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<h1 id="reader-title">The Great Sioux Nation and the Resistance
to Colonial Land Grabbing</h1>
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<p>By <a title="Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural
Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and
part-Indian mother. She has been active in the
international Indigenous movement for more than four
decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to
national and international social justice issues.
After receiving her PhD in history at the University
of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly
established Native American Studies Program at
California State University, Hayward, and helped found
the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies.
Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the
fundamental document at the first international
conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held
at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva.
Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other
books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of
Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco.
Follow her on Twitter at @rdunbaro."
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html">Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz September 12, 2016<br>
</a></p>
<p><em>Members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe have <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.democracynow.org/2016/8/18/stopping_the_snake_indigenous_protesters_shut">been
protesting the construction of the Dakota Access
pipeline</a> since April. Slated to direct crude oil
from North Dakota to Illinois, <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/dapl-dakota-sitting-rock-sioux/499178/">the
multibillion-dollar project threatens</a> to
contaminate the Missouri River and likely destroy
Native burial sites and sacred places. The protesters
have received support and solidarity from
representatives of other Indigenous nations from all
over North America, Alaska, Hawaii, and the Andes,
along with climate activists and the <a
target="_blank"
href="http://blacklivesmatter.com/solidarity-with-standing-rock/">Black
Lives Matter movement</a>.</em></p>
<p><em>The history of the Sioux peoples’ fight for their
homeland runs deep. To understand the background of
the protest, we turn to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s </em><a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-the-United-States-P1164.aspx">An
Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States</a><em>.
In this excerpt, Dunbar-Ortiz unpacks the origin of
the nineteenth-century treaties and colonial
land-grabbing that have repeatedly denied the Sioux
the right to their land.</em></p>
<p>***</p>
<p>The first international relationship between the Sioux
Nation and the US government was established in 1805<a
name="_ednref1"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_edn1">[i]</a>
with a treaty of peace and friendship two years after
the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory,
which included the Sioux Nation among many other
Indigenous nations. Other such treaties followed in 1815
and 1825. These peace treaties had no immediate effect
on Sioux political autonomy or territory. By 1834,
competition in the fur trade, with the market dominated
by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, led the Oglala Sioux
to move away from the Upper Missouri to the Upper Platte
near Fort Laramie. By 1846, seven thousand Sioux had
moved south. Thomas Fitzpatrick, the Indian agent in
1846, recommended that the United States purchase land
to establish a fort, which became Fort Laramie. “My
opinion,” Fitzpatrick wrote, “is that a post at, or in
the vicinity of Laramie is much wanted, it would be
nearly in the center of the buffalo range, where all the
formidable Indian tribes are fast approaching, and near
where there will eventually be a struggle for the
ascendancy [in the fur trade].”<a name="_ednref2"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_edn2">[ii]</a>
Fitzpatrick believed that a garrison of at least three
hundred soldiers would be necessary to keep the Indians
under control.</p>
<p>Although the Sioux and the United States redefined
their relationship in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851,
this was followed by a decade of war between the two
parties, ending with the Peace Treaty of Fort Laramie in
1868. Both of these treaties, though not reducing Sioux
political sovereignty ceded large parts of Sioux
territory by establishing mutually recognized
boundaries, and the Sioux granted concessions to the
United States that gave legal color to the Sioux’s
increasing economic dependency on the United States and
its economy. During the half century before the 1851
treaty, the Sioux had been gradually enveloped in the
fur trade and had become dependent on horses and
European-manufactured guns, ammunition, iron cookware,
tools, textiles, and other items of trade that replaced
their traditional crafts. On the plains the Sioux
gradually abandoned farming and turned entirely to bison
hunting for their subsistence and for trade. This
increased dependency on the buffalo in turn brought
deeper dependency on guns and ammunition that had to be
purchased with more hides, creating the vicious circle
that characterized modern colonialism. With the balance
of power tipped by mid-century, US traders and the
military exerted pressure on the Sioux for land cessions
and rights of way as the buffalo population decreased.
The hardships for the Sioux caused by constant attacks
on their villages, forced movement, and resultant
disease and starvation took a toll on their strength to
resist domination. They entered into the 1868 treaty
with the United States on strong terms from a guerrilla
fighting force through the 1880s, never defeated by the
US army—but their dependency on buffalo and on trade
allowed for escalated federal control when buffalo were
purposely exterminated by the army between 1870 and
1876. After that the Sioux were fighting for survival.</p>
<p>Economic dependency on buffalo and trade was replaced
with survival dependency on the US government for
rations and commodities guaranteed in the 1868 treaty.
The agreement stipulated that “no treaty for the cession
of any portion or part of the reservation herein
described which may be held in common shall be of any
validation or force against the said Indians, unless
executed and signed by at least three fourths of all the
adult male Indians.” Nevertheless, in 1876, with no such
validation, and with the discovery of gold by Custer’s
Seventh Cavalry, the US government seized the Black
Hills—Paha Sapa—a large, resource-rich portion of the
treaty-guaranteed Sioux territory, the center of the
great Sioux Nation, a religious shrine and sanctuary.
When the Sioux surrendered after the wars of 1876–77,
they lost not only the Black Hills but also the Powder
River country. The next US move was to change the
western boundary of the Sioux Nation, whose territory,
though atrophied from its original, was a contiguous
block. By 1877, after the army drove the Sioux out of
Nebraska, all that was left was a block between the 103<sup>rd</sup>
meridian and the Missouri, thirty-five thousand square
miles of land the United States had designated as Dakota
Territory (the next step toward statehood, in this case
the states of North and South Dakota). The first of
several waves of northern European immigrants now poured
into eastern Dakota Terri- tory, pressing against the
Missouri River boundary of the Sioux. At the
Anglo-American settlement of Bismarck on the Missouri,
the westward-pushing Northern Pacific Railroad was
blocked by the reservation. Settlers bound for Montana
and the Pacific Northwest called for trails to be blazed
and defended across the reservation. Promoters who
wanted cheap land to sell at high prices to immigrants
schemed to break up the reservation. Except for the
Sioux units that continued to fight, the Sioux people
were unarmed, had no horses, and were unable even to
feed and clothe themselves, dependent upon government
rations.</p>
<p>Next came allotment. Before the Dawes Act was even
implemented, a government commission arrived in Sioux
territory from Washington, DC, in 1888 with a proposal
to reduce the Sioux Nation to six small reservations, a
scheme that would leave nine million acres open for
Euro-American settlement. The commission found it
impossible to obtain signatures of the required
three-fourths of the nation as required under the 1868
treaty, and so returned to Washington with a
recommendation that the government ignore the treaty and
take the land without Sioux consent. The only means to
accomplish that goal was legislation, Congress having
relieved the government of the obligation to negotiate a
treaty. Congress commissioned General George Crook to
head a delegation to try again, this time with an offer
of $1.50 per acre. In a series of manipulations and
dealings with leaders whose people were now starving,
the commission garnered the needed signatures. The great
Sioux Nation was broken into small islands soon
surrounded on all sides by European immigrants, with
much of the reservation land a checkerboard with
settlers on allotments or leased land.<a name="_ednref3"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_edn3">[iii]</a>
Creating these isolated reservations broke the
historical relationships between clans and communities
of the Sioux Nation and opened areas where Europeans
settled. It also allowed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to
exercise tighter control, buttressed by the bureau’s
boarding school system. The Sun Dance, the annual
ceremony that had brought Sioux together and reinforced
national unity, was outlawed, along with other religious
ceremonies. Despite the Sioux people’s weak position
under late-nineteenth-century colonial domination, they
managed to begin building a modest cattle-ranching
business to replace their former bison-hunting economy.
In 1903, the US Supreme Court ruled, in <em>Lone Wolf
v. Hitchcock</em>, that a March 3, 1871,
appropriations rider was constitutional and that
Congress had “plenary” power to manage Indian property.
The Office of Indian Affairs could thus dispose of
Indian lands and resources regardless of the terms of
previous treaty provisions. Legislation followed that
opened the reservations to settlement through leasing
and even sale of allotments taken out of trust. Nearly
all prime grazing lands came to be occupied by
non-Indian ranchers by the 1920s.</p>
<p>Indian land allotment under the Indian Reorganization
Act, non-Indians outnumbered Indians on the Sioux
reservations three to one. However, the drought of the
mid- to late-1930s drove many settler ranchers off Sioux
land, and the Sioux purchased some of that land, which
had been theirs. However, “tribal governments” imposed
in the wake of the Indian Reorganization Act proved
particularly harmful and divisive for the Sioux.<a
name="_ednref4"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_edn4">[iv]</a>
Concerning this measure, the late Mathew King, elder
traditional historian of the Oglala Sioux (Pine Ridge),
observed: “The Bureau of Indian Affairs drew up the
constitution and by-laws of this organization with the
Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This was the
introduction of home rule. . . . The traditional people
still hang on to their Treaty, for we are a sovereign
nation. We have our own government.”<a name="_ednref5"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_edn5">[v]</a>
“Home rule,” or neocolonialism, proved a short-lived
policy, however, for in the early 1950s the United
States developed its termination policy, with
legislation ordering gradual eradication of every
reservation and even the tribal governments.<a
name="_ednref6"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_edn6">[vi]</a>
At the time of termination and relocation, per capita
annual income on the Sioux reservations stood at $355,
while that in nearby South Dakota towns was $2,500.
Despite these circumstances, in pursuing its termination
policy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs advocated the
reduction of services and introduced its program to
relocate Indians to urban industrial centers, with a
high percentage of Sioux moving to San Francisco and
Denver in search of jobs.<a name="_ednref7"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_edn7">[vii]</a></p>
<p>Mathew King has described the United States throughout
its history as alternating between a “peace” policy and
a “war” policy in its relations with Indigenous nations
and communities, saying that these pendulum swings
coincided with the strength and weakness of Native
resistance. Between the alternatives of extermination
and termination (war policies) and preservation (peace
policy), King argued, were interim periods characterized
by benign neglect and assimilation. With organized
Indigenous resistance to war programs and policies,
concessions are granted. When pressure lightens, new
schemes are developed to separate Indians from their
land, resources, and cultures. Scholars, politicians,
policymakers, and the media rarely term US policy toward
Indigenous peoples as colonialism. King, however,
believed that his people’s country had been a colony of
the United States since 1890.</p>
<p>The logical progression of modern colonialism begins
with economic penetration and graduates to a sphere of
influence, then to protectorate status or indirect
control, military occupation, and finally annexation.
This corresponds to the process experienced by the Sioux
people in relation to the United States. The economic
penetration of fur traders brought the Sioux within the
US sphere of influence. The transformation of Fort
Laramie from a trading post, the center of Sioux trade,
to a US Army outpost in the mid-nineteenth century
indicates the integral relationship between trade and
colonial control. Growing protectorate status
established through treaties culminated in the 1868
Sioux treaty, followed by military occupation achieved
by extreme exemplary violence, such as at Wounded Knee
in 1890, and finally dependency. Annexation by the
United States is marked symbolically by the imposition
of US citizenship on the Sioux (and most other Indians)
in 1924. Mathew King and other traditional Sioux saw the
siege of Wounded Knee in 1973 as a turning point,
although the violent backlash that followed was harsh.</p>
<p>Two decades of collective Indigenous resistance
culminating at Wounded Knee in 1973 defeated the 1950s
federal termination policy. Yet proponents of the
disappearance of Indigenous nations seem never to tire
of trying. Another move toward termination developed in
1977 with dozens of congressional bills to abrogate all
Indian treaties and terminate all Indian governments and
trust territories. Indigenous resistance defeated those
initiatives as well, with another caravan across the
country. Like colonized peoples elsewhere in the world,
the Sioux have been involved in decolonization efforts
since the mid-twentieth century. Wounded Knee in 1973
was part of this struggle, as was their involvement in
UN committees and international forums.<a
name="_ednref8"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_edn8">[viii]</a> However,
in the early twenty-first century, free-market
fundamentalist economists and politicians identified the
communally owned Indigenous reservation lands as an
asset to be exploited and, under the guise of helping to
end Indigenous poverty on those reservations, call for
doing away with them—a new extermination and termination
initiative.</p>
<p><strong>About the Author </strong></p>
<p><strong> Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz</strong> grew up in rural
Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and
part-Indian mother. She has been active in the
international Indigenous movement for more than four
decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to
national and international social justice issues. After
receiving her PhD in history at the University of
California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly
established Native American Studies Program at
California State University, Hayward, and helped found
the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies.
Her 1977 book <em>The Great Sioux Nation</em> was the
fundamental document at the first international
conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held
at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva.
Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other
books, including <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.reddirtsite.com/bk-roots-1.htm"><em>Roots
of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New
Mexico</em></a>. She lives in San Francisco. Follow
her on Twitter at <a target="_blank"
href="http://twitter.com/rdunbaro"><strong>@rdunbaro</strong></a>.</p>
<p><strong>Notes</strong></p>
<p><a name="_edn1"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_ednref1">[i]</a>
UN Commission on Human Rights, Sub-commission on
Prevention of Dis-
crimination and Protection of
Minorities, 51st sess., <em>Human Rights of Indigenous
Peoples: Study on Treaties, Agreements and Other
Constructive Arrangements between States and
Indigenous Populations: Final Report</em>, by Miguel
Alfonso Martínez, special rapporteur, June 22, 1999, UN
Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/1999/20. See also <em>Report of
the Working Group on Indigenous Populations on Its
Seventeenth Session, 26–30 July 1999</em>, UN Document
E/CN.4/Sub.2/1999/20, August 12, 1999.</p>
<p><a name="_edn2"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_ednref2">[ii]</a>
Robert A. Trennert, <em>Alternative to Extinction:
Federal Indian Policy and </em>
<em>the Beginnings of
the Reservation System, 1846–51 </em>(Philadelphia:
Temple
University Press, 1975), 166.</p>
<p><a name="_edn3"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_ednref3">[iii]</a>
Testimony of Pat McLaughlin, then chairman of the
Standing Rock Sioux
government, Fort Yates, ND (May 8,
1976), at hearings of the American Indian Policy Review
Commission, established by Congress in the act of
January 3, 1975.</p>
<p><a name="_edn4"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_ednref4">[iv]</a>
See Kenneth R. Philip, <em>John Collier’s Crusade for
Indian Reform, 1920–1954. </em>Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1977.</p>
<p><a name="_edn5"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_ednref5">[v]</a>
Matthew King quoted in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, <em>The
Great Sioux Natiom: Sitting in Judgment on America. </em>Lincoln:University
of Nebraska Press, 2013. Originally published, 1977.
156.</p>
<p><a name="_edn6"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_ednref6">[vi]</a>
For a lucid discussion of neocolonialism in relation to
American Indians
and the reservation system, see Joseph
Jorgensen, <em>Sun Dance Religion: Power for the
Powerless. </em>Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1977, 89–146.</p>
<p><a name="_edn7"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_ednref7">[vii]</a>
There is continuous migration from reservations to
cities and border towns and back to the reservations, so
that half the Indian population at any time is away from
the reservation. Generally, however, relocation is not
permanent and resembles migratory labor more than
permanent relocation. This conclusion is based on my
personal observations and on unpublished studies of the
Indigenous populations in the San Francisco Bay area and
Los Angeles.</p>
<p><a name="_edn8"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2016/09/the-great-sioux-nation-and-the-resistance-to-colonial-land-grabbing.html#_ednref8">[viii]</a>
The American Indian Movement convened a meeting in June
1974 that founded the International Indian Treaty
Council (IITC), receiving consultative status in the UN
Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in February 1977.
The IITC participated in the UN Conference on
Desertification in Buenos Aires, March 1977, and made
presentations to the UN Human Rights Commission in
August 1977 and in February and August 1978. It also led
the organizing for the Non-Governmental Organizations
(NGOs) Conference on Indigenous Peoples of the Americas,
held at UN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, in
September 1977; participated in the World Conference on
Racism in Basel, Switzerland, in May 1978; and
participated in establishing the UN Working Group on
Indigenous Populations, the UN Permanent Forum on
Indigenous Issues, and the 2007 UN Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples. See: Walter R. Echo-Hawk,
<em>In The Light of Justice</em>: <em>The Rise of Human
Rights in Native America and the UN Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples. </em>Golden, CO:
Fulcrum, 2013; Vine Deloria, Jr., <em>Behind the Trail
of Broken Treaties</em>: <em>An Indian Declaration</em>
<em>of Independence. </em>Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1985. Originally published 1974: Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz, Dalee Sambo Dorough, Gudmundur Alfredsson,
Lee Swepston and Peter Wille, Eds., <em>Indigenous
Peoples’ Rights in International Law: Emergence and
Application. </em>Kautokeino, Norway &
Copenhagen, Denmark: Gáldu and IWGIA, 2015.</p>
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