Lakota secede from United States

[Tye 1on]

Indian tribes are not true sovereign nations. To put it in the most condescending terms, they are wards of the federal government. Their sovereignty is akin to the sovereignty of the states, and they could no more sue the US in a foreign/international court than California could.

I think Danno's on the right track, if there is one. Found this on a DOJ site:

II. PRINCIPLES OF INDIAN SOVEREIGNTY AND THE TRUST RESPONSIBILITY

Though generalizations are difficult, a few basic principles provide important guidance in the field of Indian affairs: 1) the Constitution vests Congress with plenary power over Indian affairs; 2) Indian tribes retain important sovereign powers over their members and their territory, subject to the plenary power of Congress; and 3) the United States has a trust responsibility to Indian tribes,which guides and limits the Federal Government in dealings with Indian tribes. Thus, federal and tribal law generally have primacy over Indian affairs in Indian country, except where Congress has provided otherwise.

http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/readingroom/sovereignty.htm

And in another legal paper:

"In light of the history of treaty-making and with an eye toward restoring the sense of equality between nations that justified the treaty process to begin with, American Indians are -- in concert with indigenous peoples worldwide -- asserting a sense of their own "sovereignty." The United Nations Draft Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is at the center of this global struggle for self-determination. The Declaration is the product of twenty years of negotiating among indigenous peoples and U.N. bodies. It's very title draws the line of battle -- rights of indigenous peoples (plural).
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^what Chief Tipp was saying.
Federal Indian Law:
When we enter into the realm of "federal Indian law," we need to keep in mind that we are traveling in a semantic world created by one group to rule another. "

Was found in AMERICAN INDIAN SOVEREIGNTY:NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T at http://www.umass.edu/legal/derrico/nowyouseeit.html, which appears to be a pretty comprehensive study.

And I still don't really get it...

[Danno]

Pretty sure they're considered Nations in the eyes of the UN - see the Inuit in Canada. Just because a Nation is subjugated and assimilated by it's oppressors doesn't mean it ceases to exist. I'm also not so sure about their being "wards" of the state, since they are governed by themselves separate from the States they are located in.

wow, I was careful in my language, making sure to say "wards of the federal government" instead of "wards of the state" so someone didn't misinterpret "state" to mean one of the 50 states, and not as a generic reference to the government. Yet you still did just that!

Let's just say that they are not sovereign nations on par with France, England, etc. They are just not. A quick scan of the UN's web site shows no tribes listed as members, so I am not sure what you're referencing. And my condescending terminology is repeated in US case law over and over. I use that terminology not because I like it or agree with it, but because it IS used over and over, and in many ways still does describe -- in simplistic terms -- the federal government's relationship to Indian tribes in this country.

[Danno]

Disclosure: I practice Indian law.

[stupendous man]

disclosure: danno blows goats. I have proof.


but he does practice indian law. so danno, what's the word? if the tribal leaders said the treaty is over, can they draw a big circle from wyoming to missouri and say the war is back on?

[Hugh Conway]

Let's just say that they are not sovereign nations on par with France, England, etc. They are just not. A quick scan of the UN's web site shows no tribes listed as members, so I am not sure what you're referencing. And my condescending terminology is repeated in US case law over and over. I use that terminology not because I like it or agree with it, but because it IS used over and over, and in many ways still does describe -- in simplistic terms -- the federal government's relationship to Indian tribes in this country.

so the white man says the red man ain't like the white man? explain to me again why the red man should give a fuck what the white man thinks? your logic is sublimely assinine.

Taiwan isn't a member of the UN either.

[Danno]

if the tribal leaders said the treaty is over, can they draw a big circle from wyoming to missouri and say the war is back on?

First, like I said, I don't believe these were authorized tribal leaders, so it's an academic question. But second, if you lose a suit in the court of claims, can you just decide that the court was wrong and walk into the treasury and take your money? of course not. A tribe can contest the validity of a treaty in court; if they win, the court provides them a remedy. If they lose, and then seek to ignore the court's orders, then they will be subject to the same things that anyone who violates a court's directives would be subject to.

[Danno]

so the white man says the red man ain't like the white man? explain to me again why the red man should give a fuck what the white man thinks? your logic is sublimely assinine.

Taiwan isn't a member of the UN either.

Hey dipshit, I am not using logic. I am merely stating the current state of the law. I did not interject my opinion, nor did I try to use any logic connections.

Just so you get it:
Sugar contains calories: statement of fact
If I eat 500 spoonfuls of sugar a day, that will likely make me fat, because I can't burn that many calories in a day: using logic

[Hugh Conway]

But second, if you lose a suit in the court of claims, can you just decide that the court was wrong and walk into the treasury and take your money? of course not.

Yes, you can. And if you are big enough and strong enough you can keep the money. Or in this case you just take the land and offer "treaties" and "payment". People, Companies and Countries break "the law" all the time. Bad things don't always happen to them.

[Danno]

ok, good luck with that.

[Tye 1on]

Taiwan isn't a member of the UN either.

yeah, but does Taiwan have casinos?

What the fuck does that have to do with anything?

Nothing, actually.

[Tye 1on]

First, like I said, I don't believe these were authorized tribal leaders, so it's an academic question. But second, if you lose a suit in the court of claims, can you just decide that the court was wrong and walk into the treasury and take your money? of course not. A tribe can contest the validity of a treaty in court; if they win, the court provides them a remedy. If they lose, and then seek to ignore the court's orders, then they will be subject to the same things that anyone who violates a court's directives would be subject to.

That makes sense to me. Thanks Danno, i feel like i'm moving from a 100% fkn idiot on this to a 98% idiot. So, as things stand today, it kinda sounds like even if it was hypothetically an authorized tribal leader, that once they hit the US courts, they'd likely lose, and have no recourse other than actions that in the eyes of the US courts would likely be considered unlawful. So unless the UN comes up with some strong aboriginal rights program that the US bought in to, they're pretty much stuck trying to achieve incremental gains thru the courts or legislatures?

[Danno]

That makes sense to me. Thanks Danno, i feel like i'm moving from a 100% fkn idiot on this to a 98% idiot. So, as things stand today, it kinda sounds like even if it was hypothetically an authorized tribal leader, that once they hit the US courts, they'd likely lose, and have no recourse other than actions that in the eyes of the US courts would likely be considered unlawful. So unless the UN comes up with some strong aboriginal rights program that the US bought in to, they're pretty much stuck trying to achieve incremental gains thru the courts or legislatures?

Don't sell yourself short, I'd say you're only 95% idiot.

Actually, I would say you summed it up nicely.

[Hugh Conway]

What the fuck does that have to do with anything?

I was using Taiwan as an example of an independent country (and most rational non-mainland Chinese would consider it such) that is not acknowledged by the United Nations, thereby illustrating the pointlessness of UN membership as the arbiter of sovereignity.

So it's not legal and the courts wouldn't recognize them. So what? Would we go to war if they seceded illegally?

[Tye 1on]

I was using Taiwan as an example of an independent country (and most rational non-mainland Chinese would consider it such) that is not acknowledged by the United Nations, thereby illustrating the pointlessness of UN membership as the arbiter of sovereignity.

So it's not legal and the courts wouldn't recognize them. So what? Would we go to war if they seceded illegally?

Sorry dude, my lame jokes can be lame even to the lamest. I was referring to my referring to the casinos. Er, never mind.

Your point, however, is well taken. While the pointlessness of the UN membership is a spot on, if i was a tribal dude i'd be pissed there's not a valid international arbiter...

[flatlander#2]

My Dad's side of the family own a shitload of land all up against Crow Creek area, I grew up with those kids, go back to there every year to hunt. Nothing has changed, the damn casino's suck as everyone knew they would, meth is rampant, the cheapest booze is now the high dollar way to go. Go ahead and secede Russel Means you irrelevant old PR windbag. It makes as much sense as me saying Evergreen is seceding from Colorado. Just how is this going to help the tribes? The people, the kids growing up there and hoping to not end up in the trouble that is so prevalant. You can grow up on the rez and be something in life, I have many friends that did, I also have several buddies that really did not. A kid I grew up with Marlon Blackbonnet was just arrested this last week in Rapid City for stabbing a dude on the bike path. His foster brother was in my grade, in the can for multiple DUI and possession of a shitton of meth. The family that fostered him were Chippewa, their boys both have their PhD, one works for the Wisconsin Education Dept. the other is Asst Director of Indian Ed in Montana, choices made. Also, there are quite a few white folks living/owning land on Crow Creek, Lower Brule and Rosebud Rez. I know because they're my cousins so having a nation or geographic region of only Natives is impossible and dumb to think it would work.

[Danno]

I was using Taiwan as an example of an independent country (and most rational non-mainland Chinese would consider it such) that is not acknowledged by the United Nations, thereby illustrating the pointlessness of UN membership as the arbiter of sovereignity.

So it's not legal and the courts wouldn't recognize them. So what? Would we go to war if they seceded illegally?

I didn't use the UN as the arbiter of sovereignty, I was merely responding to someone else who mentioned it.

Let us assume that a legitimately elected tribal government did declare its secession from the union. If they did nothing else, ie if they continued to act as law abiding US citizens, I don't know what would happen. The US would surely make it clear that their declaration was unlawful and had no effect, but if the tribe and its members didn't "do" anything more, I doubt the U.S. would do more.

Let us now assume that this tribe did take some action. Say, they took over the local IHS clinic and kicked out the federal employees. The feds would not "go to war" in the sense that it is a ridiculous notion. But you can be DAMN sure that they would step in, with force, and retake possession of their property, and arrest everyone involved.

I have no doubt that they would take the Dude's hard line, this aggression will not stand, man.

[philippeR]

...
unless the UN comes up with some strong aboriginal rights program that the US bought in to...

which sounds rather unlikely...

Muy interesting Danno ! thanks for the insight.

[irul&ublo]

Pretty sure they're considered Nations in the eyes of the UN - see the Inuit in Canada. Just because a Nation is subjugated and assimilated by it's oppressors doesn't mean it ceases to exist. I'm also not so sure about their being "wards" of the state, since they are governed by themselves separate from the States they are located in.

Since when did we give a fuck about anything the UN says unless its from the Security Council, which we have a veto over.

And the "nations" are sovereign only to the extent they are allowed by treaty and Congress.

[Will]

And if you are big enough and strong enough you can keep the money.

Problem: These guys are not big and strong enough. They lost the big and strong contest a while ago and are now stuck playing the Federal Government's game. Until they become big and strong, the Federal Gov't is the only game in town.
Unfortunately, the game is does not have rules in their favor. And playing the game will most likely result in loosing the game. Their best hope for advancing this line of action is some movement in the legislature - essentially get enough people to say, "Hey, this is kinda fucked up right here. Someone should pass a law." Hopefully then, Congress passes a law and the rules change in their favor.

As for what is actually best for Native Americans as group? Beats me. How do you restore a culture that's been so thoroughly fucked for such a long time? At what point do you throw in the towel and take YetiMan's line?

Oh yeah, the English have bad teeth, good beer, bad fried food, ugly women, uglier men, dry wit, subtle humor, but also Benny Hill and Monty Python, a lot of fog I'm told, and if Dick Van Dyke has any skills as an actor then I believe the lot of you talk funny.

[spook]

"For America to Live,
Europe Must Die"

The following speech was given by Russell Means in July 1980, before several thousand people who had assembled from all over the world for the Black Hills International Survival Gathering, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It is [said to be] Russell Means's most famous speech
........

The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

So what you read here is not what I have written. It is what I have said and someone else has written down. I will allow this because it seems that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead, dry leaves of a book. I don't really care whether my words reach whites or not. They have already demonstrated through their history that they cannot hear, cannot see; they can only read (of course, there are exceptions, but the exceptions only prove the rule). I'm more concerned with the American Indian people, students and others, who have begun to be absorbed into the white world through universities and other institutions. But even then it's a marginal sort of concern. It's very possible to grow into a red face with a white mind; and if that's a person's individual choice, so be it, but I have no use for them. This is part of the process of cultural genocide being waged by Europeans against American Indian peoples' today. My concern is with those American Indians who choose to resist this genocide, but may be confused as to how to proceed.

(You notice I use the term American Indian rather than Native American or Native indigenous people or Amerindian when referring to my people.) There has been some controversy about such terms, and frankly, at this point, I find it absurd. Primarily it seems that American Indian is being rejected as European in origin - which is true. But all the above terms are European in origin; the only non-European way is to speak of Lakota - or, more precisely, of Oglala, Brule, et. - and of the Dineh, the Miccousukee, and all the rest of the several hundred correct tribal names.

(There is also some confusion about the word Indian , a mistaken belief that it refers somehow to the country, India. When Columbus washed up on the beach in the Caribbean, he was not looking for a country called India. Europeans were calling that country Hindustan in 1492. Look it up on the old maps. Columbus called the tribal people he met "Indio," from the Italian in dio , meaning "in God.")

It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain. It must come from the hoop, the four directions, the relations: it cannot come from the pages of a book or a thousand books. No European can ever teach a Lakota to be Lakota, a Hopi to be Hopi. A master's degree in "Indian Studies" or in "education" or in anything else cannot make a person into a human being or provide knowledge into the traditional ways. It can only make you into a mental European, an outsider.

I should be clear about something here, because there seems to be some confusion about it. When I speak of Europeans or mental Europeans, I'm not allowing for false distinctions. I'm not saying that on the one hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal, reactionary European intellectual development which is bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development which is good. I'm referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and "leftism" in general. I don't believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the European intellectual tradition. It's really just the same old song.

The process began much earlier. Newton, for example, "revolutionized" physics and the so-called natural science by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation.

[JS Dill note:

...we are not witnessing a peculiar twist in the fortunes of postwar Europe and America, an aberation that can be tied to such late twentieth-century problems as inflation, loss of empire, and the like. Rather, we are witnessing the inevitable outcome of a logic that is already centuried old, and which is beng played out in our lifetime.

The collapse of capitalism, the general dysfunction of institutions, the revulsion against ecological spoilation, the increasing inability of od the scientific world view to explain the things that really matter, the loss of interest in work, and the statistical rise in depression, anxiety, and outright psychosis are all of a piece.

The Reenchantment of the World, Morris Berman, ISBN 0-8014-9225-4]

Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these "thinkers" took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into a code, an abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended: they "secularized" Christian religion, as the "scholars" like to say - and in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer!.

This is what has come to be termed "efficiency" in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment - that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one - is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why "truth" changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive.

Hegel and Marx were heirs to the thinking of Newton, Descartes, Locke and Smith. Hegel finished the process of secularizing theology - and that is put in his own terms - he secularized the religious thinking through which Europe understood the universe. Then Marx put Hegel's philosophy in terms of "materialism," which is to say that Marx despiritualized Hegel's work altogether. Again, this is in Marx' own terms. And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans may see this as revolutionary, But American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between being and gaining . The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European imperialism lie in Marx' - and his followers' - links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel, and the others.

Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is "proof that the system works" to Europeans. Clearly, there are two completely opposing views at issue here, and Marxism is very far over to the other side from the American Indian view. But lets look at a major implication of this; it is not merely an intellectual debate.

The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, "Thou shalt not kill," at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue.

......
Capitalists, at least, can be relied upon to develop uranium as fuel only at the rate at which they can show a good profit. That's their ethic, and maybe that will buy some time. Marxists, on the other hand, can be relied upon to develop uranium fuel as rapidly as possible simply because it's the most "efficient" production fuel available. That's their ethic, and I fail to see where it's preferable. Like I said, Marxism is right smack in the middle of the European tradition. It's the same old song.

There's a rule of thumb that can be applied here. You cannot judge the real nature of a revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposed to make within the European power structure and society. You can only judge it by the effect it will have on non-European peoples. This is because every revolution in European history has served to reinforce Europe's tendencies and abilities to export destruction to other peoples, other cultures and the environment itself. I defy anyone to point out an example where this is not true.
.......

cont...
http://www.dickshovel.com/Banks.html

[Gripen]

I was using Taiwan as an example of an independent country (and most rational non-mainland Chinese would consider it such) that is not acknowledged by the United Nations, thereby illustrating the pointlessness of UN membership as the arbiter of sovereignity.

Taiwan is not a independent nation. Dont follow Taiwanese politics do you? They have never declared independence nor will they in the near future. In fact the ruling party just pledged NOT to declare independence last week.

So why isnt Taiwan in the UN? Becuase it is not an independent country. We can argue the semantics about what an independent country means, but in the eye of the UN it is part of China.

Also, Tawain was a member of the UN until the PRC took its seat in the 1970's as part of the appease the Chinese to piss off the Soviets and exacerbate the Sino-Soviet split.

[Hugh Conway]

So why isnt Taiwan in the UN? Becuase it is not an independent country.

< shrug > arguing in circles. they've their own economy, laws, defense force, airlines. de facto they are their own nation < shrug >

last I saw the Taiwanese president is still planning to hold a referendum on UN membership < shrug >

[Gripen]

Yea... it has applied fifteen times since 1971. Gets shot down down by Assembly Resolution 2758 every time.

http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2007/ga10617.doc.htm

[Benny Profane]

Old Russell just wants to lead some into another stupid massacre before he dies. May sound harsh, but, get over it. You ain't gonna win nothin'.

[Tippster]

Aw, fuck it.