Who holds the true Nation to Nation relationship with the Federal Government: Tribes or Corporations?
This shouldn’t even be a question.
As we watch, pray, and try to keep up with what is happening as the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe continues resistance of the Dakota Access Pipeline and its threat to clean water for millions of people, it grows increasingly apparent that Corporations or metanationals have taken over not just America, but the world. People like Bernie Sanders understood this and that is why he was able to mobilize and create a movement beside him. Please check out this article if you want to understand more of why “The world is entering an era in which the most powerful law is not that of sovereignty but that of supply and demand.”
The some 567 federally recognized tribes of the United States of America (of which Standing Rock Sioux tribe is one) are sovereign nations — we are ‘distinct, independent political communities’ and the federal government has what is called a ‘trust’ obligation/relationship with tribes. Trust here implies “fairness”, “trust,” or “guardianship”. (Case&Voluck 2002). This relationship is once again being broken at Standing Rock and the world needs to pay close attention.
“Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith…” ~ Felix S. Cohen 1907–1953
On September 3rd, Energy Transfer Partners sent its mercenaries to Standing Rock Sioux traditional lands where peaceful Protectors were trying to stop the desecration of burial sites by the company’s bulldozers. These mercenaries unleashed trained attack dogs on the men, women, and children that were trying to protect the sacred sites. Several people were bitten and injured including a child and a pregnant woman. This attack on human beings by security hired by Energy Transfer Partners is an egregious and flagrant disregard for human rights and there has already been a call by Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the International Indian Treaty Council to the United Nations for a moratorium on all pipeline construction.
How is it even legal for these privately owned companies to hire private military corporations (PMC)? Well, in most countries around the word it is prohibited but the United States along with U.K., Russia, & China have rejected the UN’s classification of PMCs as mercenaries. Will the criminal actions of the Energy Transfer Partners mercenaries be protected by state and federal law?
It must be reiterated that this resistance is founded on prayer. It is peaceful. There are no weapons, no drugs, no alcohol allowed in any of the camps.
We should all emulate the example being led by the camps at Standing Rock as they exercise their sovereignty in a profound manner for what is taking place in these camps is no less than the resurrection and reclamation of the best values of our traditional ways and knowledge; ceremony, language, shared foods and resources, traditional skills and artistry.
We are the gathering of Nations, the gathering of movements — of Black Lives Matter, of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, of those standing to protect Mauna Kea, Oak Flat, the Gulf, the Arctic Refuge and all that is sacred.
We are the silver lining — the hope for our future generations — for all humanity. We are the protectors of Mother Earth. We, the People, are more powerful than the corporation or these current systems that were created to serve a few, but not the many — us. We, brown bodies who are on the front lines, who have bore the brunt of the racial, environmental, and social inequalities of our Nation with our lives; now stand in solidarity with love in our hearts and a fierce determination to shift the current paradigm.
