(CNN) The United States of America is a particularly strange name for a country. Most countries have one-word names consisting of just a few syllables. And these names often have thousands of years of history behind them. They come from the language of the people who come from these lands.
However, this is not a story about the name of our country. Think it over. United States of America: If you have to tell people you’re united, then you probably aren’t.
Our name sounds like a negotiated settlement, which it was. Except that not everyone who benefited from the settlement was invited to the negotiating table.
The story of the founding of the United States of America is about colonists from England and various European countries agreeing to put aside their differences and unite against the British. But no one asked the native people of this land — who already lived here and already had their own arrangements — what they wanted or what they thought of these violent gentrifiers.
No one asked the natives, who had known the land since time immemorial, how they thought it would work best. No. The “founding fathers” just took the ideas they liked from the native cultures, discarded what they didn’t, and killed the native people in their own way.
This Sunday’s episode of United Shades of America is about the indigenous people of this land and how tired they are of being told where and how they can be on their land. Simply put, they want their land back.
Think how much of this nation is considered “American” – when in fact it is a downright desecration of Native lands. For many Americans, Mount Rushmore is one of the nation’s most patriotic and awe-inspiring symbols. Like a giant apple pie wrapped in a Kid Rock T-shirt. Yee-hey! But for others, it’s a reminder that this country was meant for whites only. don’t you believe The sculptor of Mount Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum, was associated with the Ku Klux Klan.
In the episode, I met Nick Tilsen of the Oglala Lakota and Krystal Two Bulls of the Northern Cheyenne and Oglala Lakota. They are part of the non-profit organization NDN Collective. Their organization is fighting, as they say, to “take indigenous lands into the hands of the indigenous people.” We met at the entrance to Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
But the natives don’t call it that. There are different names depending on the tribe, but they are usually called the Six Grandfathers. Tilsen explained, “Our people called it Ȟe Sápa, and it was a sacred site that they (the US government) blew up to carve the faces of the four presidents into.”
The Black Hills in particular were home to many indigenous communities. And after many wars and battles between settlers and native tribes, the United States signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868, setting aside millions of acres west of the Missouri River for—and this part is important—the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Great Sioux Nation, which comprising more than a dozen tribes.
And as Western as that sounds, the contract is a serious thing. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be. A treaty is a legally binding agreement between two sovereign states. It is a treaty that guarantees respect for the sovereignty of each country. The United States has treaties with countries around the world. The State Department even regularly publishes a public document called “Applicable Treaties” that lists all of our current treaties. The one from 2020 comprises 570 pages.
This is to show that the United States is following through on its agreements. That is, unless you are one of the sovereign indigenous nations of that land. Whenever I talk to Native American activists about the hundreds of treaties signed with their people, I always ask how many treaties the United States has broken. Krystal answered the same as everyone else, “Everyone.”
Let’s make something perfectly clear. When the United States signed hundreds of treaties with sovereign Native nations and then violated them all, the United States violated its own Constitution hundreds of times.
In 2020, the NDN Collective launched the Land Back Campaign to demand that the United States government honor all of its illegally broken treaties and return Mount Rushmore to the management and stewardship of indigenous peoples. Apparently, Nick and Krystal realize that reclaiming the land is—at least—an idea that is difficult for most non-Indigenous people to accept.
I think many non-natives have a hard time imagining returning the land to native people because we shape it through American capitalism. American capitalism says if I give you something, then I lose what I gave you, so you have to give me something in return, preferably money. I hope you give me a lot more money than the starting thing is worth.
But that’s not how things work in indigenous societies. In this episode, you will hear that there was no homelessness and poverty before the colonizers came, because everyone took care of everyone. Frankly, the natives are now saying give us back the land because we can take care of it much better than you did. As we learned in the “California is Burning” episode of “United Shades of America” earlier this season, Native Americans in California didn’t have the problems with wildfires that Californians have today because they knew how to take care of the land.
It’s not just about the land – it’s about taking better care of the people who live on it. I met with two activists, Sunny Red Bear from the Cheyenne River Sioux (also part of the NDN Collective) and Annita Lucchesi of Cheyenne and Italian descent. They are part of a new generation of activists bringing attention to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) across North America. Annita also created the national MMIW database, which is changing the way the police deal with unsolved cases.
Annita told me, “My reservation is controlled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. We went a whole year without a criminal investigator. So there are a bunch of murders that don’t even get investigated because there’s no one to do it.” In fact, the government and tribes do not even agree on how many cases of MMIW there are. Indigenous groups report that there are nearly 6,000 cases of MMIW in the country. But the Justice Department’s missing persons database contains only 116 cases.
Indigenous activists are pushing hard to make the DOJ numbers more meaningful. Help is now available thanks to the 2021 appointment of Deb Haaland of Laguna Pueblo as Secretary of the Interior. Haaland is the first Native American cabinet secretary in US history. It announced a national missing and murdered unit to help solve MMIW cases. However, it should not be necessary to appoint at such a high level that it becomes a priority to give back to indigenous peoples a modicum of their sovereignty.
And it’s such a small piece. Think about being a native of this country. You grow up hearing stories of how your people hunted, fished, performed sacred rituals, and generally roamed the land freely. And today, in 2022, you must apply for a permit to perform these rituals in a national park. And we all know how the government works – you can be rejected for any number of reasons, “you didn’t put a cover on your TPS reports”. And again, you know this has been the land of your people since — say it with me — forever. This is to say nothing of the fact that billions of dollars in gold have been mined from the Black Hills alone and not one percent has gone to the native people. No. Just another broken contract. Not that the natives would take a percentage of the theft.
In fact, in 1980 the Supreme Court ordered more than $100 million to be paid to the Great Sioux Nation over a broken treaty. But the nation did not take the money. And since 1980, the original $100 million has grown to more than $2 billion. But despite the poverty they face, the Great Sioux Nation refuses money just as it did then. Because the land was never for sale. It’s bigger than money. If you kidnap my grandmother, I won’t find a dollar amount to match.
The land restitution movement is best understood if we think of it less in terms of reparations and more in terms of restoration. And if that makes you nervous, think back to the world of Nick Tilsen, who says, “Native people want all our land back in this country. And the conclusion that people are jumping that this is a bad thing is the wrong conclusion.”
