Extracts from The Great Sioux Nation: author, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
Author's Note to the New Edition, a Lakota historian's statement and a review
University of Nebraska Press, the esteemed publisher of this new edition of The Great Sioux Nation, also published, in 2012, Called to Justice: The Life of a Federal Trial Judge, the memoirs of Judge Warren Urbom, the federal judge who heard the case this book is based on. The chapter in which the Judge recounts that experience, titled, "Wounded Knee and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868," is one of the longest in the book, yet it covers only one year of his rich and complex career. The chapter begins: “At the dawn of 1974 my life was about to be absorbed by Native Americans. I could have avoided it, I suppose, but I didn't see it coming, and when I did see it, I was already deeply involved. I accepted the invitation with the expectation that I'd spend a week trying Native Americans. I stayed a year.”
I could say the same myself, except I stayed a lifetime rather than a year. Immediately after the 1974 hearing I was swept into the uncharted territory of forging an international Indigenous movement. Following the publication of The Great Sioux Nation in the spring of 1977, the book was presented three months later as a fundamental document regarding the 1868 Sioux Treaty at the United Nations. The International Indian Treaty Council, formed in 1974 to seek international recognition for the Sioux Nation and other Indigenous nations based on treaties and agreements that guaranteed their sovereignty, worked with international human rights groups and UN officials to organize the "International NGO Conference on Discrimination against Indigenous Populations in the Americas," held at United Nations' headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, September 20-23, 1977. Over a hundred Indigenous representatives from the Arctic Circle to the cone of South America participated in this unprecedented initiative, triggering a three-decade process, involving hundreds of Indigenous nations, communities, and organizations. This effort culminated in the landmark 2007 United Nations' General Assembly's "Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples." Article 37 of the Declaration pertains to treaties:
1. Indigenous peoples have the rights to the recognition, observance and enforcement of treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements concluded with States or their successors and to have States honour and respect such treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements.
2. Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as diminishing or eliminating the rights of indigenous peoples contained in treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements.
The Declaration was strong on the treaty issue thanks to the persistent lobbying by representatives of the Sioux Treaty, along with other Indigenous nations. In the late 1980s, a UN Special Rapporteur, Miguel Alfonso-Martínez, was appointed to study treaties and agreements between Indigenous Peoples and colonizing states.
The Treaty Study, completed in 1999, validated the 1868 Sioux Treaty according to the Sioux interpretation. During the following years, regular treaty seminars have been organized at the United Nations to further refine the applicable international law. The Declaration is a marker on the road to a binding international treaty on the rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Contributing to the high credibility of the treaty issue was the vindication of the Sioux in their claim to the Black Hills, as guaranteed under the 1868 treaty. On July 23, 1980, in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Black Hills were illegally taken and that remuneration of the initial offering price plus interest — over a hundred million dollars — be paid to the Sioux Nation.
The Sioux people refused the settlement, and insisted that the sacred Black Hills be returned to them. The money remained in an interest-bearing account, which by the turn of the twenty-first century, amounted to over seven-hundred million dollars, increasing every year. But the Sioux refused to take the money. They believed that accepting the settlement would validate the U.S. theft of their most sacred land.
This is a profound statement coming from a people living in impoverished, colonized conditions in the richest country in the world, clear evidence of their sovereignty as a people and their insistence on self-determination.
In the decades since the publication of The Great Sioux Nation, American Indian Studies (variously called Native American Studies and Indigenous Studies) programs, have flourished in dozens of universities throughout North America, and Native American scholars are now professors in many academic fields, including Native Studies, teaching and writing invaluable books, literature, and poetry.
When this book was published, the theoretical framework of western colonialism and the United States as a colonialist settler-state was only beginning to emerge; now it is the foundational theory. Lakota scholar and poet, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's 2011 book, A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations, is the best guide to that development.
Several books published since the Sioux Treaty hearing provide perspectives on the treaty issue, the Black Hills, the Wounded Knee siege, and Native activism in general. Two prominent leaders of the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee published their autobiographies: Russell Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means, in 1996, and Dennis Banks: Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement, in 2005. Peter Matthiessen's 1983 book, In the Spirit of Crazyhorse: The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI's War on the American Indian Movement is a meticulous history of the American Indian Movement and the U.S. government's attacks on the organization, most notably, the continued imprisonment of Leonard Peltier. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, published in 1997 by Native American writers, Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, has already become a classic and essential interpretive work.
The most comprehensive historical work on what led up to Wounded Knee is Daniel M. Cobb's Native American Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty (2008). Lakota attorney Mario Gonzalez and Lakota scholar and writer Elizabeth Cook-Lynn published The Politics of Hallowed Ground: Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty in 1998, an inspired book of legal and oral histories, along with documents. Regarding the central issue of the return of the Black Hills, Jeffrey Ostler's 2010 book, The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground, is a thorough and useful text. Indigenous
Peoples' rights in international law and within the United Nations system have received considerable scholarly attention, and two collections of articles stand out among dozens of publications: Making the Declaration Work: The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2009), edited by Claire Charters and Rodolfo Stavenhagen; and Indigenous Rights in the Age of the UN Declaration (2012), edited by Elvira Pulitano. The latter book contains an important article by the researcher for the UN Treaty Study, Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff, titled, "Treaties, Peoplehood, and Self-Determination."
Vine Deloria, Jr., 2005 and John Thorne 2011 were the main legal minds behind the strategies developed for the 1974 Sioux Treaty Hearing. Both passed away in the early twenty-first century, leaving behind remarkable legacies, and in the case of Deloria, more than twenty books of literary and political genius. Both were mentors of mine and for many.
All royalties from the sale of The Great Sioux Nation will go to the Defenders of the Black Hills--He Sapa O'nakijin, which is based in Rapid City, South Dakota, and is coordinated by Charmaine White Face. In protecting and defending the Sioux Treaty and the restitution of the sacred Black Hills--Paha Sapa, the Defenders are also upholding Article VI of the Constitution of the United States, which asserts: “treaties are the supreme law of the land.”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1938 to the daughter of a sharecropper and a half-Native American mother from Oklahoma, grew up in Central Oklahoma, and is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Hayward. Since retiring from university teaching, Dunbar-Ortiz has been lecturing widely and writes.The Great Sioux Nation is available from Bison Press.
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“Rations Not Fit for Human Consumption”
Statement by Matthew King, Oglala elder from the Pine Ridge Reservation, a Lakota historian and spokesman, who serves as Chief Fools Crow's interpreter on official occasions. (154-156)
From the book, The Great Sioux Nation, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
I speak and write about Indian affairs. I used to lecture in different schools all over the country-universities, high schools, organizations, television, and radio. Recently I helped Chief Fools Crow in trying to negotiate a peace between the United States government and our Indian people. I was the official interpreter on that occasion. I am now writing the history of the Sioux people, our life and beliefs.
The Sioux are a Nation. We believe in nature, natural laws, the great spirit. We are not materialistic. Sioux history goes back thirty or forty thousand years.
The Sioux have exercised their religion longer than the Pipe. The Pipe was presented to us only recently, maybe four hundred years ago. If we are in trouble and need help we must use the Pipe to pray. The mysterious person who presented the Pipe said that prayers must be answered. We have been using the Pipe ever since. There cannot be a ceremony without the Pipe. There is no other way. The Pipe is a power which was given to us and we must use it according to the instructions.
The Pipe was used in many of the negotiations between the United States government representatives and the Sioux Chiefs. But the white man doesn't believe in the Pipe and broke every treaty that was made with Indian Nations-371 of them. The Indian never broke a single treaty.
Songs and dances play an important role in the life of the people. Creation, no matter what it is, is anything that has life. The universe is the tabernacle of the Great Spirit and we must study it. We must study the moon, the stars, everything that contains our world. We must understand, we must respect. It took the Sioux thirty thousand years to observe those laws of nature. The white man has a long way to go.
All people have the same relationship with the land. Mother Earth produces sustenance to all human life and animal life. Everything we get from the Earth, we must pray to the Great Spirit that made it possible for us. Even our herbs that we use for medicine we don’t take without due consideration of whoever created the Earth, the power that is on the face of the Earth. White people look upon the land differently.
We are sorry that the white man does not think about the destruction of Mother Earth. Recently they have started strip mining on some of the most beautiful country in the world, in Montana. The Cheyenne are crying about it because they would rather keep it as it is because it is their religion. They do not want to hurt Mother Earth.
I do not hate white people. I feel sorry for them. We only take what we need from the Earth. Same way with the buffalo. They just killed what was needed. They don't destroy. We believe the Great Spirit has provided for all the people and we don't sell the things. We would give something away.
I was brought up in a period of time when some of the Chiefs were still living back in 1908—the ones who signed the 1868 Treaty. I was old enough to understand. I heard Red Cloud and other chiefs talk. I was always an attentive listener and they say, all of them, has been handed down. That is the law of nature, because you cannot lie. You have to tell the truth, and remember. They advocated peace among the people. They lived by that law because the world is a peaceful place to life in. They knew thatthe Great Spirit wanted everybody to live in peace in creation. They did not know what violence was until it was inflicted on them. Then they had to fight for their lives.
I remember the rations the United States government sent. Those rations were not fit for human consumption. They had white bacon which turned yellow, and kept the warehouses for I don't know how long. The rice and beans had mice droppings in them. I saw it.
The Treaty of 1868 was signed in good faith by our chiefs and by General Sanborn and Henderson, two civilians and five generals. They drew up the 1858 Treaty and it was signed. Eight months later, the same people who drew up the Treaty drew up a resolution and presented it to the President that there would be no more treaties and that the Indian department should be turned over to the War Department to use stronger methods against Indians, to put us in concentration camps.
That is where we are. Those concentration camps are still in existence.
Then they tried to make them sign new agreements. They threatened to take rations away, to exterminate the people. They said, “We will rub you off the face of the earth and we will take you to the south to the hot country.” Our Chief said to go ahead and kill us for we won't be worse off, and they never signed. Three-fourths majority were to sign any changes.
We had no written language. We used the sign language when we talked to the other tribes. From 1860 we had some Indian missionaries, religious people. When the white man religion was introduced, many of the Indians became ministers in the Episcopal Church, the Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church. I have a father and two uncles who are ordained Christian ministers. I went to a seminary myself, but I did not become a minister.
Between 1851 and 1877, the United States made eight peace treaties, and eight war plans abrogating the treaty just made. The ones who drew up the Treaty of 1868 never meant to keep it, because eight months later here are the same ones that made the changes that the Indians will be in a concentration camp. All those treaties were made by the white man. He drew them up, approached us.
We ceded nearly two billion acres to the United States and the government said they would give back half, and also pay. But we never gave up the Black Hills that is sacred ground and we have many people buried in the Black Hills. The whole area is a religious law of nature. It cannot be sold.
The 1868 Treaty is one important thing in Sioux life. What the white people brought was problems, and the people discuss that. They said they didn't understand the white people and they didn't understand what manner of men these white people are that make promises and then change them. They don't believe in that.
The interpreters for the treaties were not very good in making interpretations. For instance, some things were never recorded in these treaties but have been handed down orally. The Union Pacific Railroad was to belong to Indian people where it ran through Indian country. That meant, too, that they would have free passage. This was never recorded. Also, the mineral rights were only ceded for two feet of the surface. Wild game was never settled. Damages for the slaughter of buffalo, twenty or thirty million, was never taken into consideration. Many of the things in the Treaty do not explain all that happened to Indian people. That is what we are trying to correct.
The Sioux Nation is a sovereign Nation longer than the white people's government. We have thirty-one leaders, or headmen. The Chief's job is different from the President of the United States because every Indian thinks he is responsible for the actions of the Chief. The Chief is closely watched. If he makes a mistake he is out. There is no trial. He is out and that is all. They do not have to go through court spending thousands of dollars. Chief Fools Crow has to be acknowledged because he is the only senior Chief we have among the Oglala Sioux. In form the United States Government is established under the Indian way of governments—chiefs, subchiefs, and head men. All of these have been copied from the Indian.
When the United States Government wanted to exercise sovereignty, the Indian people who were already sovereign Nations, gave permission to the United States so they could negotiate with Indian people. We recognized their sovereignty by negotiating with them. None of those agreements signed after 1868 are recognized because the three-fourths of the 1868 Treaty was never used. The Indians say they are illegal.
The 1868 Treaty clearly states that law breakers will be handled either by the United States government or the Sioux government. We have one case where Two Sticks killed some white ranchers and the Chief arrested Two Sticks and presented him to the proper United States authority and they hanged him.
We have never known the white man to keep peace. There are a lot of white people who killed Indians that were never apprehended or even brought to trial. We kept our Treaty but the United States never did.
The United States promised to give half of the original land base back to the Sioux Nation. Now recently the United States offered the Sioux 105 million dollars. Where did they get that money?
The government of the United States is a foreign government as far as the Sioux are concerned. Indian people are supporting that government with our resources, our land, gold, minerals, everything in this country.
They just took the Black Hills. They got 408 people to sign it over, when it legally, by the Treaty, had to be 7,800 people sign.
Always the United States government representatives say that the 1868 Treaty is either void or not in force. I think we can do the same thing. We never broke a treaty but I think we could void all of our treaties legally. It would be the same thing because we are sovereign nations. We made the Treaty with the United States Government as a nation. We want to get the land back.
They have an organization which they call a "tribal council." The Bureau of Indian Affairs drew up the constitution and by-laws of this organization with the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934. This was the introduction of home rule. Mostly younger people are on it. The traditional people still hang on to their Treaty. They are a sovereign Nation. We have our own government. We have no written laws. The law of nature is ourlaw. We have Chiefs-principal Chiefs and Chiefs. And we have Sub-Chiefs, Headmen, Warriors. We have different societies, Fox Society, White Horse Society, Badger Society, and others.
We had wars with other tribes under the influence of the United States. They furnished guns. They wanted certain territory and they got other tribes to war against the Sioux Nation, like the Pawnee. With a little concession of new guns and power there was war. That was for territory. The United States wanted certain land. They want Indians to fight each other and get rid of the people who occupied certain territory.
I will tell you an incident that happened between the Pawnees and the Sioux when my grandfather was wounded. They used to get along with the Pawnees. They used to trade and give. Before guns, they used tomahawks and bow and arrow. They used to have sham battle, friendly .battle when they met. Once my grandfather with thirty-eight others went on a hunting trip and there were some Pawnees who came over the hill. They were warriors. The Sioux recognized them, so they didn't do anything. When the Pawnee came close they suddenly started shooting at the Sioux and killed all but three. My grandfather was wounded, but managed to get back to his people.
The Sioux asked the Pawnee for an apology, but they did not come. So the Sioux went against them. This was a result of what the United States did to influence the Pawnee. Probably they gave them money or tobacco to fight the Sioux. My grandfather used to tell me that.
The United States had their own scouts going to Indian countries. Some of them married Indian women, and they reported back to their own government what was possible. That was the trouble we had in the beginning. They used gifts inducing some tribe to fight another for certain territories. The United States wanted the land and wanted to get rid of the occupants.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs has more influence in the operation of the tribal council. They are operating under a policy that is against the traditional people.
(End of statement)
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This is not a Peace Pipe: The Continued Struggle for Lakota Liberation.
Review of Great Sioux Nation, by Nick Estes
The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America, An Oral History of the Sioux Nation and Its Struggle for Sovereignty, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
The re-publication of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s classic 1977 The Great Sioux Nation upholds it reputation as an oral history and testament of the Sioux Nation’s struggle for liberation 36 years later. The archetypal historical narrative of the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) 72-day siege of the Wounded Knee Massacre site in 1973 reads like a script that ends with the AIM and the defiant Indians ultimately succumbing to the vanquishing forces of the U.S. government. This is not that story.
Dunbar-Ortiz’s The Great Sioux Nation picks up following the aftermath of the Wounded Knee siege during a thirteen-day December 1974 hearing in a federal courtroom in Lincoln, Nebraska. What presiding Federal Judge Warren Urbom expected was a hearing for 65 defendants accused of various criminal acts allegedly committed during the Wounded Knee siege. What the Judge got, instead, was a “Sioux Treaty Hearing” with traditional Lakota leaders filling the jury box, sitting in judgment of the United States.
The Great Sioux Nation is a compilation of the edited 3000 pages of court proceedings, which includes 49 witness testimonies from traditional Natives, scholars, lawyers, and activists. Amidst the testimonies witnesses were allowed to swear on the Sacred Pipe rather than the Bible. AIM spiritual leader Leonard Crow Dog summarized the importance of this act: “We call it the Sacred Pipe first of all... But the white man called it the peace pipe. And then he couldn’t live by what he said was the peace pipe.” (36)
The new edition of The Great Sioux Nation begins with a new foreword by Philip Deloria, author of two important manuscripts on Native history Playing Indian (1999) and Indians in Unexpected Places (2006). It only seems right Philip Deloria, the son of the late Native scholar and activist Vine Deloria, Jr. (2005), prefaces a book that continues the vision his father helped create and lay the foundation for twentieth century Indigenous struggles for sovereignty and liberation.
The 2013 re-publication also features an Author’s Note by Dunbar-Ortiz, reflecting on where the book and her role, as a lifelong and well-respected, Indigenous activist-scholar has taken her over the last 36 years from the courtroom in Lincoln, Nebraska, to the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “Immediately after the 1974 hearing I was swept away into the unchartered territory of forging an international Indigenous movement.” (v)
The rest of the book is split into seven topical parts that are organized around several important historical themes: the Wounded Knee Massacre, the Wounded Knee siege, the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, the Lakota oral tradition, and the violence colonialism and dispossession have wrought on the Lakota and Native Nations of North America.
The Great Sioux Nation concludes with Judge Urbom’s decision that his court has no power to uphold the sovereignty of the Sioux Nation and the defendants are not exempt from criminal jurisdiction under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. This decision, however, is circumvented in the final section aptly titled “It Does Not End Here.” This section elucidates the international strategy adopted as the next logical step for liberation for the Lakota Nation.
Six months prior to the court proceedings at Lincoln the first International Indian Treaty Council met at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. This Treaty Council drafted the “Declaration of Continuing Independence” that outlined the international direction the Lakota and Indigenous peoples of North America set out. What came of this original 1974 meeting of the International Indian Treaty Council was a three-decade struggle that involved hundreds of Indigenous nations and peoples from across the globe and resulted in the 2007 United Nations’ “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”
This struggle for international recognition is also the culmination of over 500 years of struggle and resistance by Indigenous peoples of the Americas. For the Lakota Nation, this struggle is recounted in the oral testimony recorded in that Nebraska courtroom, bearing witness to how the Lakota encapsulate all notions of sovereignty and struggles for liberation as materially and spiritually tied to land. The Great Sioux Nation centers land and the 1868 Treaty as the basis for demonstrating the struggle for liberation as materially congenital to not only the Lakota Nation’s subjugation, but also to the Lakota Nation’s liberation.
Gladys Bissonette explained the struggle, “Anything of violence on our part has been provoked by the United States” for not living up to the 1868 Treaty. Furthermore, Bissonette stated, “We are showing the people of the world that justice must be done.” (176)
The re-publication of Dunbar-Ortiz’s The Great Sioux Nation arrives at the heels of the 40th anniversary of the Wounded Knee siege, now recognized as “Lakota Liberation Day” by the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Among the celebrants at Wounded Knee this year were tribal council members wearing AIM t-shirts, Wounded Knee veterans, AIM members from across the continent, families and allies of AIM, and, more importantly, young Lakota patriots wearing AIM badges and flying the flags of liberation “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse”—as the saying goes.
For this younger generation of Lakota patriots immersed in the continued struggle for liberation (myself included), The Great Sioux Nation is more important today than it was in 1977 for its courage and brevity in telling the Lakota’s historical struggle. It is the testimony to the oath the witnesses took on the Sacred Pipe in 1974 that our struggle is intrinsically tied to the liberation of our homelands and an international Indigenous liberation movement.
Dunbar-Ortiz’s lifelong commitment to these struggles is tantamount to the consequence of the testimonies contained in The Great Sioux Nation. Hecutu Welo!