By Lynda V. Mapes
For the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, (click here) the battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline recalls a bitter history the tribe does not want repeated.
“We want to protect our land, and we want to protect our water,” said Dave Archambault II, tribal chairman. “Our concerns and interests don’t matter and this is how we have been treated for over 150 years.”
Once roaming the Great Plains, living in teepees and hunting buffalo, the great Sioux leaders such as Sitting Bull, Red Cloud and Crazy Horse are household names for many. Their bloodiest moments are, too: Wounded Knee. Custer’s Last Stand.
But the history of the Sioux people and the United States is also one all too familiar: of broken promises, and a relentless taking away of lands for white settlement, gold mining and development. Those lands were promised to be reserved for the Indians’ sole use forever, in peace treaties that were supposed to be the highest law of the land....
There is also United Nations support for the return of lands to the Native Americans of the USA. Breaking promises within treaties is a civil rights violation.
May 4, 2012
By Chris McGreal
A United Nations investigator (click here) probing discrimination against Native Americans has called on the US government to return some of the land stolen from Indian tribes as a step toward combatting continuing and systemic racial discrimination.
James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, said no member of the US Congress would meet him as he investigated the part played by the government in the considerable difficulties faced by Indian tribes.
Anaya said that in nearly two weeks of visiting Indian reservations, indigenous communities in Alaska and Hawaii, and Native Americans now living in cities, he encountered people who suffered a history of dispossession of their lands and resources, the breakdown of their societies and "numerous instances of outright brutality, all grounded on racial discrimination".
"It's a racial discrimination that they feel is both systemic and also specific instances of ongoing discrimination that is felt at the individual level," he said.
Anaya said racism extended from the broad relationship between federal or state governments and tribes down to local issues such as education....
