With more than 500 treaties already broken, by
More than 500 treaties have been made between the government and Indian tribes and all were broken, nulllified or amended. Nothing’s changed. The mere fact that the Keystone XL oil pipeline has even been considered is a violation of law and shouldn’t have seen blueprints, let alone having this North American monster voted on by the Senate and House of Representatives.
The unmitigated arrogance of it all! U.S. Congressmen and U.S. Senators had no right to even vote on the Keystone XL. A treaty is a law, and breaking a treaty, or attempting to break a treaty, is a criminal act. Democratic U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu is no better than the vilest of all miscreant reprobates – for throwing her version of the bill before her Senate peers. To think that a Democrat would be behind this thing is appalling to me. I’ve always believed the Democratic Party was the “Party of the People” and the political party that looks out for of the interests of the working class, the poor, even the underdog. Certainly, Democratic Senators would at least be sensitive to treaties the government has in place with American Indians. Well, it’s definitely not the case with U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu.Political analysts have concluded that Landrieu’s stake in politicking for the Keystone XL was entirely self-serving. Facing Republican Congressman Bill Cassidy, who authored the bill for the U.S. House (which passed the bill Friday, Nov. 14), Landrieu’s main intent in all this was to save her seat in a Dec. 6 runoff reelection in Louisiana, Vying again for her fourth term in a matter of days, Sen. Landrieu’s Senate bill would have been a crowd pleaser in a state where energy is the leading industry.
In the Nov. 4 general election, Landrieu got only 14 percent of the white vote and she needs at least 30 percent of this demographic to win Dec. 6’s runoff. On Nov. 4, the vote was too close to call, necessitating another election, with Landrieu getting 42 percent and Cassidy getting 41 percent. Tea Party candidate Rob Maness (R), got just under 14 percent and his support is expected to sway to Cassidy in the runoff election.
Called “an act of war” by the president of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota, the Keystone XL proposal is a terrible thing. The Republican-led House is a room filled with criminals; and if the standard elementary definition of a “criminal” is defined as anyone who breaks a law – and since treaties are laws – I have no problem calling these “good and great” law breakers criminals.
“The House has now signed our death warrants and the death warrants of our children and grandchildren. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe will not allow this pipeline through our lands,” Cyril Scott, president of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota, is attributed to have said the day after the House voted in favor of the Keystone XL.
The Keystone XL is designed to carry the dirtiest crude oil ever produced, and if it is implemented eventually, this monstrosity will cut a swath through Rosebud Sioux reservation lands, along with other tribal Indian reservation territories as it follows its path from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Once there, the crude will most likely be shipped overseas. According to Cyril Scott, his tribe – the Sicangu Lakota Oyate – would have closed reservation borders for the construction of this pipeline, if the Senate passed the measure Tuesday, Nov. 18.
Charles and David Koch, according to Jared Gilmour in an article in the Huffington Post, could make as much as $100 billion from the Keystone XL (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…). It has been discovered that the Koch Brothers own as much as two million acres of land in Alberta, Canada, where the tar sands oil is being harvested to create the crude that is to be shipped to the Gulf of Mexico via the Keystone XL.
Canada’s primary oilsands area encompasses around 140,000 square kilometers of Alberta, an area just a little smaller than Florida. More than 60 percent of this area has been leased for extraction. (http://www.pembina.org/…)
Most of the tar sands are found under boreal forest, including 37 percent that is part of Alberta’s Boreal Forest Natural Region. This natural region includes internationally significant wilderness areas like the Peace-Athabasca Delta. Destroying the boreal forest for oilsands extraction releases huge amounts of GHG emissions into the atmosphere. In a losing war to fight a little battle to thwart off increasing climate change, it’s essential that the Alberta boreal forest not be decimated simply for the interests of a handful of very greedy and wealthy people.
Meantime, to reiterate, breaking treaties means breaking the law. According to Cyril Scott, the construction of the Keystone XL would have been in direct violation of both the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties. But do the U.S. House’s Republican majority and their moderate Democrat counterparts care? No, of course they don’t care. All that concerns them is the interest of Big Oil & Gas, which have lined the campaign contributions of many of these weasels and charlatans. It’s the same-old, same-old song of “Treaties were meant to be broken.”
Still controlled by Democrats, the U.S. Senate defeated the Keystone XL with a 59-41 vote Tuesday, and the bill only needed one more vote to squeak through for passage. Although President Barack Obama was expected to veto the bill, even placing such paper in front of the President would have been a criminal act of the vilest form.
This entire political scenario is déjà vu of another autumn of harrowing truth – 1972’s initiative the Trail of Broken Treaties. Sponsored by Aim (the American Indian Movement), (Canada’s) National Indian Brotherhood, the Native American Rights Fund, the National Indian Youth Council, the National American Indian Council, the National Council on Indian Work, the National Indian Leadership Trail and the American Indian Committee on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, the crux of the Trail of Broken Treaties was a 21-point complaint that was drafted to give credence and sovereignty to the treaties held between the U.S. Government and America’s Indian tribes.
A caravan of cars and vans drove from the West Coast to Washington, D.C., in early November, 1972 – just a week before the Presidential election – and it resulted in the Nixon Administration’s refusal to meet with Trail of Broken Treaties’ organizers. So the caravan proceeded to take over the Bureau of Indian Affairs building and these brave protesters initiated a stand-off. Finally, the federal government agreed to make concessions with the activist group. Included in the concession deal was the government’s vow to negotiate with Indian tribes concerning the treaties made.
America’s Indians are hardly surprised by these government lawbreakers. It’s just the latest of a long litany of broken treaties committed by Wasi’chu, which in the Lakota language is a term used for non-Indians, and its meaning translates to “The one who takes the best meat for himself.”
Yes, the vote by the U.S. Congress was an example of this age-old Indian term for hostile invaders who came to Turtle Island in 1492 and took over everything. Genocide against Indians was Wasi’chu’s favorite means of having the ends justify the means.
Nothing’s changed since then, actually. The Senate vote Tuesday was solely based on greed and self-interest by Self-Serve-a-tive politicians who have been lambasted continually as being mere pawns for Big Oil & Gas, along with the interests of the egregious Koch Brothers.
The South Dakota Black Hills contains some of the most antediluvian mountains in the world, encompassing over 5,000 acres. And the Black Hills have been held sacred by the Lakota people since antiquity. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty designated the sovereignty of the Lakota people and prohibited outside settlers to ever occupy their lands. All this changed, though, in 1874 when gold was found in the Black Hills and in other areas held sovereign by the Lakota and non-Indian miners swarmed the Black Hills. Consequently, the federal government reneged on the Fort Laramie Treaties and took total control of the Black Hills again, only a decade after signing the second treaty.The 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, by the way, clearly defined boundaries owned by the Lakota people and if the land boundaries of this treaty were actually upheld by the federal government, a very large Indian state about twice the size of Oklahoma would now be situated somewhere in the upper Midwest, probably between Minnesota and Montana. But Wasi’chu had other plans and in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln allowed for a flood of white settlers into Native lands by signing the Homestead Act. In retaliation, there was an Indian uprising in 1863 by the Santee Sioux tribe in Minnesota which resulted in the largest mass-hanging in U.S. history wherein 38 Sioux men were hanged by order of President Abraham Lincoln. Ironically, the mass-execution came only two days after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Treaties the federal government held with the Sioux continued being ignored with the beginning of the Trans-Continental Railroad. Around 1866, a path was cut through the Lakota nation to make for a shortcut for this railroad. Chief Red Cloud led Indian men from three tribes to defeat the U.S. Army in several battles and the federal government backed off its aggression, or at least, on the surface, seemed to succumb to the force applied by Red Cloud and his warriors. So in 1868, the second Fort Laramie Treaty was signed, guaranteeing the sovereignty of the Lakota and their ownership of the Black Hills. This later Fort Laramie agreement even gave Indians hunting rights in surrounding states. Only a year later, though, in 1869, the Trans-Continental Railroad was completed and this new mode of transportation began carrying large numbers of hunters to Lakota sovereign lands. These hunters began their extermination of bison, a major food, clothing and shelter source of Indians. There was a nefarious intent behind the mass hunting of buffalo – Wasi’chu knew the northern Indian tribes would starve and freeze to death if they couldn’t harvest these beasts. Buffalo were killed for the sake of killing and their bodies were left on the open plains. These great white hunters wanted to see the genocide of Native Americans, it has been said by Indian leaders and historians.
In 1871, the Indian Appropriations Act made all Indians “wards of the U.S. government” and even forbid western Indians to leave their reservations, making all Indians POWs. Yet more bullying, more hegemony and apartheid. The 1887 Dawes Act ended communal ownership of reservations. Reservations were cut up into parcels and distributed to individual Indians and their families. This redistribution of land saw Indian tribes losing millions of acres of land to the federal government. More of a big sell-off. More criminal debauchery and treachery. More of “He who takes the best meat” helping himself to the choicest and best cuts of land stolen from aboriginal people.Things like the “Sell or Starve” process are not taught in the public schools. The “Sell or Starve” initiative was yet another way the government got around the Fort Laramie treaties. At a large meeting of government leaders and Lakota chiefs and their minions, 10 percent of the Lakota adult men signed a paper allowing for yet another vast sign-away of Lakota lands. According to the Fort Laramie treaties, three-quarters of all Sioux tribal members had to be in agreement if any such amendment or breach to the Fort Laramie treaties were put into effect.
In 1874, Gen. George Custer of the U.S. Army’s 7th Calvary reported to Washington officials that gold was in the Black Hills and surrounding areas that the Lakota people owned. And again, a massive influx of white settlers ensued. Custer recommended to government leaders that the U.S. government should end all treaties with the Lakota “as soon as possible.” On July 26, 1876, Custer’s 7th Calvary was annihilated at the Battle of Little Big Horn. In 1877, the great Lakota Chief Crazy Horse surrendered at Fort Robinson and was killed while taken into custody.
The Wounded Knee Massacre came Dec. 28, 1890 on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation near Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. The Army’s 7th Calvary slaughtered 300 unarmed Lakota men, women and children. At least 20 cavalrymen were awarded Medals of Honor for their butchery of these defenseless Indians.
There are so many examples of Wasi’chu’s inhumanity and barbarianism towards Indians that they cannot be documented in an online magazine article. It has taken not a tome, but an entire collection of many tomes, to encapsulate all the massacres. Although it’s not taught in schools, Wasi’chu’s gift of smallpox-infested blankets as “gifts” to Indian mothers is being played in modern alternative songs over the airwaves. The Trail of Tears, initiated by the great Indian killer Andrew Jackson, was a forced death march of southern Indian tribes to the western Midwest. Before the Indian Removal Act of 1830, nearly 125,000 Indians lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida. Indians were rounded up and gunpoint and forced to leave these southern states. It’s estimated that at least one of four Cherokees died during this parade of Uncle Sam’s hegemony and apartheid. But being an egalitarian supplier of doom, gloom and death, Indian removal wasn’t limited to the South, but also was quite prevalent in the North. In Illinois and Wisconsin, for example, the Black Hawk War in 1832 opened millions of acres of land formerly owned and occupied by Indians to white settlement. Before it was stolen, this land belonged to the Sauk, Fox, and other Indian nations.
And thousands upon thousands of incidents repeated themselves in regard to Wasi’chu’s inhumanity to First Nations residents, like n January, 1869, when General Sheridan held a conference with 50 Indian chiefs at Fort Cobb territory (which later beame part of Oklahoma). Sheridan, who had been promoted to a Union officer in the Civil War, was in charge of the Deptartment of the Missouri. One of his duties was to oversee the department’s Indian territory. In other words, he policed the tribes and made sure they did not bother white settlers. When a Comanche chief, Toch-a-way, was introduced to Sheridan at the conference, Toch-a-way said, “Me Toch-a-way, me good Indian.” Sheridan reportedly smirked and replied, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Later on, the remark became “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Could you imagine a government dignitary saying something like this today? It would be all over the major news outlets and such a flagrant racist remark would inevitably lead to the official’s immediate termination. I think it would, anyhow, but with Indians, who knows?
Even in recent history, going back only to the late-1960s and even beyond, American Indian boarding schools in the USA, along with non-reservation boarding schools and Canadian Indian residential schools were death camps for little Indian children. Operated and run by powerful and affluent “Christian” groups, Indian children were sometimes even killed in front of their peers to show that it is important to mind the dictates of those who ran these horrific demonic institutions. Indian children, taken from their homes, had no voice against the powerful government and religious entities that controlled everything in their worlds inside the walls of these prisons. Children suffering from contagious tuberculosis and smallpox were placed in the same classrooms with healthy children. Now middle-aged and elderly, the living survivors of these horrible places speak of the horrors: youth being put in tubs with live snakes, sometimes even hanged, and teachers kicking students with such impact that blunt-force trauma was the ultimate fatal result. For a horrendous, stark, eye-opening documentary of numerous testimonials of Canadian Indians who suffered inside residential schools, and a defrocked United Church minister’s fight against this genocide, watch this YouTube video:
Today, Indian activists are fighting the stigmas and racism associated with pofessional, college, and high school teams and those that manage and own these teams, along with their fans, that have Indian mascots and team names. The most glaring example and the biggest fight involves the Washington Re%s$ins, but the Cleveland Indians, with their silly, stupid, smiling red face of “Chief Wahoo” and his ridiculous little feather sticking up, hardly is a tribute to the ethnic pride Indians feel for their race and culture. A lesser-known, but perhaps an even more important war, is being waged in keeping Indian children with their families and in their communities, since such an alarming number of Indian babies are being put up for adoption, or put in foster homes or even more sinister types of institutions. Bold initiatives like the Lakota Peoples Law Project are fighting to keep these children where they belong – with their loved ones – since the government’s current fix is nothing less than a return to the residential school nightmare. It is a stark realization that has Indian leaders outraged. These poor kids are oftentimes placed with the Department of Corrections or in mental institutions in places like South Dakota. Meantime, in Canada, the harrowing fact that more than 1,000 Indian girls and women have been murdered or are missing during the course of the past few decades should have the government and law enforcement making these atrocities top priority, but no – the Prime Minister has underplayed this and has even washed his hands of this big problem, and there is even evidence that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are responsible for an alarming number of these horrors http://www.opednews.com/…. And of course, there is the sad case of Leonard Peltier, one of the originators of the American Indian Movement, who is incarcerated in a federal prison, and has been since the mid-70s. Most Indians consider him a political prisoner and want President Barack Obama to give him a pardon and to set Peltier free. Most Indians see Peliter as a good man, an innocent man, who was sent to prison by a kangaroo court. He was convicted in 1977 of the murder of two F.B.I. agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota for an incident dating back to 1975. The F.B.I. agents’ presence on the reservation is nebulous and suspect. The trial was so controversial that Amnesty International deemed in an “unfair trial” in their 2010 annual report. Mr. Peltier, being one of Aim’s originators and a public figure who is revered by Indians, has always been is a political and spiritual leader, despite the fact that he is in prison.
We like to think, as Americans and Canadians, that we’re humane and we have never been totalitarian or inhumane to any race, ethnicity or group of our own. Did you know that when Adolf Hitler was planning mass extermination of Jews and other peoples that he used as his primary study guide Uncle Sam’s extermination of its First Residents?
“How many times must the white man break his word?” Crazy Horse is quoted as telling an Army major. “How short are your memories that you can again accept their promises? Has Olm Man Afraid forgotten the peace talks on the Shell River? Has Sitting Bull forgotten the peace talks at Blue Water? Has Dull Knife forgotten the peace talks at Sand Creek? And Red Cloud, has he forgotten our people who came to this fort before us, who have grown sick and old before their time? No, our nation will not be divided as it was at Shell River, at Blue Water, and at Sand Creek.” Then the major said the Commissioner wanted the fighting stopped and Crazy Horse said, “He’s put his name to the paper too many times before.”
And now the Koch Brothers and the political prostitutes that they have bought with their vast money supplies are working on another angle. The latest sell-off is the Keystone XL pipeline, a 1,711-mile-long, yard-wide environmental hazard leading from Alberta’s boreal forests – which have been decimated into lunar-like tar sands through the efforts of Conservative Party Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper – to refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. The oil would not even be used for domestic supply for the U.S.A. or Canada, it would most likely be exported to Europe, Latin America and China. But incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R – Ky) has pledged to hold another vote to approve the Keystone XL in January. And with eight more Republican votes in the incoming Senate roster, it will surely pass the next go-around.
The entire Keystone XL proposal is built on lies. The treachery and deceit of these federal leaders has again gone back on the treaties made long ago with the Sioux. Prime Minister Harper’s decimation of the Canadian rain forest to uncover the tar sands should see this tyrant taken out of power completely. What Harper has done to the pristine natural order of large tracts of Canadian virgin forest is criminal. And for what? To harvest the dirtiest crude oil ever? And for exporting to foreign countries, many of which do not even have environmental regulations in place? If construction of the Keystone XL is ratified by the U.S. Senate early next year, we can only hope that President Obama, one of the only national leaders who is not totally consumed by greed and treachery, vetoes this thing. If he does, he’ll be doing a great favor to Mother Earth and a disservice to a handful of very wealthy, draconian monsters who are running the world these days. And as for Canadian tyrant Harper, Queen Elizabeth should pull rank on this vampire and heave him out of office. Somehow, someway, surely the Crown has some kind of authority for such an act towards humankind’s future. Harper belongs in prison, or at least, a hospital for the criminally insane, for his destruction of the boreal forest alone.
The Keystone XL pipeline is a madman’s pipe dream that should have never come this far. It’s already created a decimation of the natural order, it has gone directly against treaties the U.S. and Canadian governments hold with Indian tribes, and it will inevitably lead to an escalation of global warming, with the burning of the dirtiest crude oil ever harvested
