(Famed 19th Century Sioux Indian Chief Sitting Bull, who was killed at Standing Rock in 1890)
The Dakotas lie outside the U.S. South, but the struggles of indigenous people such as the Sioux have parallels throughout the Global South.
In the 1934 Warner Brothers film Massacre, Joe Thunder Horse (played by Richard Barthelmess) tries to navigate the white majority world by playing an Indian in a Wild West show. After reconnecting with his Indian heritage and seeing the depth of injustice whites have done to that heritage and his people, he goes to Washington, D.C., to plead with the Indian Affairs Commissioner to do something about it.
In the 1934 Warner Brothers film Massacre, Joe Thunder Horse (played by Richard Barthelmess) tries to navigate the white majority world by playing an Indian in a Wild West show. After reconnecting with his Indian heritage and seeing the depth of injustice whites have done to that heritage and his people, he goes to Washington, D.C., to plead with the Indian Affairs Commissioner to do something about it.
“Every move I make is blocked by the same organized groups
that have been bleeding the Indians for years,” the commissioner tells him.
“Water power, oil rights, cattle ranges, timber—whatever the Indian happens to
own, they manage to get it away from him. They control public opinion and
legislation, and they’ve got me hog-tied.”
The same could be said today as American Indians from across
the nation join in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Indians along the
North and South Dakota border to protest plans by Dallas-based Energy Transfer
Partners to build the so-called Dakota Access pipeline, part of which would be
on Sioux land and under the Missouri River. The river is the tribe’s only
source of water.
Tribal leaders say the pipeline seriously threatens the water
supply on the reservation and could destroy ancestral lands considered sacred.
In taking their stand, they and hundreds of their supporters have created the
largest joint effort by American Indians in the nation’s history.
Company officials insist the Indians’ concerns have no
foundation and that they have met with tribal representatives numerous times
over the issue as well as provided the U.S. Corps of Engineers—which owns the
land and approved the pipeline—with extensive data backing their claims. They
say the pipeline meets and exceeds existing safety standards.
A federal judge denied a request by the Standing Rock Sioux
Tribe to stop construction on the pipeline, but the Obama Administration
proceeded with temporarily shutting down the part of the project that was a
half-mile from the reservation.
The protest has led to dozens of arrests, including the
filing of trespassing and riot charges against Democracy Now reporter Amy Goodman for filming a confrontation
between Indians and the pipeline security officers. These confrontations have
included the pepper-spraying of protesters and unleashed dogs lunging at them.
The charges against Goodman were later dropped.
The dispute has gotten minimal attention from the mainstream
media—no big surprise there—even during a presidential election when it would
be interesting to hear the candidates’ positions.
It’s the latest chapter in the long, sad history of American
Indians in this country. Four years ago, New
York Times writer Nicholas D. Kristof traveled to the Sioux Reservation in
Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and called it “the poster child of American poverty
and of the failures of the reservation system for American Indians in the
West.”
Kristof said Census data showed that Shannon County there had
the lowest per capita income in the nation in 2010 and that several other
counties that included Sioux reservations were among the nation’s poorest. The
jobless rate in Pine Ridge was 70 percent, 50 percent of the over-40 population
suffered from diabetes, and as much as two-thirds of the adult population were
alcoholics. Tuberculosis was rampant—eight times the national rate—and life
expectancy was under 50 years of age.
The Pine Ridge reservation includes Wounded Knee, the
village where the U.S. Seventh Cavalry slaughtered Chief Big Foot’s band in
1890, the last of the 19th century battles between U.S. military and
American Indians. Famous Sioux Chief Sitting Bull was killed at Standing Rock that same year in a shooting melee related to government efforts to crack down on the so-called "Ghost Dance" movement. The Ghost Dance was a mystical ceremony Native Americans performed to rid their land of the white man.
Maybe it’s better if the mainstream media stay away from Standing Rock. When
they do come, they tend to treat American Indian issues like a John Wayne
movie, such as the coverage by many news organizations of the Wounded Knee
protest and hostage crisis on the Pine Ridge reservation back in 1973, the Navaho-Hopi land dispute near the
Grand Canyon 10 years later, and the so-called “Navaho flu” health crisis in
New Mexico in 1993.
“I feel a sadness for the white man,” American Indian Movement
leader Russell Means once said. “He has no roots. No foundations.”
And too often, the white man, in his greed, attacks those
who do have roots and foundations but stand in the white man’s way.
