Native Sun News Today reaches out to NM Rep. Haaland to advance land-back legislation

On this date in 1889 President Benjamin Harrison signed the proclamation creating South and North Dakota from stolen treaty lands giving Republicans four more US Senators.

The Editorial Board of Native Sun News Today and its Publisher Tim Giago sent the Bill Bradley Bill and the history of the illegal taking of the Black Hills to Deb Haaland, (D-NM) Congresswoman from New Mexico, a Native American woman, and we are encouraging her to study them and perhaps meet with some of the leaders of the tribes of the Great Sioux Nation, in order to discuss the idea of putting together another Bill in the fashion of the Bradley Bill, in an effort to get some of the stolen lands of the Black Hills returned to the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people. [Making an effort to get legislation for the return of land in the Black Hills]

It’s been 40 years since 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. The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe has passed resolutions condemning what they say are abuses of the General Mining Law of 1872 that led to the Custer Expedition's discovery of gold in the Black Hills. 

The South Dakota Democratic Party should advocate for 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 in cooperation with 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. 

Rewild it and rename it He Sapa or Paha Sapa National Monument eventually becoming part of the Greater Missouri Basin National Wildlife Refuge connecting the CM Russell Wildlife Refuge in Montana along the Missouri River to Oacoma, South Dakota combined with corridors from Yellowstone National Park to the Yukon in the north and south to the Canadian River through Nebraska, eastern Colorado, western Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas.