Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away
from US
WASHINGTON (AFP) — The Lakota
Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors
Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn
from treaties with the United States, leaders
said Wednesday.
"We are no longer citizens of
the United States of America and all those who
live in the five-state area that encompasses our
country are free to join us," long-time Indian
rights activist Russell Means told a handful of
reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian
embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down
neighborhood of Washington for a news
conference.
A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message
to the State Department on Monday, announcing
they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties
they signed with the federal government of the
United States, some of them more than 150 years
old.
They also visited the
Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan
embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic
mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks
and months, they told the news conference.
Lakota country includes parts of the states of
Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana
and Wyoming.
The new country would issue
its own passports and driving licences, and
living there would be tax-free -- provided
residents renounce their US citizenship, Means
said.
The treaties signed with the
United States are merely "worthless words on
worthless paper," the Lakota freedom activists
say on their website.
The treaties have been
"repeatedly violated in order to steal our
culture, our land and our ability to maintain
our way of life," the reborn freedom movement
says.
Withdrawing from the treaties
was entirely legal, Means said.
"This is according to the
laws of the United States, specifically article
six of the constitution," which states that
treaties are the supreme law of the land, he
said.
"It is also within the laws
on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and
put into effect by the US and the rest of the
international community in 1980. We are legally
within our rights to be free and independent,"
said Means.
The Lakota relaunched their
journey to freedom in 1974, when they drafted a
declaration of continuing independence -- an
overt play on the title of the United States'
Declaration of Independence from England.
Thirty-three years have
elapsed since then because "it takes critical
mass to combat colonialism and we wanted to make
sure that all our ducks were in a row," Means
said.
One duck moved into place in
September, when the United Nations adopted a
non-binding declaration on the rights of
indigenous peoples -- despite opposition from
the United States, which said it clashed with
its own laws.
"We have 33 treaties with the
United States that they have not lived by. They
continue to take our land, our water, our
children," Phyllis Young, who helped organize
the first international conference on indigenous
rights in Geneva in 1977, told the news
conference.
The US "annexation" of native
American land has resulted in once proud tribes
such as the Lakota becoming mere "facsimiles of
white people," said Means.
Oppression at the hands of
the US government has taken its toll on the
Lakota, whose men have one of the shortest life
expectancies -- less than 44 years -- in the
world.
Lakota teen suicides are 150 percent above the norm
for the United States; infant mortality is five
times higher than the US average; and
unemployment is rife, according to the Lakota
freedom movement's website.
"Our people want to live, not
just survive or crawl and be mascots," said
Young.
"We are not trying to
embarrass the United States. We are here to
continue the struggle for our children and
grandchildren," she said, predicting that the
battle would not be won in her lifetime.
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