Word: lakota
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...farm life in winter. "Cows aren't smart enough to paw through the snow like horses, so you have to feed them," one child explained. A Sioux student on a reservation in South Dakota wrote candidly about what is happening to one branch of the tribe: "Life for the Lakota people is going in a downward direction . . . To control it would take great human power or magic...
Against this background a letter came East last month from Porcupine, South Dakota--from a bitter Lakota Indian. Russell Means. Means is running for president of his tribal council with a slate of candidates representing a program known as TREATY--an acronym for the True Revolution for Elders. Ancestors, Treaties and Youth His platform is utterly revolutionary--complete and immediate severance of relations with the United States...
...backing for his rather extreme view, Means cites Article Six of the Constitution, which dictates that the U.S. can only enter treaties with sovereign nations, and he cites the fact that the government has signed four treaties with the Lakota nation. Means says that his tribe "is a sovereign nation, and it is time we started acting sovereign...
...country are rightly angry over years of shabby treatment at the hands of the government. They are rightly dismayed over their powerlessness, and the double-edged sword of development. Companies like Union Carbide, working with the Reagan Administration's blessing, are moving to get rights to strip-mine the Lakota land, one of the poorest in the country, a bare plot of 4500 square miles in southwest South Dakota. Their goal is the fantastically lucrative uranium bed that sits under the land and that could, if properly cultivated, prove a panacea to the tribe's poverty. It could mean, among...
American Indians have been holding on, just barely, for a century. The U.S., meanwhile, has not helped them toward self-reliance, but practically encouraged a Government dependence that the bingo businesses, here and there, are helping tribes to break. Tim Giago, who publishes the Lakota Times, an Indian newspaper, is understandably ambivalent about the cinder-block-and-tin palaces springing up on reservations. "We've got to find a means to survive," he says, "but I don't see our young people making any great strides working in casinos. This is O.K. as a stopgap, but why should...