Defenders of the Black Hills
Tituwan Oyate - Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council
July 16, 2009
"North American Indigenous Nations to Meet"
"International Work to be Topics of Discussion"
Rapid City, SD--Representatives from a Canadian Indigenous nation, the Kakisiwew-Ochapowace Cree, will be meeting at the Mother Butler Center with the Tetuwan Oyate, Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council. The two-day event is scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, July 27 & 28, 2009, beginning at 9:00 AM.
Destroying Indigenous PopulationsSaturday 20 June 2009
by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Perspective Read piece with photo here The Fort Laramie Treaty once guaranteed the Sioux Nation the right to a large area of their original land, which spanned several states and included their sacred Black Hills, where they were to have "the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation" of the land. However, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills, President Ulysses S. Grant told the army to look the other way in order to allow gold miners to enter the territory. After repeated violations of the exclusive rights to the land by gold prospectors and by migrant workers crossing the reservation borders, the US government seized the Black Hills land in 1877.
June 2009 - Newsletter“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.†Paulo Freire
Dear Defenders:
A year and a half ago, the Board of Directors of Defenders of the Black Hills agreed to stop the monthly meetings and mailings. The Coordinator’s health, the expense, and the time needed to put a mailing together were the primary reasons. The downside is, we are not able to get as much information out to all of you as we did before, and sometimes it has meant missing on comment due dates. The Angostura information on the backside of the address page is an example. Although we did submit comments from Defenders, it would have been better for more comments to go in. We will continue to supply as much information to you as possible.
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"Defenders of the Black Hills is a group of volunteers without racial or tribal boundaries whose mission is to preserve, protect, and restore the environment of the 1851 and 1868 Treaty Territories, Treaties made between the United States and the Great Sioux Nation."
Speaking about radioactive fallout, the late President John F. Kennedy said,
"Even then, the number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs might seem statistically small to some, in comparison with natural health hazards. But this is not a natural health hazard and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby who may be born long after we are gone, should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent."
July 26, 1963 upon signing the ban on above ground nuclear tests
"The radiation levels in parts I visited with my students were higher than those in the evacuated zones around the Fukushima Nuclear disaster...." Nuclear Physics Professor Kimberly Kearfott, University of Michigan, in comparing the readings obtained in northwestern South Dakota at the Cave Hills open-pit, abandoned uranium mines.
"It must always be remembered that the various Indian tribes were once independent and sovereign nations, and that their claim to sovereignty long predates that of our own government."
Thurgood Marshall, US Supreme Court Justice
(McClanahan v. Sate Tax Commission, 1973)