Standing Rock is about more than a trending news narrative. It’s about honor and standing one’s ground, even to the death, even through hundreds of years. Integrity can be an ancestral legacy.
A bit o’ background from alotta research before getting to my final thud of a point [*this is just a brief overview of one small piece of the centuries-long conflict put in my own summation, and i skip an exhaustive list of gory, shocking events & details of even this one part]:
Millions of acres of land throughout North & South Dakota have always belonged to the 9 tribes of Sioux Nation (Standing Rock is home to one) — what was called the Great Sioux Reservation, and after hundreds of years of fighting to keep and safeguard their sacred, lush land rife with resources, and consistently being *under siege (*killed, raped, pillaged, vandalized, and terrorized in the doing), it was officially sanctioned on record as lawfully theirs by a treaty between the US Gov’t and Sioux council back in 1868. [In fact, there were many treaties through the centuries, but that’s for a more in-depth account]. Despite this law-binding agreement that the United States gov’t itself co-wrote & signed, our federal government has both directly and indirectly usurped the law and confiscated their territory chunk by chunk over the past 170+ years: directly by seizing the land (knowingly breaking the statutes of the treaty and disregarding the unlawful unjustness of that, even advertising & auctioning land sales while the Sioux occupied the very land being sold), and indirectly by backing corporate invasion and refusing to step in and uphold law when rights are being infringed upon.
In 1980 (after decades of trying to file a suit), the Tribal Council was finally heard by the Supreme Court, who swiftly stepped in like, “Whoa whoa whoa, this shit ain’t right” (I’m, um, paraphrasing here; but they did in fact state this verbatim: “A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history.” damn. calling some thieving fed bullshit OUT.) The Court declared that the land had in fact been seized illegally, and it ruled that the territories were to be reclaimed in full by the Sioux, WITH payment AND interest for the time it’d been apprehended (*note: the original case records in full are open to be viewed online). The U.S. Gov’t reticently acquiesced and coughed up 102 million dollars to the Sioux….To which, the Sioux REFUSED, knowing the complicated and compounded implications of treating their beloved homeland like a financial transaction as if haggling over some commodity, and because accepting the money would legally terminate Sioux demands for the hopeful, eventual return of the Black Hills, the spiritual center for all the tribes which holds particular sacred value amongst all the land (as well, stolen from them and not returned in the 1868 treaty of Fort Laramie)….They don’t want the damned money. They want those holy Black Hills back under their protection.
Fast forward to now, that money has since been sitting in a protected trust still earmarked for them, compounding interest that’s accrued to 1.3 BILLION dollars today…..and the Sioux STILL won’t take it.
They stand their ground, literally, that what is sacred cannot be bought.
Fucking. Epic.
The Blyss Catalyst 