote the following words in an e-mail to the staff of Republican New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez in June after her tribal meeting was announced: “The state is going to hell. Col. [Allen] Weh would not have dishonored Col. Custer in this manner.” Weh was a Republican candidate for state governor who ran against Martinez in 2010."
Read more:http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/08/27/custer-friendly-official-has-backing-of-republican-national-committee-131336 http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/08/27/custer-friendly-official-has-backing-of-republican-national-committee-131336#ixzz24l0O5ZJv
Yep, it's better to have a white supremacist imbecile running for re-election as VP.
http://64.38.12.138/News/2012/006885.asp
"A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll released last week showed Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, claiming zero percent of the black vote. President Barack Obama was set to claim 94 percent of the black vote."
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/80194.html#ixzz24lorCP8g
This guy is a hotheaded, angry person, and there's no place for his kind in a public discussion of such an important matter.
It's time for Bernie to remove this column from his website. You have 5 days.
THERE IS NO PLACE FOR HIM AND HIS "COLUMNS" IN CIVIL DISCOURSE.
Bernie, you have 3 days to remove this "column" from your website.
"An Aug. 25 public sale of land at the Pe’ Sla Native American prayer site in the Black Hills of South Dakota was canceled after the top Oglala Lakota traditional and elected officials requested federal intervention.
In signing the written request on Aug. 22, Chief Oliver Red Cloud and Oglala Sioux Tribal Council President John Yellow Bird Steele said, “Due to the extremely short timeframe we have in addressing the auction of Pe’ Sla, we are under duress and have no alternative but to make this special request of you.”
Addressing a letter to Donald “Del” Laverdure, acting assistant secretary of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., through Robert Ecoffey, superintendent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Pine Ridge Agency, the Lakota leaders stated:
“We are writing to you, as trustee of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and protector of the tribe’s rights under its treaties, Article 8 of the 1877 Act and under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. We need you to intervene in the auction of Pe’ Sla, that is scheduled for Aug. 25, 2012, by providing funds to the Oglala and other Sioux tribes to purchase the 1,900 acres of land that make up Pe’ Sla.”
While signing the Aug. 22 letter, Steele noted: “The United States is a signatory of the United Nations Declaration of Indigenous Rights and bound to the provisions of that declaration. Not only that, they are bound to the Constitution of the United States, which states that treaties are the law of the land."
http://www.buffalopost.net/?p=18083
The U.S. has recognized the Sioux people own half the state of south dakota- its only a matter of time before we get just compensation.
Now that the sioux people own reynolds holler igotta say it feels good raising 4 sioux children on their own NEW/OLD sovereign land.
corniest article ever.
this is the pale shit the Indians in SD deal with erday...