Rev Left Radio - Očhéthi Šakówiŋ: A History of the Lakota and Dakota People

Episode Date: November 27, 2019

In today's episode, Breht is joined by returning guest, Mors, who explains, and reflects on, over 300 years of history and struggle of the Dakota and Lakota people.  Follow and contact Mors on Twitter @mors_Lakota Check out Mor's blog here: https://hinskehanska.wordpress.com/ Check out Nick Estes' book "Our History Is the Future" mentioned in the show here: https://www.versobooks.com/authors/2351-nick-estes Outro music: 'Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee' by Buffie Sainte-Marie ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/ SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, FORGE, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have on Moors to talk about the history of the Lakota and Dakota people. We touch on an incredible amount of topics, cover huge swaths, literally centuries of history. And I think this is important for obvious reasons. It's around that time of the year. Thanksgiving when a lot of this history is brought up and distorted by the set of colonial state and its ideological state apparatus. And so, you know, around this time of the year, like we did last year, we want to release a couple episodes really focusing in and doing deep dives

on indigenous issues and indigenous history. Again, I love this conversation. So much is covered. I think it's really important, especially for those of us on the left who really take decolonization seriously, who think about it in the context of what we're going to do politically in the coming decades. Understanding history is an absolute key to understanding the present and to building the future. So with that said, let's go ahead and get into this wonderful history on the Lakota and Dakota people with Comrade Morris. Enjoy. Enjoy. So, I'm going to be able to Salymskoyang a lot of people,

I think that's how much my name, that's how much my name is Lechiawattie. And Ikewach, and that Kall, I can't a whole, it's only a way-a-backing

Dello, Othun-on-Spewit-Wichawa Kee. So, hi everybody. My name is Morse. I'm Lakota, Winkte. All of that, I am, basically, I have no training as a formal historian, but I am here to talk about Lakota history because I think all Lakota people know our history to some extent. And I'm deeply passionate about Lakota language and history and everything like that. And so, you know, it's important to talk about this history because our history is really,

really misunderstood since, for better and for worse, we are the archetypal Indians. And so this will be a good Oceti Shakumi history, a history of all Lakota, Dakota, and Dakota peoples as best can be done in one podcast episode. For sure, yeah. And thank you, yes, thank you so much for coming on. I'm really excited about this episode. So let's just go ahead and get into it because, as you say, there's a lot of history to cover here. And, you know, I do, before we jump in, I do want to say, like, I think a big part of our, audience really does love these history episodes. You know, we do a few different things, more philosophy episodes, more organizing episodes, but there's certainly a segment that gets a lot out

of these history episodes. And this is the sort of history that you are rarely, if ever, taught in our generalized educational system. So, you know, if we can bring this history to more people, I think that's an important thing to do. So let's go ahead and dive into this history. And let's just start maybe with a basic term that, you know, it's really essential to this conversation. And I think a lot of people hear it a lot, but maybe just a 101. explanation of it. Can you just define the term settler colonialism and then give a brief overview of like its history, specifically just in relation to what we'll be discussing today? Yeah. So settler colonialism is a type of colonialism, one of many colonelisms. And settler colonialism

seeks to eliminate indigenous people from existence. So contrary to the name, you can have a colony which has settlers in it or a country that has settlers in it and it isn't necessarily a settler colony. So you look at somewhere like Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru. None of these places are settler states because they aren't looking to eliminate indigenous people from existence, contrary to somewhere like the U.S. or Canada, Israel, Australia, blah, blah, blah. And so you have this and you have two basic questions that sort of pop up. The first is what's an indigenous person. And an indigenous person is a person indigenous to a specific place that is suffering a colonial situation. And then you have a settler. And a settler is a person who invades a country,

settles there, displaces people, keeps their own sovereignty and plans to stay there. And so a settler colony or a settler state, once it, you know, ends its sort of colonial form, displaces and eliminates indigenous people's bodies, epistemologies, ontologies, cosmovision, so on, all of that sort of stuff. It doesn't seek to proletarianize indigenous people. It seeks to eliminate indigenous people. So it takes the land and does something new with it. It supplants indigenous people with settlers. And it supplants indigenous society with settler society. And to give a quick example of, you know, what that means, you and me are talking right now in English, right? Even though you are living somewhat on

Lakota land, right? We can't communicate in Lakotiyapi. And this is because the language of the settler society was supplanted onto the indigenous one, which is why I speak English and why, you know, you don't speak Lakhotiapi. And so this goes on and on with all the other categories that you can think of in like just daily life. And then in regards to how this relates to what we'll be talking about today. The two countries will be looking at today, or like, settler entities, is the United States and Canada, because those are the two countries that have had the biggest effect on our history as a Chetty Shackling people. And throughout this whole conversation, listeners will be able to notice the eliminatory center of settler colonialism throughout this

whole thing. And it's good to keep in mind while you're listening to this and thinking about this elimination, sort of in the back of your head. that the U.S. and Canada have done this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, right, to hundreds of different peoples. So there's not just like one genocide of indigenous people because that's racialized thinking. If you think nationally, there's hundreds of genocides of hundreds of nations throughout, you know, this whole land. Yeah, incredibly important distinction. Now, before we move on, we're going to be using the term Lakota and Dakota people. And when I made this outline, I made an error. I was first calling it, you know, like the Sioux Nation or Sue people, and you

sort of, you know, gently and friendly checked me and said, you know, that's a word that is not really used and is considered a slur. And if, you know, if I'm ignorant of it, I'm sure there's lots of my listeners who are also ignorant of it. So would you like to just touch on, on that term and why that term is considered a slur and why, you know, Lakota and Dakota people or nation is a better way to think and talk about these stuff? Yeah. So basically, really shortly, Sue is a slur because it's used disrespectively constantly. And that's really the important part of it is you, I mean, in my family, for example, the older people in my family say sue all the time, like, you know, older Lakota people. And that's fine because we know, like we're

nice to each other when we say it. It doesn't mean anything disrespectful. But if you go to Rapid City or you go to any, you know, small town in South Dakota or North Dakota or Nebraska or anything like that, then it's always used to imply dirty and subhuman and Indian and everything like that, right? And so we, you know, in our language, don't refer to ourselves as Sioux, but we say Ocheti Shakomi. And Ocetti Shakomi is sort of the big national structure that makes up Lakota and Dakota and Dakota and Dakota people. Thank you for that. That's really important. I hope people remember that going forward. All right. So let's just start with the history starting in the 18th century. Where and how did

the Lakota and Dakota people live throughout the 1700s? And what sort of relations did they have with other native nations as well as with the early European settlers? Right. So like I just said, when we're talking about Ocetei-Shakongin people, we're talking about three main peoples, right? we'll look at those three ones. The first one is Dakota people. And they're more accurately called Isayati, but just for the sake of remembering, we'll say Dakota. And in the 1700s, Dakota people lived all the way from Bedouacan, which is Lake Winnipeg, all the way down to Minnesota, which is the Minnesota River. And they also lived a bit west of Lake Winnipeg out onto the

plains. And Dakota people are made up of four further groups of people, which is the Sisi, Trouin, Warpeh Trouin, and Warpéte, which you don't need to remember, but these, you know, four peoples will be important later on in our talk. And then the second people that we have is the Yank Trouin and Yank Trouana, who are grouped together because they speak the same dialect of our language. And in the 1700s, they lived about between the Minnesota, so Minnesota and the Minichosha, or the Missouri. in that area between the Minnesota River and the Missouri River. And then finally, we have

the Tithuan, or as we call ourselves today, Lakota. And in the 1700s, we lived on the plains near the Missouri River. And so some lived west of the plains, mostly around the Black Hills and south of that. And then a lot of people still lived east of the Missouri. And so Lakota people were mainly at this time divided into two groups. So Northern Lakota, Saun, and Southern Lakota, which were Oglala and Sichangu. So the Southern Lakota lived around the Black Hills and the Platte River and the Kansas River was sort of the furthest south that you get. And so this is about like Southern South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas area today. And then you had the Northern Lakota, Sa'un, Minikouroujou, those are the northern ones, and they live mostly east of the

Missouri at this time in sort of the 1700s. And the Sa'un would eventually break up into four different subdivisions. And so this would give us the seven subdivisions of Lakota people that we have today, which is the Oglala, Sichanahu, Minikovaju, Itazibcho, O'Hanlpa, and and this division is still somewhat important today you have different accents like people in the north have a different accent for people in the south and everything like that people on standing rock will talk different from people in pine ridge and then being such a big nation so these are the three groups and we recognize that this is a lot of land we're looking at lake winnipeg all the way in the northeast over to the black hills and sort of platte river area all the way down

in the southwest, which means that there's a lot of conflicts going on with different native peoples at the time. And so, you know, these conflicts can do with hunting grounds, or you could get conflicts fueled by sort of horse raids or food raids of corn and rice, things of that nature. And you have all these shifting series of alliances and enemies and everything like that, just like you would have anywhere else in the world. So, the Dakota had conflicts with Cree and Anashinaabe in the north, and then with Miami, Ho-Chunk, and Sacken Fox in the south. The Hankhwana and the Hanthwana had conflicts with Omaha, Ponca, and Pawnee people. And then the Lakota, we had conflicts with Pawnee, Cheyenne, Mandan, Hidotza, and our Akara people. So, as I said before, many

Northern Lakota, Lakota lived east of the Missouri. And there's a big thing that happens near the end of the 1700s that changes this. So a wave of smallpox comes and hits the sort of northern Dakota people in the most, most northern part of the Great Plains, which today is in Canada. And then it came down the Missouri and hit the western side of the northern Missouri. And it hit Mandan Hidottsin, are a car. people very hard. The reason why that's so important for our history is that those three people were the people generally preventing the northern Lakota from moving across the Missouri to the western side of the Missouri. And so when they were hit by that, Lakota people were able to move over the river and sort of establish life west of the Missouri. And this is the point where you get, you know, this is late 1700s, early 1800s, where you see Lakota people living, like the vast majority living west of the Missouri. And this is the point where you get the map that I think most people are sort of familiar with of seeing like Lakota people as like a Plains tribe,

always west in Missouri and everything like that. In regards to how people lived really quickly and like simplifying it a lot, but Dakota people lived closer into the woodlands. And so they lived semi-sedentary sort of lives where in the fall and winter you would spend life hunkered down sort of in a village in the woodlands and then in the summer and spring you would go out to the plains area and hunt for buffalo and things like that the hanktruan and the hanktriana would live the same sort of semi-sedentary life except they were deeper into the plains not really near the woodlands at all but still semi-sedentary and then la kota were completely not sedentary Harry at all, completely focused on moving with Buffalo and everything like that and moving

the camp constantly, except for winter periods where a lot of people would go to the Black Hills to be able to hunker down for the winter. And, you know, I was doing some preparatory research for this conversation. And I learned, like, I always kind of knew this on some level, but it was really driven home to me that, you know, you mentioned the American bison and how, you know, important of a source for many things beyond food that this was, and in fact, part of the conscious genocidal efforts, and correct me if I'm wrong, but part of the genocidal efforts on the part of the colonialists and the settlers was to decimate the bison population because they knew

it was so wound up with the way of life for the indigenous people in that area. Is that correct? Yeah, and we'll get into that later, but it's, it basically, you know, like, kills a whole mode of production and it also sort of makes this genocide not only like the food source but mental too because you're i mean like bison is so necessary to sort of the way that we think spiritually that killing all the bison had a deep impact there also yeah yeah and there's uh there's photos online that you can see of all of these um basically bleached bison skulls and like settler standing atop like this, you know, 50-foot mountain of bison skulls sort of triumphantly. And it's really horrific when you understand the background and what that means to indigenous people.

But like you said, we'll get to that in a little bit later. But let's talk about one of the most important conflicts between the Lakota and Dakota people and the United States. And that was the Dakota War of 1862. So can you talk about not the war itself? We'll get to that next. But the treaties and the conditions that led to that war. Yeah. So aside from all of the sort of stuff that's happening with other Native nations, the alliances and conflicts and everything like that, in the late 1600s, during the 1700s, and of course during the 1800s, you start having La Cota and Dakota people start talking with Europeans also. So for example, in 1695, you have a treaty with New France, where you had a Dakota chief who went all the way to Montreal to have a treaty with all the friendship. officials over there. And then you add a 1763 Treaty of Peace and Friendship and trade between

Dakota people and the British. And then in 1812, you had the war of 1812, where Dakota people participated in the war and sided with the British, you know, participated in taking over some forts and everything like that. They participated in the siege of Detroit. And at the end of the war, a lot of Dakota people received medals and recognition from the British, basically saying you fought for us, you were really important for us. You know, we couldn't have won the war without you, blah, blah, blah, everything like that. And I stress this because this is this participation and these treaties with the British is going to become really important, you know, 50 years from now and 100 years from now. And we'll see why later. But, you know, keep all those things in

your mind. So while all this is happening, like I said, said many treaties being made between Occhetti-Shaquoing people and other indigenous people for hunting rights, land usage rights, things of that sort. And when treaties are broken, there's skirmishes or sometimes battles between, you know, the bands of certain nations, but also these aren't European-style wars. I think it's important to stress that. So, for example, you have battled between the Pawnee and Oglala and Sichanhu, which are both Lakota near Pranchiwakba, or the Republican River.

in 1873, where you had some 75 to 150 Pawnee Warriors killed. And this was thought to be the worst battle possible, right? Like, just a horrific event that was unimaginable. And so you have this, you know, our thought here, and then you look over at Europe in the same time, and you have Napoleonic line warfare and just tens of thousands or millions of people being killed, or you have the Civil War here.

And so it's a very different sort of relationship, these sort of conflicts and the diplomacy between native nations than what European nations did between each other. It's a lot less bloody. So if we return back to Europeans in the sort of early 1800s, so we can say 1800 to 1850, settlers are becoming more of a threat and more of a nuisance for, Dakota people. So Dakota people are around Minnesota and Manitoba sort of area. For the U.S., the U.S. government wants to expand its presence into this area by sending settlers to be able to lay claim to new land for the United States. And what ends up happening here is you have, first, the 1851 Treaty of Traverse-Dissue. This was signed between the U.S. and Sisi Trouin and Wakh-Pet-Truan people where these two people were basically threatened to give up land

and to accept to live on a reservation along the Minnesota River, a small reservation that extended 10 miles north and south along the Minnesota River. And so they accepted and went there, or they were really removed there by the United States. And then there's only a couple days later, there's the 1851 Treaty of Mindota, which is between the Bedouacrantroix and the Wachpecote and the United States to also give up sort of the same land and be removed along to the Minnesota River. All four of these people are Dakota people. All of them have been removed to the same area. And the land that is taken from these Dakota peoples are, is basically the southern half of Minnesota and also portions of South Dakota and North Dakota also. And so you have this treaty happen and this is really important because you just had like the whole bottom part of a state, that area of land be seated and people being forced onto a reservation.

And these treaties promise cash annuities, schools, blacksmith shops, farms, and mills in exchange for that land. So you have all of this going on. And then if you look over at what's happening more in the West, on Lakota land, forts are being constructed along the Platte River and along the Missouri and along the Bozeman Trail, basically just deeper and deeper into our land in order to ensure the, you know, safe and easy transit. of settlers on their way to Montana and California during these gold rushes that are happening during the 1850s. And so to ensure the safe passage of settlers, the United States will sign another treaty also in 1851 with Lakota people. So the other ones were with Dakota. This one is with Lakota. And this is the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie. So the first Treaty of Fort Laramie. they'll be two. And this is signed not only by Lakota people, but by Ihanktua, Arapaho, Cheyam, Aracara, Ponca, Crow. And you add a couple other nations, not signatories to it, but they're at the treaty session. And this treaty made borders between indigenous nations, which nobody would respect because there's no concept of borders. It demanded peace between indigenous nations. It promised

protection for settlers and it warned for punishment against settlers if they attacked Indians. And so you have the United States basically trying to impose itself colonially over this area of land to try and create some sort of peace for settlers to be able to move across it, to be able to settle on the West Coast. And it's important to remember that the settlement of the United States isn't just this movement east to west like a lot of people think it there it is so you have the northeast be settled and then the south and then you have sort of the west coast happen after that and this middle of the plains sort of area is one of the last areas to be settled within the continental uh united states

and the same thing happens in canada too you have the sort of quebec ontario region and then bc and then the planes get swallowed up in that last. So, yeah, so that's leading up to the war and, you know, this, this whole treaty system will, you know, play a huge role in this entire history because time and time again, the United States creates these treaties and then in various ways, undermines them immediately or soon thereafter in various ways. And so that continually ramps up, you know, resentment and distrust, et cetera. So let's just move into the Dakota war itself.

Can you talk about the war, the outcome, and why it's such a sort of pivotal and historically noteworthy war? Yeah, so this war begins in 1862. And what happens beforehand, what causes the war, is after having forced Dakota people onto incredibly small tracks of land, like I said, along the Minnesota River, annuities didn't come at all, or they came little or in bad supply. And this is because, you know, the officials who would bring them would just take them or they would be robbed on the way their traders would take them. You know, there's a whole host of things that happened. It's also important to realize that, so this is happening in 1862, the U.S. is just beginning the civil war. So you have the whole southern part of the country break off from the north. And by this point, tens of thousands of people have already died in the civil war. back in sort of Dakota territory, the Dakota people, because they're not getting these annuities that they were promised, and because of settler killing of the buffalo in the region, of the game in the region, picking up the plants and making farms and everything like that, Dakota people no longer have a means to really hunt that much for food. And so they're then forced to buy it. And because they don't get their annuities, they have to buy it on credit and they can't pay it back because there's just no jobs and nobody's going to give them jobs and everything like that. And so because a lot of Dakota people find themselves in debt, settlers refuse to do further dealings with Dakota people.

And of course, this brings on starvation and everything like that. And so one day, a Dakota hunting party is out and about, and one of the people in the hunting party go into a chicken coop owned by a settler, comes out with some eggs, and the settler sees it happen, and a firefight ensues between the settler and the hunting party. And the hunting party kills the settler. And it just so happens that the settler also happened to be a judge. And so basically the Dakota people knew that something was going to happen. So a war council was convened by a lot of the sort of biggest chiefs. And half of them basically decided to go to war and the other half decided we don't want to go to war. The half that did decide to go to war were the Bdao Kruan and the Wachan-Pé Qutte and then the Sisi Trouin and Wachpe-Truan didn't go to war.

and this will be important in the little. But the war initially goes in our favor, even though all settler men were, you know, told you need to rise up and participate in this war. And they, of course, did so because settlers aren't just people, but they're also an occupational force. And I mean this still today. You look at somewhere like Ferguson, when Ferguson happened, all the settlers there just so happened to rise up with their guns to stand in front of. of their shops with AKs or whatever they have or their AR-15s or whatever and, you know, defend it from the people that they think are trying to rob them or whatever. And so the settlers, though, don't do well.

Dakota people still get the upper hand. And so the U.S. calls in John Pope, who was sort of a disgraced general from the Civil War because he'd lost a couple battles. And he brings a couple thousand men to participate in the war. and they are then able to turn the tides and the U.S. ends up winning the war. After the war is won, there's four important things that happen that we want to look at. And this is going to affect the rest of our history as a people, like up to today, I think more so than anything else. The first is you have the largest legal mass execution in the history of the United States of the Dakota 38 plus two.

This is a really important event for obvious reasons. Secondly, you have the prisoners who were forced to go to Camp McClellan. So Camp McClellan was a camp for prisoners of war, and it was in Iowa. And so you had men, women and children, warriors sentenced from one to ten years in prison. Some of them, as young as 16 years old, were put onto a boat, brought down the Minnesota, up the Missouri, put into this prisoner of war camp, and forced to be there for years and years and years. And people would starve there. People would freeze. There were epidemics of smallpox in the camp and everything like that. And it was horrible. And there's actually a book about this

and a whole bunch of people on the Sisi Trouin-Wa-Pet-Ru-Yata, which is a reservation in South Dakota, translated a whole bunch of letters that these people imprisoned in the camp wrote to family members and everything like that, from Dakota into English. And so you can, you know, read about the sort of conditions that they felt there and the way they felt there. Aside from this, you have the removal of Dakota people from Minnesota. So the government said Dakota people are no longer welcome in Minnesota. You have to leave. So it's just the same thing as the Trail of Tears or the Trail of Death or anything like that, removed from the state. And so they take a whole bunch of people, 1,600 in total, 1600 Dakota, put them all on Wita Tranka,

which is called Pike Island in English. It's right in the middle of Twin Cities. All 1,600 of them are forced into a concentration camp on that island, except for 200 Bedouacrantruman, who were neutral in the war. on Pike Island, you'll have 300 people die, and then the government will put these people onto a boat, again, send them down the Minnesota, up the Missouri, to a new reservation that the government created called Crow Creek Reservation, which is in South Dakota today. So people will die on the way there in the boat. Once they get there, the region was in drought. And so there was no ability to farm at all. And so more and more, people are going to starve because of this. And you'll have throughout this whole process, just hundreds and hundreds of people die while being removed from the state. And you'll get this complicated relationship between Crow Creek Reservation and Santee Sioux Reservation, which is a

reservation in Nebraska that was created for the people at Camp McClellan, the prisoners of war, when they finally were released from the camp. So these are two sort of reservations of removed people, like very, very directly removed. The last thing that happens is you have the CC-Tru-en and the Wachpe-Tru-en who didn't participate in the war. So even though they didn't participate, obviously settlers didn't care. They said, Mad, you're Indian, we're going to kill you. You know, it doesn't, we're not going to ask you, are you CC-Tru-A or are you better walk on too long? I need to know before I, you know, pull the trigger on this gun. And so these two people flee out of Minnesota. And thousands will flee sort of to the South Dakota, North Dakota area,

but there will also be thousands who will flee to what is today Canada. And this is really important because there's already a lot of Dakota people in Canada by the time that, you know, Sisi, Truan, Wachpe, Truan get there. The reason that this is such a pivotal event, right, the war. The war in general is exactly because of this part of it where the Sisi Trouin or Petruan have to flee. Because these people then in Canada become American Indians, or as Canada calls them today, American indigenous peoples. And we'll talk about this later, but basically, Dakota people, all Dakota people in Canada, whether they got there through fleeing from Minnesota or whether they were there before that, are now called.

American indigenous peoples and do not receive the same rights as quote-unquote Canadian indigenous peoples because of the way that the Canadian government has manipulated this event and everything like that. And so I think this is the most important event in the last 400 years of what Chetty Shackoing history. And it'll be clarified more and more as we talk about it. But the consequences of this is that half of our people are removed to reservations on land that they had never been to before. And you have the departure of so many of these people to escape the army. And it just fundamentally changes the way that many Dakota people live,

from living in the woodlands to forcing them out onto the plains. And so this is felt by Dakota themselves. It'll be felt by Lakota further west because Dakota are then forced on to Lakota land. And it'll be felt by a sineboyne and Kree and Blackhota. feet and Grosvant and a whole host of other native peoples because of the arrival of thousands of these people to this land. This, you know, fundamentally changes the way that everybody had lived beforehand because of all these refugees.

And so it'll change the face of the Northern Plains for the rest of this history that we're going to be looking at up to today. Wow. I did not know most of that, especially the part about the Canadian designation of certain indigenous people displaced by the war and how they you know they because they're from one side of the this border that they're you know owed less by the Canadian government etc i mean that's that's horrific so let's move forward and talk about this this next sort of 30 year period of history so i was hoping you could talk about the period of time from the 1860s through the

1890s and i know this is a big question that covers a lot of ground so you can take this in any direction that you want to right so this is is a very, very big question, because we're covering a lot of very complicated history and sort of the history of really of change from the Dakota War all the way up into the reservation period. So the first thing that we want to do is define what an agency is, because this is sort of what I would call the agency period. And so, let's see, well, there's two things that are part of of the United States project to settle in this area. So you have the military and the political way

in which the United States tries to project itself onto Ocetei-Shakowing people. So this is done through the U.S. putting down a fort in the military way. And you can think of the fort as a base today. So it projects U.S. military power and presence over an area of land that isn't of the United States. States. I think that the city that I live in Omaha started off as a fort for this exact reason.

Yeah. And that's, I mean, you look, especially in the area where you live, but it's all over the United States. You have all of these towns called fort such and such. And it's because they all started out as as forts sort of over this area of land. And so you have the forts and then you have either inside of it or near it an agency. And you can think of an agency as an embassy. So within the fort is an Indian agent, and the Indian agent acts sort of like a military governor to a certain extent. They're pretty dictatorial. So if anybody knows about, for example, the U.S. government over Cuba, when the U.S. sort of took over Cuba for I think three years after the Spanish-American War, or even the U.S. government over Iraq, when the U.S. took over

Iraq, these are all based on what I'm talking about right now. So you have then after this agency Indians and non-agency Indians. So like I said, the goal of an agency is to project U.S. power and therefore it wants to put Oceti Shakoian people under the control of the United States. So settlers either use an area as a place of transit, you know, a certain place of land as a place of transit over to somewhere else, or they settle and take all the food sources, and the army kills the buffalo, and all of this is with the goal of starving Ocetti Shackoing people or whatever other indigenous people, and to solidify U.S. presence and U.S. control of a certain area through settlers. So then, when this starts to happen, you have all these food sources

disappearing and everything like that, Indian agents will go out, and they'll talk to bands of Chitishakouin people and say, we see how you're starving, we see how you're destitute, but if you agree to stay next to this agency, next to this fort, and give up your nomadic way of life, we'll give you food, will give you clothing, and we'll give you bullets to hunt with. And so this creates a dependency between the agency and the people. And then it'll further create a split between people who depend on the agency and people that don't. And for example, the U.S. would choose someone as the chief of a tribe. And I put tribe within quotes.

This isn't a tribe that actually exists. It's something that the U.S. makes up. And so in our traditional system, you would have a chief who is the chief of a band. So between 50 and 250 people. So you take someone like Trotanka and Yotake for example, Sitting Bowl. Sitting Bull is the chief of just his band.

He might have influence over other bands, but he only has sort of this higher power within his band, right? This like political power, you could say. What the U.S. would do is it would

take someone like a chief who was called Matro to Chuhu and they would make They made this man the chief of all hunkpaphtra bands, which is, you know, a couple thousand people. And this made no sense according to the traditional structures. None of the non-agency chiefs recognized that Matro Tuchu was, you know, like the king of Holakota. And so, or of all hunkapra. And so they thought that it was preposterous and everything like that.

And they detested him for his dealings with the local Indian agent at least. Fort Pierre. So one day, there's two Itazib Chow warriors at this at Fort Pierre where Matro Tutuhu was at, and they kill him. And then a month later, the Indian agent at Fort Pierre gets a letter signed by 10 Hunkpach chiefs that said, we killed Matro Tutuhu for taking annuities from you. No Hunc Papra is going to take annuities from the United States. And we're not going to consent to this. If any settlers come onto our land, we will attack them, et cetera, et cetera, all of this sort of stuff. And so to reiterate, this is a split that you start seeing happening between the people that didn't exist before, this split between agency Indians and

non-agency Indians. And so in 1868, you have the second Treaty of Fort Laramie. The first Treaty of Fort Laramie that we talked about earlier was a huge failure, an absolute failure. It didn't accomplish what the United States wanted it to accomplish. It wasn't upheld for chetti-sacquoing people. Both us and the United States thought that it wasn't worth anything. And so the U.S. makes a new treaty, and it says a lot of things. One of the things that we'll most focus on is that it set aside the Black Hills for, quote, the absolute and undisturbed use an occupation of the Indians, unquote. And so the army during this period

defends the Black Hills from prospectors. This is a really strong influence from the Reconstruction South, where the thought is you put federal troops into a territory to keep people that the federal government doesn't like from killing people and from sort of messing up this vision

that the federal government has for whatever area of land, whether it be the South or whether it be the Black Hills or wherever. The government does not want settlers to ruin its plans for how it thinks territory should be developed. So troops try to some extent to protect the territory from prospectors, but there's too many prospectors. There's a lack of troops, a lack of forts within the hills, that sort of prevents this from happening effectively.

And then there's violence against the, or, you know, army violence against the prospectors, and then settler anger at that violence, which then sees the army in the Black Hills as an army of occupation. And this is where libertarianism comes from, like the very U.S. classic example of seeing the federal government

as restricting you, it comes from this thought of, I want to go there and have my gold, you know, I will kill Indians if I have to. And if you prevent me from doing that, then, you know, you're oppressing me, right? The federal government is oppressing me and everything like that. Yes, exactly. It's good to remember, don't tread on me.

This is all meant to say, I'll kill Indians if I want. And so what eventually happens is, There's a conflict between the military in the region and the higher command in D.C. The military in the region doesn't like defending Indians, and there's still conflicts between, like, La Cota people in Shia and Iraq, everybody that's in the Black Hills and the army. But they understand why they're there to a certain extent. but in DC they don't so much see the reason much anymore because you have people like General Sheridan and everything like that

other big figures who just want to continue the military expansion not in this sort of humanist way that was being pushed for a certain amount of time like a diplomatic way to expand instead of a military one and so in 1873 there's a big change in policy towards the Black Hills and this is because of the great panic of 1873 which back then

or until 1929 was known as the Great Depression so just a huge crisis of capitalism globally and the United States you know there's rumors of gold in the Black Hills which is why all the prospectors want to go there and so the United States

the federal government starts hearing this and says oh we could we could take a hold of that gold and use it to push back up the regional economy and also the economy of the country as a whole. Because, you know, dollars still tied to gold at this time. And so gold actually means a lot if you just find gold. And so Washington eventually wins. This sort of reconstruction attitude has already by far ended in the South. And so it will also end in the Black Hills. And this is where Custer starts to go to the Black Hills to be able to lead an

expedition to find gold. He says that he finds gold. It's really not much, but he just says it because he wants to take it whether there's a bunch of gold or not. And so it was opened up. And before it was opened up, there was a meeting between the president and a whole bunch of high advisors trying to determine how best to take the Black Hills. And what they determined is if we pull out the army and just let prospectors go in, then the natives in the area will start killing the prospectors to be able to defend their land because it's defended under the treaty. And if prospectors start being killed, if settlers start being killed, then we can send in the army against them just for obvious reasons. They've created our reason for war. This is exactly what happens. It's just

to a T, and so the U.S. sends in the troops to the Black Hills. This is the Black Hills War, and I'm not going to talk about the war in and of itself other than, you know, Custer dies, and it's just a huge victory, like very, very decisive victory for Lakota and Cheyenne and Arapaho people. Custer had a pretty elite fighting force. and it was routed by the by the indigenous resistance is that correct yeah custer and a couple other important generals uh were all involved in this and were thought of i mean custer was thought of as extremely arrogant by everybody but also they saw him as as useful it's also as a side note custer was also one of the like generals in the reconstruction south he was in texas or not general but

you know, people in the Army in the Reconstruction South sort of participating in that. And it's only once Reconstruction starts to end in Texas that he starts to go up to South Dakota, to participate in Indian Wars and everything like that. So anyways, there's these huge victories at the Battle of the Rosebud and the Battle of Greasy Grass or the Battle of Little Bighorn. And these victories are real big. but there's two things that happen afterwards one after the battle of greasy grass all of these bands sort of disperse

and there's a couple more battles afterwards that don't go so much in favor of Lakota people because they know that they've had this huge victory and that the government is going to send in a lot more troops whenever there's a victory it just means that there's more troops coming it doesn't mean that things are done. And that is what happens. Another thing happens, though, that's really important, which is the Department of War is given control of all of the agencies in this area, sort of in the Missouri River area. And what the Department of Defense does is they start this campaign, which is called Sell or Starve. And this is why I stressed that agency, Indian, non-agency Indian thing so much. because this campaign says all of the hostile Indians

all of the non-agency Indians need to turn themselves in if they don't we will not give food to the Indians that are at agencies so we will starve all of these because and this goes to your point that you brought up earlier they'd killed all the buffalo

there was no way for a lot of people to be able to hunt anymore you completely depended upon the food that was given to you at the agency And so if the government says we're not going to give you food anymore until these other people surrender to the federal government, then you have a huge division that's just further created between the people, you know. And so all of this important stuff is happening during the agency years in the United States. But then we want to look up to what's happening in Canada too.

So this same process of creating forts and agencies and Indian agents and agency Indians, non-agency Indians, blah, blah, blah, all of that is happening in Canada, too. But it's different in Canada because Canada goes around the plains attempting to get people to sign on to numbered treaties. So while treaties in the U.S. at this point were more individualized to nations or even to people, Canadian treaties in the planes covered. tracks of land, and then various nations signed to a treaty that covered whatever portion of land that they lived on. And so you could have one treaty where Assiniboine and Cree like sign on to the same treaty. And then they become, you know, quote-unquote treaty four people or treaty five or wherever they are. And these are, you know, Canadians will know the names of these treaties to say, you know, Treaty 1, Treaty 2, Treaty 3, up through

that they're in like the tent somewhere. As I said, Dakota during this period are seen as American Indians, you know, American like U.S. Indians. And so Dakota people while attempting to sign on to these treaties either were completely rejected from signing on,

so they just could not sign treaties at all, which means that these people got no rights as Indians. And this still extends up to today where there's a lot of Dakota people in Canada who just were not able to sign on to treaties. And then the ones who could, they signed on to these treaties

after being excluded for a certain amount of time and received less rights. So the Canadian government says that these people signed on to these treaties, quote, through grace, not right. So for this reason, they received less land, you know, less land than that land given to quote unquote Canadian Indians,

and had less rights as Indians due to that foreign status. And so in 1876 in Canada, you have something created called the Indian Act. And the Indian Act basically says who is Indian and who is not Indian. So to give an example, if you're Indian in, let's say 1880 and you marry a white person, you federally are no longer Indian. or if you're Indian and you become a doctor or a lawyer or a clergyman or you get a degree, you're no longer Indian. So what this is called is status, either your status or your non-status.

And status is really important during this period, and still up to today, but during this period, status said, if you were a status Indian, then you couldn't vote because you're not really a Canadian. but let's say you become a doctor, you are enfranchised. And so you lose your status as Indian and you become a Canadian citizen. And so then you get the right to vote in Canadian elections and everything like that. But you lose the right to be able to live on reserve, which is what reservations are called in Canada. You lose the right to live on reserve. You lose the right to be able to participate in reserve elections and everything like that.

And this is one of the ways in which Canada does its system of genocide. So Canada mostly doesn't have a blood quantum system, but they have the status system. So you have all this happening. And then lastly, you have in 1885 the Northwest Rebellion, which is a huge rebellion in Canada in the plains. And it's Métis people and Kree people, both rise up against the Canadian government for different reasons but at really near the exact same time. And so Dakota people are sitting in the middle of this,

and some want to participate, but it's not possible because you say, we already have so little rights. What are they going to do to us if we participate in this? Are they going to deport us to the United States, or are they going to take away all of our land, et cetera, et cetera. And even then people are arrested for, even though they didn't participate just sort of for being Indian. So like you have Waphaska, who's a really important Dakota chief in Canada who is just arrested, just because.

And so Dakota people are put into a really hard place in Canada, as I think is pretty apparent. Both like in all of these sort of political senses, you can't, you receive all these less rights, you can't participate in these uprisings because of because you're scared what's going to happen to you as a quote-unquote American Indian. It's just all really, really tough. And so by this point, let's say by 1890 or 1900, you can see that there's a firm split starting to happen between Occhati-Shakowing people in Canada and Occhati-Shaquoing people in the United States. And it's so much so that we have a phrase to describe it, which is, which means there used to not be a border, but now we're tied up to it,

which is like a lot of people in the US, a lot of Chicano or Chicano or whatever, know this sort of as we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us, and it's the same thing for us. We have this exact same problem of this fake border being created. in the middle of our nation, and just having to deal with these two different colonial governments putting themselves, themselves over us. Right. Yeah. And just to tether this conversation to just some Marxist concepts, I really kind of want to stress

the notion that all of this history is what we call in Marxist circles a form of primitive accumulation, whereby, you know, indigenous people are, you know, fundamentally displaced from their land. there's a concerted effort to destroy the natural resources that sustain these people so that they lose their autonomy, basically, to survive outside of the encroaching capitalist colonial system. And then, of course, you have this whole system of borders and, yeah, the deterioration of, I mean, language comes into it when you talk about the settlers taking indigenous children and really stripping them of their heritage and their ancestry and really trying to assimilate them basically into American culture. So, I mean, am I right here that this is all a form of a really primitive accumulation and the destruction of indigenous people as a part of that process? Yeah, and I do, two things. First, I do encourage people that sort of, to a certain extent, think about this in Marxist ways.

I'm not really using a whole lot of Marxist language to talk about this or talking about theory with this, just because I don't think we have the time with all the stuff I want to talk about. But, yeah, I do encourage people to think through that. while we're going through it. The other part is I unfortunately forget the term because it's not primitive accumulation, but Patrick Wolfe in Traces of History, which is a book that I suggest. Anybody read, I suggested the last time I was here, talks about beginning accumulation or something like that. So for example, a lot of the highways in the United States are based on old paths that we used to use just as footpaths to get from place to place, right? You can see maps like within New York

of old native pathways and see the highways or the roads that are put over the top of them. And it's the same thing with farming, with people who did farming where there were fields placed where there already were ones. Or, for example, if you look down in sort of Nawa land in Mexico, you have thousands of years of perfecting corn and stuff like that. And then settlers come in and they already have these paths or they already have this corn that's been made by indigenous people for thousands and thousands of years. And then they can just automatically take it and start using it. And so it gives another way to be able to exploit what's already here.

I see. Yeah. All right. So let's go ahead and move. on to the next chunk of history to cover, and that's roughly from the period of the 1890s through the 1930s. And this really makes up a period in which you see the reservation system come sort of fully online. So can you talk about this period and the role that the development of reservations played in this broader history? So what's happening here is we're having a transition from these agencies to reservations. So we're getting to a time where there's not

really any non-agency people left and everybody has sort of attached themselves to agencies and been you know been forced to attach themselves to agencies and so this period is marked by and this starts in the 1870s but we see it up you know 1890s to 1930s is the early reservation period is marked by an attempt to make natives into farmers and make make natives into productive members quote-unquote productive members of civilization. And so this process is really difficult. And it's difficult for three reasons, many, but I'll point out three. The first is people don't want to. You know, you've been forced to do this. You've been forced to become a farmer. Nobody could have guessed 50 years ago or 100 years ago. I'm going to start planting corn or I'm going to start

planting whatever. I'm going to be a cattleman. And so that makes the whole thing very difficult. The other thing that makes it difficult, which I think we talked about at the beginning of this, is modes of production. So in Europe, when you have this transition from feudalism slash mercantile capitalism to capitalism, this is a transition that takes hundreds of years. And it's also an incredibly bloody process. Like you read about the enclosures in England, horrible, absolutely terrible. and it's something that happens over hundreds and hundreds of years. What's happening here in this reservation period is you have that whole switch of mode of production that's being concentrated into a 40-year period and all of the difficulties that come with, you know,

going from being a for Dakota people, and this happens earlier for Dakota people, by the way, they start, you know, being forced into farming and everything in the 1860s. but you have Dakota people over there who did a little farming beforehand, but not nearly on the amount, like not sort of European standards of farming and everything like that. And you have Lakota people who didn't do it at all. And so forcing people into this is just very, very difficult. And then the last thing that makes it so difficult that I want to point out is BIA mismanagement. So mismanagement of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Yeah. Liberals and I'm not being mean, but liberals or anarchists or left comms or anything like that will complain about Soviet bureaucracy. Nothing does not approach anything to BIA bureaucracy. If BIA bureaucracy is a whole another beast, it just makes like the Soviet Union look like a little kitten, right? Yeah. And, but the bureaucracy is, is, uh,

imaginable. And one example of this is the permit system. So the permit system comes online in Canada in 1885 and it comes to the U.S. and around the same time. And what it is is if you're native, you can't leave the reservation without a permit. So you need to go to the Indian agent and you need to say, I want to go to such and such place for such a such reason, and they'll either okay it or they won't. So you have this incredibly restricted movement. And it's important to think about this too in not only the United States, but in Canada. In Canada, reserves are so much smaller than they are in the United States. I mean, because when you think of Lakota reservations in the U.S., I mean, the Dakota ones in Minnesota are really, really small too. They're like

Canadian reserves. But Lakota reservations are. huge. You think of Standing Rock or Cheyenne River and like even Pine Ridge and Rosebud. They're all really big. But Canadian ones are really small and so you can't move anywhere on these ones without permission. And you'll also need permission to be able to sell things to market. So if you want to sell cattle, well, you have to get permission from the Indian agent first. And all of this sort of permission that you need to get and these permits and everything hinder people's ability to sort of adapt to this new way of life that you've been forced into. You have the typical problems of like droughts and everything like that that'll happen.

But you look at other stuff, you have boarding schools. This is another thing that marks the early reservation period, which you talked about a little, is this breaks, or it's an attempt to break the next generation, an attempt to make the next generation not Indian. And so boarding schools start in 1884 in Canada and also in the 1880s in the United States where, you know, you're stolen from your home, forced to go to the boarding school. You have, you know, forced to have your haircut, you know, beaten if you speak your language. And it makes life very, very difficult. And so we're seeing a couple things happen here.

in you're seeing the movement from motive production you're seeing the young people being attacked to make sure that we don't keep thinking as we used to think in 1887 you'll have the dawes act and in 1889 the sue agreement in canada in 1918 you have the indian amendment allowing reserve land to be lended to non-native farmers what all these things do is the dawes act makes it so land is distributed to individual Indians. So this breaks the collective mode of thinking. This tries to implant on people an understanding of ownership of land. And aside from that, it also makes it so reservations aren't fully owned by, you know, the quote unquote tribe anymore. You have this land allotted out to individuals. and usually, since our reservations are so big,

you have a whole bunch of land, let's say half the reservation left over afterwards that hasn't been allotted. And so then you give that to settlers. And so if you look at maps of reservation land today, of whether it's owned by people that's been allotted to, which is to say individual Indians, or whether it's owned by a tribe, like the tribe itself,

it's just checkerboards of like maybe for three miles you have allotted land and then for five miles you have white owned land and then for two miles you have tribe owned land and everything like that and the same thing happens like i said in 1918 in canada where they allow non-native farmers to go on to reserves and to be able to farm was this a conscious act to sort of decommunalize their psychology and you know bring in this sort of hyper individualism and private property by deconstructing their whole sort of notion of we like us as opposed to i yeah absolutely i mean that's that's the complete reason why it exists and this is part of that eliminatory process that i was talking about is eliminating that thought not only the we sort of thing but you know very importantly forcing into indians

the thought of land is something that is owned by individuals a very capitalist notion and so you have this happened, and then World War I starts. So 1914, World War I starts, and it goes for, you know, three years until the U.S. joins. And this affects us, too, before the U.S. even joins the war, because land is opened up to more and more farmers in order to feed the war market. So you make more food and more whatever for those powers that are fighting in Europe. Once the U.S. does eventually joined. A lot of people will either be forced in about 50% of the natives in general across the United States. And I'm only talking about the United States. I don't know these statistics for Canada, but 50% of the native people in the United States will be conscripted in. And then the other half

will go in on their own. And you have people, what happens at least on Lakota reservations. I don't know if this happened in other places, but Indian agents would go around and they would go to the old societies that existed. And societies were basically groups of people that lived sort of with certain values. And part of being in a society, at least for Wichasha or for men, was this thought of being a warrior to a certain extent. It wasn't the whole thing, but it was part of it. And so the Indian agents will go to the societies, they'd go to the leaders of the societies, and they'd say, give us your best men for the war. And I think this is really important to hammer home because it shows that during this period, during World War I, the reservation period has just begun. And the government is still thinking of natives in the sense of we just fought you, or at least with Lakota people.

We just fought you. And we know you're good warriors. And so come and fight for us against the. the Germans. And so, you know, compared to the 1% of U.S. troops that would die in World War I, 5% of natives who fought for the U.S. died. And this always happens in all the subsequent wars, as natives will die mostly at the highest rate of all ethnic groups in the United States. So you have all this sad stuff happening, but there's good things that come out of this, too. And I think one thing to point out is the literature boom that really starts in the early 1900s and up into the 30s and 40s, you could say, is you have like this first boom of literature.

So you have people like Zindikalashawin, who's Gertrude Simmons Benoit, Bonin, I mean, wonderful writer. I mean, absolutely great writer who wrote against World War I a lot, but also just wrote a whole bunch of good what you could call sort of like, anthropological texts and stuff like that. Great writer. You have O'Hiaz-A, who's Charles Eastman, also a really good writer, wrote a book that is like, I think it's called The Souls of Indians.

I forget exactly what it is, but it's like the souls of black folks written by W.E.B. Du Bois, but for us, he was Dakota. Zindhalla Shah-win was I-Hang-Touin. And then you have Pituashtawi, who is Ihantuan also, Ella Deloria. She wrote novels.

She did a lot of cataloging work of the language and everything like that. Really, really great writer. And then you have Hechakasapa, or Black Elk. And Black Elk was, he wrote a lot about traditional beliefs and, or he had stuff like that written for him by white people. but he himself wrote a lot of religious stuff because he was a Catholic. And so he wrote in all of the sort of Lakota language Catholic newspapers and stuff like that a lot. And so you have all of these writers coming up in this period and they're all really, really great people to read. Yeah, fascinating.

And at the end of this conversation, I do want to ask you a little question about the role that Christianity plays in all of this because I think there's a fascinating history there and perhaps a difficult one. But we'll get to that in a bit. So let's move on to the next period of history. We've just covered the first, you know, three or so decades of the 1900s. So let's go from the 1930s up through the 60s. And specifically, maybe you can talk about the IRA or the Indian Reorganization Act. Yes.

So we'll start with the context surrounding the IRA. Okay. Or Indian reorganization. I mean, I need to say the full thing where people are going to think we're talking about the Irish. I know. So the first thing to say, think about is the depression. This is the first context. There's not much to say special about the depression, really, just that it made life a lot harder than it already was, as it did for basically

everybody. But it killed any businesses that were beginning to start. And it just, yeah, it just made life more difficult. And then I also want to just go back one more time and look at the goals of the United States here. The goal of the United States is the elimination of indigenous people, the elimination of Lakota, Lakota, anybody else. By this time, so by the Indian Reorganization app, the United States has eliminated our mode of production. It's attempted to eliminate our languages, epistemologies, ontologies, cosmovisions, through boarding schools, and the banning of ceremonies and stuff like that.

It's attempted to make us into individuals by making our connection to land an individual one through the Dawes Act. So you have to ask it. point, what's left to attack? And it's the tribe and traditional leadership structures. So when I say tribe, I mean this government-designated form of how it sees groups of people and then the actual traditional leadership structures. So the Indian Reorganization Act, if I put it down real small and try and define it really quickly with few words, it enforces democratic government based on the model constitution of BIA lawyers who drafted it. And that model constitution is somewhat based on the

US constitution. And so they try and put this democratic structure over reservations. It enshrines blood quantum, which is really, really important because this is going to be one of the ways the United States tries to eliminate us as a people, which it's also important to say blood quantum existed before that, but this is also 1934. So it's something that's relatively new. I don't really think you start have Indians as a race being something as we see it today until around the 50s or the 60s. But we'll talk about that later. Well, for those listeners that don't know, could you briefly define what blood quantum is? Yeah, blood quantum is a system which seeks to define who is federally Indian and who isn't federally Indian. And so let's say that you have reservation one and

Reservation 2. Reservation 1 says that you need to be a fourth Reservation 1 Indian to be able to be federally Indian. And Reservation 2 also says you need to be a fourth Reservation 2 Indian to be federally Indian. So what happens is let's say someone who is one fourth Reservation 1 Indian marries somebody who's one fourth Reservation 2 Indian and they have a kid. That kid is, and I think this is how the math works out, one eighth reservation one Indian and one eighth

reservation two Indian. And that kid therefore can no longer get federal status as Indian from either of those reservations, and they're no longer Indian on a federal level, which means that the government has successfully gotten

rid of another person. The goal of blood quantum then is to be able to, if eventually just force all native peoples out of existence because let's say you live on a reservation that's 500 people and the blood quantum level is set at a fourth or even like a half everybody is related in some way I mean this is like the constant joke is you have to text your grandma to make sure that like you're not about to date your cousin or something like that yeah And so, but that's a serious thing because you don't want to date your cousin, so then you have to go and, you know, date somebody who maybe is, you know, who basically doesn't have the same reservation status as you.

And everybody in the community might need to do this. And slowly you have the reservation go down and the amount of people until there's nobody left. And then the government can just erase it from existence. And so in the Indian Reorganization Act, this is where this really begins to be enforced, because it's in their model constitution. One fourth is within the model constitution, is like the suggested blood quantum that every reservation should hold up. So you have all this. And then the other thing you have is the switch from Indian agents, so like these sort of dictatorial white figures to who by this time we're called superintendents. you have the switch from them to, you know, quote unquote,

democratically elected tribes members as, you know, president of a tribe or something like that. And all of this might sound good because it's, you know, giving sort of a more democratic model to the reservation, and it's making it so people can be elected, so there aren't any more of these dictators, white dictators over reservations and everything like that. But it has to be thought of as this is how they attempt to eliminate traditional leadership structures.

So no longer do you have the traditional way in which you figure out who is chief of a certain people. But now you have to follow the sort of U.S. constitutional outlined way of democratically electing somebody. So it's imposing sort of like a Euro parliamentarian structure to these societies, right? Yeah, exactly. And like I said, it's just another way to try and break off of all the things I listed before. It's another way to try and break us. And you have the same thing in Canada happened too in a pretty big different way, but you have in the 1920s, or in the year 1920s, an amendment to the Indian Act that bans hereditary rule of bans,

which is what they call tribes. And then in 1936, you have an amendment to the Indian Act allowing Indian agents to direct banned council meetings. And so you still have the Indian agent playing a pretty big role over the bans, but in banning hereditary rule and forcing this sort of democratic model over the people, this is another way of trying to eliminate these traditional leadership structures and try and find people who more ally with the way that the United States wants things to go. The other big thing in this period is the Pick and Sloan dam projects. And this is continued dispossession.

So what happens is along the Missouri, a whole bunch of dams are built in this period. One big one being the Oaxia Dam, and that's the one I'm going to most focus on. When this dam is built, so it's built down the river from, mainly from Crow Creek, Lower Brule, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock. These are the Lakota people. It also hurts people at Fort Berthold, but not going to cover just because they're not Lakota, and this is supposed to focus on all chitishakou and stuff. And so when this dam is built, all of the water creeps up because those places are north of the dam. And so it puts places underwater.

So on these reservations, 16 to 34% of families are dispossessed of their land. So a third of the people on certain reservations are forced to move. 9% of farming land is put underwater on Cheyenne River 40% of farming land is put underwater on Crow Creek 6% of land is put underwater in general and 7% on Cheyenne River and 17% of land on lower brule is put underwater it reduces 80% of Timberland acreage

across all of these reservations and so what this does is it removes people and it destroys the economy again. And this is something that we see over and over about every 20 years or so, the reservation economy is destroyed by some sort of thing that happens. And so when you look and you see, for example,

you have all of that timberland acreage destroyed. Well, this, I mean, timber is really important just as a source of money. Also, all of this land near the water is some of the best agricultural land. You know, you also use the timber to give shade to cattle and everything like that when they're grazing. All of this put underwater just destroys economies. And then the government, you know, tries to send resources to be able to replace these sort of things.

And it's all of terrible quality. None of it works well at all. And so you have all of these people who are displaced in effect. And I mean, economically, you know, generationally still affected today by the displacement of all these families from where they live. I mean, there's, for example, in Standing Rock, there's a community called Fort Yates. And when my grandma was born, Fort Yates, this dam hadn't been constructed yet. And it was just a nice little community.

And then by the time that the Oaxi Dam is constructed, Fort Yates is now like an island with a bridge to it. because all of the water went around all of this land and created this like island of a community out of what was just grassland before. And so it's just really, really difficult. And then World War II happens. More people sent off to fight and, you know, more people, you know, young men and everything dying and stuff like that. And at this time, I would say this, this is sort of a contentious thing. but I think this is where the frontier actually closes probably once the because these dams we've actually jumped forward in history a bit because they're not in the 30s but they're in the 60s and stuff like that but World War II had a huge effect and I think these final sort of displaciers from the dam constructions is the final effects of white accumulation of wealth from our land it's just this time. they're not settling on it, this time they're putting it underwater to receive energy and those sort of benefits from it. But I think this is where it actually happens, the closing of the frontier.

What's the contention around that issue? Then what's the other like dominant view? The dominant view by far is that, and I said this last time it was here. So I've, I've reformed mind, you know, it is wounded knee is the end of it, is what people say. And I disagree with this for a couple of reasons. The first is because the frontier, if we look away from history and we go to like metahistory, like historical narratives, the frontier is the point at which like Indians are supposed to disappear from history and that the U.S. fully claims all of its territory. So the end of the frontier is key because it creates the country that we live in today in the mind of most like historians. But I think ending the frontier period at Wounded Knee is just

sort of, it makes no sense because it says that the frontier period ended when the end of hostilities came. And so when you have the massacre at Wounded Knee, it said this is the last hostility that you have and when when people are fully sort of forced onto reservations. But I disagree with that because if you look at the context for Wundadne, it's a group of people, Sintegleshka and his band and other bands to traveling from one agency, from Shayan River agency, down to Pine Ridge Agency. So these people already belong to agencies and they're just in transfer. And so I think by this time hostilities had already ended and Wounded Knee was just a massacre, but it's not a show of hostility. And I also just don't agree with the sense that

hostility is the definition of the frontier. I think displacement is a better definition. And by the end of the dams and everything like that, I think that's a better show of like the end of big displacement. I mean, it still goes on today, right? But the big, big ones. For sure. Yeah, incredibly interesting. I had no idea that there was like some contention around that issue. But as you lay it out, it totally makes sense. So that that gets a up roughly through the, you know, the 60s. And, you know, the 60s and the 70s, this was a time of, you know, explosion globally of like national liberation movements, decolonization movements, France Fanon writes, Wretched of the Earth in 61, civil rights, you know, all through

the 60s, MLK, Malcolm X, et cetera. So can you talk about how these movements, the civil rights movements, labor movements, sort of affected indigenous people in what role Lakota and Dakota people specifically might have played in these movements through the end of the 20th century? Yeah, so what happens as a background is in 1956 you have the Indian Relocation Act, which has been later described as, quote, an unfettered, ill-conceived program, essentially a one-way ticket from rural to urban poverty. what the Indian Relocation Act was is an act which basically said if you live on a reservation we want you to leave the reservation

we want you to go to the city and become an urban worker and so it would say that if you go let's say you live on Pine Ridge and you're going to go to San Francisco that when you get to San Francisco you'll get money on your way there

and when you get there you'll get more money and there also be an office there to be able to help you find jobs. The government is here for you to help you find employment and to live well in the city. And obviously people get there and there's no office anywhere and there's no money and you've just become impoverished in a place that's like a thousand miles away from where you used to live. It's real goal is to evacuate the reservation of native people. And this is easily seen today.

Today, I think the numbers, it's either 66% or 75%, somewhere within that of native people live off reservation, and then the other 25 to 33% live on reservation. It's attempting to get people out of the reservation area, and then what happens in 1960 is termination. I mean, it's from the 40s through the 60s and 70s, I think, is this act to terminate tribes. and this is pretty much exactly what it sounds like the government eliminates the tribe as a federal entity, it eliminates people's status

as Indians and it eliminates the reservation and so everything's gone all of that is sort of gone and this is like the end it's what the government saw as the end of its whole process that I described earlier of making people into individuals and killing language

in culture and everything like that, changing mode of production, blah, blah, all of that sort of stuff. The traditional leadership structure is killing that is you end up terminating the reservation. Now, Lakota people are affected by the relocation act. So, for example, you have someone like Russell Means, who is an important figure who grew up most, I forget in what city, but grew up mostly in California. He was born on Pine Ridge, grew up mostly in California, and then would come back to Pine Ridge when he was older. So a lot of people are affected by this. Lakota people are not affected by termination. Dakota people almost are, which is really important.

So all the Dakota in Minnesota, their reservations and their tribes are almost terminated. There's four in Minnesota. And in the 50s, one Congress or like state legislature. legislature person tried to terminate the tribes, but luckily it didn't end up happening. Now that you have all these people in cities, big cities, you've brought together a whole bunch of people from a whole bunch of different tribes. So like I said, let's say you're in San Francisco. Maybe you have someone from Pine Ridge, like you have a Lakota person, you have an Apache person, you have, I don't know, a Hopi person, whatever, all these different people

together and you have this transition in a certain sense from national thinking to racial thinking. And we still think of ourselves as nations today, but the prominence of thinking of oneself as Indian or thinking of oneself as native or indigenous or whatever word you want to use starts to rise up. And this is what AIM comes out of, American Indian movement. It's sort of a racial movement slash national movement to fight back against all the stuff that the United States has done up to that point in the 70s. And so if we look away from AIM to a minute, we look back at the reservation, we'll look at Pine Ridge. So in 1972, in Pine Ridge, you have a new president elected, and his name is Dick Wilson. He was incredibly corrupt, and nepotism during his presidency was off the charts.

It went to a whole other level. Eventually, impeachment proceedings are brought against him, I think in 73. I mean, they eventually fail because the people who brought the impeachment proceedings against him weren't ready yet. And so after they fail, he'll take tribal funds and use them to form a paramilitary group on the reservation. called the Guardians of the Ogallala Nation. Because of this, and sort of, I mean, it's a paramilitary group. They just go around and beat people up and kill people. This creates a whole bunch of, I mean, protest mountain, mountain, mount against Dick Wilson.

And this is the background for you have aim coming onto the reservation and occupying wounded knee. They had been asked by multiple people to go and occupy the place to sort of make a stand. against Dick Wilson. And you'll have the Guardians of the Oglala Nation, so this paramilitary unit against AIM. You'll have the police and the FBI against AIM and the National Guard sort of in the background waiting. But during this whole occupation, U.S. site and global sort of vision of native problems in the U.S. really takes off. And AIM makes a big statement with that. And from wounded knee to doing a whole bunch of different things, AIM is going to push forward a lot of legislation and stuff like that.

I mean, I think it's mostly because of AIM that termination ended. Because obviously, like, not all tribes were able to be terminated. A lot of tribes were able to get their status back after they were terminated. And I think this is probably one of the most important things that AIM did, of like a knock-on effect of what AIM did. So AIM will have a huge role And people can read about that on their own Because I can't explain everything

But they did a lot And especially AIME and all of the Lakota members That'll join Because initially it's formed mainly by Ojibwe people in Minnesota But all the Lakota people that will join Will participate in a whole bunch of protests In South Dakota, all around South Dakota

And all around Nebraska And it'll spread out everywhere Right I mean all across the country from Alcatraz to D.C. This is just, AIM is everywhere. Even though AIM is there, you'll still have Dick Wilson. When AIM leaves, he'll still be the president of Pine Ridge.

And this is sort of, I want to focus on Wilson because when I said that like the democratic structure that was forced upon reservations wasn't exactly a positive, even though it may sound like it, that you no longer have this dictatorial rule of the Indian agent. There's some people like Dick Wilson who take on the role of the Indian agent, even though they're Indians. And so for the rest of Dick Wilson's presidency, 50 plus political opponents of his will be killed during this time by the Guardians of the Oglomalination. Is this the period known as the reign of terror then? Yeah, yeah. And I mean, really, like, I would categorize it as, like a fascist government over the reservation.

I mean, it's really wild and bad. But still focusing on AIM, AIM does a lot of good. And so then to sort of round it out, I want to look at like a couple legislative things that happen near this period when we get sort of all the way up to the 2000s, which is in 19, I think it's 1980, there's a court case, a Supreme Court case, which is Sioux Nation of Indians versus the United States.

And basically, this is a whole bunch of, like, Lakota and Ihantua and Ihantuanah sort of tribes that have been made by the government fighting for the Black Hills. Of course, the government took the Black Hills and a whole bunch of other land from us, but we find the Black Hills to be really important. It's an extremely important place for us. And the way that I always try and describe it is that, the Black Hills is where we believe that like people came into existence. So imagine if like it's known where the Garden of Eden was. And imagine it's known where Adam and Eve were created. We know all that. And so we find that place to be incredibly important for us. And when the United States took it, it was really, really hard. And so this Supreme Court case happens. And the Supreme Court says in an eight to one ruling that the United States did indeed steal the Black Hills.

Now, they did not say, we'll give it back to you. What they said is, we'll give you the amount of money that it was worth with interest accrued and, you know, converted to what the dollar exists today, and we'll pay you that as recognition that we stole it. Today, that's about, like in 2019, that's about $1.5 billion. And from all these reservations where life is so difficult, you know, where you have 80% plus unemployment rates, none of them have accepted and none of them ever will accept because it says that we're okay with the United States having stolen this land and we'll accept money to show that the United States legitimately has the land. And so you have this court case in the U.S. And then in 2007 in Canada, you have the wildest thing ever, which is the Canadian government goes forward to the nine Dakota and Lakota bands that are in Canada. And it says, we will give you $60.3 million if you renounce any claim to Aboriginal treaty rights.

So 2007, this is 10 years ago, the Canadian government is trying to, still today, very intently, trying to make sure that Dakota people and Lakota people in Canada have no rights whatsoever. And just trying to terminate these reserves and bans from existence. Another thing that I actually forgot to say earlier, and I'll put it in really quickly, it is not until 1960 that status Indians gain the right to vote in Canada. And this isn't through oppressive sort of systems where they can vote, but they can't actually vote because they'll get beat up if they get near a poll or something like that. What it actually is is just legally cannot vote. don't have the right. Not until 1960. And so anyways, you have these two things happening in the

United States and in Canada, which massively affect. I mean, you can still see them trying to take our land up to today or eliminate us up to today. And this is the struggle that we get to and that you see right now with all of the environmental struggles that are happening and with the fight against the Dakota access pipeline and all of that sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. And, you know, as we zoom in towards the conclusion here, and first of all, I'll say this again,

but thank you so much for covering literally centuries of history there. Yeah, you taught me a lot in that as well, and it's just fascinating and so important. But I mentioned earlier, I wanted to talk about Christianity, and we've mentioned throughout this show many times, the Pine Ridge Reservation. And, you know, I'm on the sort of, in Omaha, you know, I'm very close to these,

territories that we're talking about, and Pine Ridge is a huge regional issue, and it has been for a long time because of many reasons. Lots of protests up there. There's a whole alcohol thing where, you know, it's a form of genocidal slaughter through these intoxicating substances that white settlers profit off of outside of the reservation proper, etc. But I was watching this documentary on Pine Ridge, and it was, I mean, fucking devastating, the poverty, just the deprivation of everything, disconnection from the cultural, historical community that they come from.

And it's just, I think even statistically, the amount of, like, sexual assault victims, the amount of suicide. I think it's the second, like, Pine Ridge is the second lowest life expectancy in the entire Western Hemisphere. So you're talking, you know, a really brutalized community

and this ongoing genocide. But as I was watching this documentary, which was incredibly touching, the people there were constantly sort of talking about how like one guy was talking about how you know jesus if he found jesus and that allowed him to kick his alcohol habit another person found jesus and that allowed him to kick his addiction habit you mentioned earlier that black that black elk was catholic um so we have this sort of tension here when when christianity is a huge part of the genocide and the colonizing force i mean

manifest destiny all of these things come into play so how how do you think about these these intersections and how do you think about the role that Christianity plays in the lives of indigenous people to this day? Yeah, it's very complicated, to say the least. So I'm Catholic, and my family is Catholic because my grandma's grandma was forced to go to a Catholic boarding school on Standing Rock. So I think the whole Christian thing is really difficult because you, have a couple different eras happen. So you have the beginning era, which we'll say starts like at the 1880. And you can look at people like Hehaka Sapa or Black El and see this, where these are people who pretty much genuinely convert. And, you know, it's hard to define genuine when you're

forced onto the reservation and there's all these huge changes happening around you. But at the very least, they decide somewhat on their own. And, you know, you know, these are people who are in their 30s or in their 40s or like ages like this. When you have the boarding schools start to pop up, then this is when kids, like my grandma's grandma, were forced to become Christian and put in there and it was indoctrinated into people. And so I think for a lot of us, it's like a really difficult sort of tension there between the history of Christianity and also like our belief in it. For Catholicism in particular, I don't know about the other ones just because I don't know like what, for example, like Lakota Episcopalians think and stuff like that, but Lakota Catholicism is a thing specifically. And so in, I think it was 1999, there was an enculturation task force into the church. So, and what that means is like Lakota customs become part of the church in places where there's a

a lot of Lakota people who go to the church. And so, for example, if you go to a church on Pine Ridge, for example, then there is the possibility of having the sermon being in Lakota, and there's the possibility of being able to use, like, traditional drums as the music and everything like that, have the music be in Lakotiapi and being able to perform certain old ceremony, that have become Catholic, like there's the smoking of the pipe and everything like that and four winds or like four direction song that is become incorporated into the church to a certain

extent. There was even, and this will be a couple months ago, I think by the time this comes out, but there was a synod on the Amazon of the Catholic Church. And a synod is basically when the church talks about an issue that's impacting a certain community. And so in this sense, the church was talking about issues that impact evangelization in the Amazon and impact indigenous Catholics in the Amazon. And so when the synod was happening, of course, there was a lot of indigenous people from the Amazon who went to Rome to be able to speak about these issues and for the church to be able to figure out something to be done about pretty much, I mean, the big non, like

you could say, the big secular issues, which I don't like calling them secular, because they're religious too, but the big issues that aren't about like priests or like Eucharist or anything like that is about Bolsonaro and all the miners and all the loggers and all the people who just go in and burn down villages and stuff like that and how to prevent this from happening. So anyways, the synod happens and during the synod there's this side group and it's led by Jesuits who gets together North American Indians and South American Indians. to sort of have this hemispherical conversation about colonialism. And there was a Lakota man who was there.

And unfortunately, I don't know his name, but he opened up his talk by saying, what you're going through right now in the Amazon is what we went through 150 years ago. And we have full solidarity with you. And we understand what's happening. And we want to be able to speak with you to be able to share this solidarity. solidarity and also share ways of knowing how to like deal with what's happening. And so with this in mind and talking about sort of Christianity in general on like among Lakota people and Dakota people and everything like that, you have the hard histories

in it and the the hard current stuff, of course, that like everybody knows the problems that the Catholic Church has, but you still have these conversations going on within the church between La Cota people and other indigenous people to have this solidarity and figure out how to fight against settler colonialism. And I think that's a big important thing for me because it shows that like despite the hard history, the church, and there's still a lot of change

that needs to happen within the church, but it still is there, you know, and trying to look for a solution to these problems. And I think a lot of other people sort of feel the same way. And so you can see that like the old issues are trying to be resolved. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, there are certain parallels with this, this tension in the American black community. But there's also this underside.

Like, you know, a lot of people in the U.S. or in the West can often think of Christianity as like inherently reactionary force because of history. But at the same side, there is this undercurrent of liberation theology and these tensions exist in different communities. But it does serve that, that, I don't know. It's just, it's hard to think about, but I, anyways, I appreciate you sort of talking about that. And I know that wasn't scripted in our outline, but I appreciate your input. I'm, I still have a lot to think about with regards to this stuff.

But, yeah, if anybody wants to, just because you bring up liberation theology, there's, I think his first name is George. I'm not sure, but his last name is Tinker. So George Tinker. And he's Anglican, I think, but he wrote a, and I don't know if he's, I don't know if he's a deacon or whatever. I don't know how Anglicans work. He's Christian and he's native. And he wrote a book that's titled something like American Indian liberation theology or something of that. And so people can look up Tinker, just type in like native Tinker theology and you'll find it somewhere. And you can read about that stuff sort of more in depth because he has a lot of

interesting things to say on it. Also, the one other thing I forgot to say on Catholicism that I wanted to say is uh hehaka sapa like black elk is in the process of becoming a saint in the catholic church and so it's another another one of those things of trying to make things work that is incredibly important for me i'm like constantly watching the candidization process and seeing if there's any updates going on with it or anything because i find that to be a really uh incredible thing yeah beautiful and amazing i had no idea um so let's go ahead and close this conversation out with just a concluding question, which is, like, overall, what aspects of this history do you really want to emphasize, and maybe how can we, as revolutionaries, take this history and let it guide us or

learn from it as we enter, you know, deeper and deeper into the very fraught 21st century? Part of this has just been highlighting this eliminatory process. It's something that we've come back to throughout the whole thing, to make it more apparent for people to recognize. But one of the things I really want to highlight, too, is we've been here for that. of years, and we're still here, and we're still fighting. Another thing is I also don't think you can't understand the history of whatever land you live on if you don't understand the history of the indigenous peoples. The history of most of South Dakota, for example, is only 100 years old, 150 at the most. So how are you supposed to understand the fights that are necessary in that

state if you don't know the history, except for the last hundred years of white history, right? So what I want to encourage people to do is not just walk away from this. And for example, let's say you live in Arizona and say, wow, that was interesting. Lakota and Dakota history, interesting. I want to encourage that person in Arizona to pick up a history book by the people whose land they live on and learn about their history and learn about their current struggles. And, you know, all of that sort of stuff, whatever it may be. Like, if you live in Washington, I hope for this to be sort of a way for that person to move forward and learn about Salish history or something like that and not just have their mind on the history of a native people who's land that they don't live in.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's great. I went to Washington recently, and that was part of my experience there was, you know, trying to, as I was. on the trip and before and even after thinking about the indigenous people that once lived in that territory and all of that history as I'm looking at, you know, these beautiful sites. And of course, I live in Nebraska. So, you know, I live off, you know, the Platte River and the Missouri River, born and raised. And this land is, yeah, it goes back centuries, millennia and the indigenous people that took care of this land for so long. And then to look at how just the brutal agricultural

practices practice in this land, the extractiveness of capitalism and just the devastation of the land broadly. It really, it hurts to see it. And I think, you know, I say this a lot, but it's really important that when we talk about decolonization, when we talk about overthrowing capitalism, when we talk about climate change, you know, indigenous peoples, the world over are on the front lines battling extractive industries and battling the very mechanisms of pollution and climate change. And it's really like, it's really inseparable. There is no solution to a problem like climate change that's not completely tethered to the rights and self-determination of indigenous peoples because like I said they took care of land for millennia and capitalism comes

over here and in 200 years we're facing an extinction level threat and that that really really says a lot so before I let you go thank you so much Morris for coming on and covering this history every time you come on I learn so much from you I also love following you on Twitter you have a great sense of humor. Yeah, I remember it's so silly, but your Greta tweet, like, I'm going to re Greta this. I don't know why, but that should have me laughing for like two weeks. I forgot about that one. It's just silly, but stuck in my head. But anyways, thank you so much for coming on. Definitely look forward to collaborating with you in the future before I let you go. Can you just let listeners know where they can maybe learn more about this topic, some recommendations,

and then where people can find you online? Yeah. So I suggest everybody go on a website called native hyphen land dot CA this is a basically a map of native land and from this

you can figure out whose land you live on and then you can figure out what books to get because I'm about to give books

on Ocetti Shakomi history but like I said if you live in Arizona if you live in Washington don't buy these books buy books about DNA people or about Salish people

or whatever so for people that do live on our land there's a lot of guard garbage on Ocheti Shakoing people, and it comes out every day. So, for example, there was a book recently released by a European author who specializes in Native history, the one I talked about earlier, who likes to say that natives are imperialists

and whatever, who he just wrote a book on Lakota people, and it's terrible. And so what I suggest you read is for the early period, so 1600s, 1700s, and, you know, before then, you want to look for winter counts, and you really just have to go on. online. There is a book on Winter Counts, but it costs a lot of money. So just go online, look up like Lakota Winter Counts or Dakota Winter Counts and you'll find stuff. And this is how you can learn more about that early history. For the sort of more history from the 1800s to 1900, I suggest the Plain Sioux and U.S. colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee by Jeffrey Ostler. It's a really, really good book. And then for that history in that period and early,

but also the recent stuff. So from like 1900 to today, our history is the future by Nick Estes. Very good. And it's really good for that later 1900 to today period. And then the last one is perspective of Saskatchewan Dakota slash Lakota elders on the treaty process with Canada. And that's by Chief Leo J. Omanee,

who's chief of the Wachpe, Trouan Dakota Nation in Canada, which gives sort of a history about the whole tree, treaty process for that quote to people in Canada, the history that leads to that treaty process and how it affected people and everything like that. It's also a really, really good thing to read. That's great. And then where can listeners find you online? I am on Twitter. Morse underscore Lakota. Morse is spelled M-O-R-S and then underscore Lakota. Wonderful. And I will put as many of those links in the show notes as possible. So those recommendations, most of them will be in the show notes. So definitely go and check those out. Thanks again, Morse,

coming on. I always love talking to you, and let's do it again soon. No problem. Thank you for having me. Indian legislations on the desk of a do-right congressman. Now, he don't know much about the issue, so he picks up the phone, and he asks advice of the senator out in Indian country, a darling of the energy companies who are ripping off what's left to the reservations. I learned a safety rule. I don't know who to think. Don't stand. Don't stand. Between the reservation and the corporate bank, they'll send in federal tanks. It is a nice, but it's reality. Buried my heart and wounded me.

This in the earth. Cover me with pretty lies. bury my heart at me They've got these energy Energy companies Who want the land And they've got churches

By the cousins Want to guide our hand And sign our mother earth Over to pollution War and green Get bitch, get bitch, quick Burry my heart It's boomed at me

Bring my heart and Deep in the earth Carry my heart and wondered me Cover me with pretty lines Burry my heart and won't hurt me We get the federal marshals We get the covert spies We get the liars by the fire

And we get the FPIs They lie and call in court. court and get nailed and still felt here goes off to jail. The police don't match the gun. Carry my heart in Humberi. An eighth of the reservation. Burry my heart at Bumbei. Transfer in secret.

Barry my heart is from Bende Kyi. The murder and intimidation. Bury my heart in Bweney. My girl. And then he made talked about uranium. Her head was filled with bullets and her body docked. The FBI cut off her hands and told us she died of exposure. Burry my heart and wounded me.

Deep in the earth. It's pretty life Burry my heart and moving me Burry my heart and moving me Burry my heart and moving me Burry my heart and boom at me Burry my heart and boom at me bury my heart and boom at me

Burry my heart and move at me bury my heart and move at me bury my heart and move at me bury my heart and movement in me My heart is perfecting We had the Gold Rush was Why didn't we learn to crawl

And now our history Gets written in a liar's Scrom, they tell you Hey honey, you can still be an Indian Don't ask the why On Saturday night Oh, bury my heart is Fulmini

My heart is Fon10 Deep in the earth Burry my heart and broken Take Cover me with trimming lines Jury my heart and open me bury my heart and crimped me bury my heart and don't and me

bury my heart and don't and me me bury my heart and broken me so let me realize bury my heart and broken me bury my heart and broken me bury my heart and fucking me I'm going to be able to be able to be able to be. I'm going to be it.