President Obama is planning to travel to a Native American reservation in North Dakota in June, a rare visit by a sitting U.S. president to Indian country, according to officials familiar with the plans. In 1999, President Bill Clinton visited the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota, home to Wounded Knee Creek, the infamous site where at least 150 Lakota Sioux men, women and children were massacred by U.S. soldiers in 1890. He was the first sitting president to visit a reservation since Franklin D. Roosevelt visited a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina in 1936. It’s unclear which reservation Obama will visit. His senior policy adviser for Native American affairs, Jodi Gillette, is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota, where her brother is the chairman. [Sara Horwitz, Washington Post]The history of humanity in the United States of America is at least 14,000 years old, some researchers say it is far older. We the People are at another crossroads: we can allow China to outgrow us or we can grow.
There are 2.5 million Native Americans living in the US, more living in Canada, and virtually every native Mexican is a native American as well. Four sets of laws trapped in a quagmire of treaty obligations. If each reservation in the lower contiguous states were a county in a non-contiguous state, the two senators and five representatives would wield great power in Congress.
The Navajo Nation could be a state.
Jennifer Naylor Gessick told readers of the Rapid City Journal that several tribal nations trapped within South Dakota are forming an alliance as a counter-weight to that state's selfishness.
President Obama: it's time for Statehood for the tribes and Mexico.
Rewild the West.
President Obama endures a question from a former South Dakota governor: note Gov. Schwarzenegger seated in front
Of the President does visit Standing Rock, it wouldn't be too far out of his way to stop in Leith ND and chat with the white supremicists who were in the news a while back.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that he gets enough of that wherever he goes and could be received with some protest on the rez. Dems, including some of South Dakota's finest will likely be there, including USA Brendan Johnson.
ReplyDeleteWe might even hear some real news from this visit.