Tribal leaders call for nation to nation talks on treaty lands

Despite the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act in 1862 that distributed unceded lands in the public domain to raise funds for colleges. 

The Morrill Land-Grant Acts are directly linked to the Native American Genocide so after the defeat of the 7th Cavalry at Greasy Grass in 1876 and the Great Sioux War Congress abrogated that treaty in 1877 then the Utes, Lakota, Arapaho, Cheyenne and others who migrated, lived and hunted all along the Front Range were driven into concentration camps. 

In 1980 attorney Mario Gonzalez filed the federal court case stopping payment of the Black Hills Claim award to the Oglala Lakota Nation. Gonzalez contends that the commission charged to make peace with tribes inserted language into the Fort Laramie Treaty signed in 1868 that Red Cloud had neither seen nor agreed to in negotiations.

After 155 years, two tribes, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and the Oglala Sioux Tribe, are determined to work together to address and correct this fraud. Standing Rock has passed a resolution, and Pine Ridge has passed an ordinance, requesting in person, nation-to-nation consultation with the Department of the Interior. In 1960, claims attorneys had Docket 74 separated into two cases. Docket 74 B became the Black Hills Claim, and Docket 74 A, was soon referred to as just Docket 74, and it pertained to 48 million acres outside the Great Sioux Reservation. Docket 74 has nothing to do with the Black Hills, that is a separate docket. [Docket 74 Battle]

In 2019 during an episode of The Keepers, a podcast produced by the Kitchen Sisters and NPR, the lead Archivist at the National Archives told listeners lawyers are combing the records for treaties with tribal nations none of which have been honored by the United States.

“For centuries, the U.S. government has broken every promise it’s made to Native tribes,” said Janet Alkire, chairwoman of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, which straddles North Dakota and South Dakota. “It’s time for that to stop. Furthermore, we’re calling on the Biden-Harris administration to take active steps to correct the record.” Alkire and Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out made the request in a joint statement issued on Wednesday, Nov. 22. The home of the Oglala Sioux Tribe is the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwest South Dakota.“The history of this case makes it clear that the treaty was an attempt by the United States to obtain peace on the best terms possible,” the Indian Claims Commission decision said. “Ironically, this document, promising harmonious relations, effectuated a vast cession of land contrary to the understanding and intent of the Sioux.” [Sioux tribes call for ‘nation-to-nation’ talks with White House over 1868 treaty land issues]

Leonard Peltier is a Prisoner of War doing hard time at a federal corrections complex in Florida. In 2020 Peltier applied for a compassionate release because of the coronavirus outbreak but it was denied by the Trump Organization because Trump loathes American Indians.

The South Dakota Democratic Party should lobby the Biden administration to free Leonard Peltier, paying the tribes and settling the Black Hills Claim, dissolving the Black Hills National Forest, moving management of the land from the US Department of Agriculture into the Department of Interior as a national monument in cooperation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs Division of Forestry and Wildfire Management. Mato Paha (Bear Butte), the associated national grasslands and the Sioux Ranger District of the Custer/Gallatin National Forest should be included in the move.