How Treaties Broken with Native Americans Resonate Even Today

One of the things that they talked about in Black Elk was the practice of the ghost dance. This idea that they were going to somehow or another bring back the old ways. And it's a sad, sad story. When you hear them talk about it, especially because it's coming from the words of Black Elk who was a guy that was there with the Battle of Little Bighorn. And then from then now is an older man talking about what his experiences have been like, having had seen his people move to reservations and seen basically every single treaty broken. I mean was there a single treaty the United States had with the Indians that it didn't break? That's insane. I mean every single one. And most treaties had some similar language. A lot of them talked about they had bad man provisions. So bad man provisions were basically if our men, the US, if our men come in and to your jurisdiction and do something bad we'll take care of it for you. You know just some simple provisions like that but that never was enforced. The US let their people come in and take over what were supposed to be protective areas of land. And that was just constant. That happened everywhere. So there were bad man provisions. There were a lot of provisions. A lot of beautiful provisions that tribes still talk about today. You know as long as the grass grows and you know we'll have our lands. And none of these provisions were ever upheld. And a lot of the East Coast tribes, their boundaries were changed and new treaties were made and accepted and removal happened and then there were new treaties. And nothing was ever maintained. Where did you grow up? Did you grow up in Oklahoma? In Oklahoma, yeah. Did you grow up on a reservation? So Oklahoma is an interesting case. So Oklahoma did have set-aside land. So Choctaw had their area Chickasaw and the other tribes that were removed to Oklahoma. And by the way because of that removal there, tribes that were already there were removed. So there were already tribes there, the Caddo and Comanche and other other tribes that this was already their land. So new tribes moved in and land during the, I'm forgetting my dates now, but there was a Dawes Commission around 1906 or so where there was a census and individual Indians were allotted about 160 acres apiece. And this was an effort to decrease the amount of land base that tribes held in common, right? And this happened all across the country, not just in Oklahoma where there were allotment policies. And I believe there were about, heck I'm not good with numbers, I think there were like 19 million acres that were removed this way of land. But what happened today, there is a criminal case before the Supreme Court that is actually addressing these issues because even though our lands were allotted, the exterior boundaries of our reservations, the area that we had agreed to live in, they've never been extinguished. They've never been diminished. And so the Supreme Court is actually looking at this issue now as to whether we still have jurisdiction within the exterior boundaries of our reservations in Oklahoma. What would that extend to? Cities? Are there cities in Oklahoma that are in those areas now? Oh yeah. So if you think of... Like Tulsa? Yeah, so that's Creek Nation. So Tulsa would be owned? Well, so not necessarily. So it's raised a lot of fear with non-Indians about... I wonder why. Yeah. The Indians are taking back the land. Oh my God. But what would actually happen, there's a lot of places in Indian country where there's allotment and there's non-Indian individuals who have fee land within the exterior boundaries of reservations and then individual Indians owning fee land within the exterior boundaries of reservations. You're saying fee land? Fee land. So just how you would... So you pay a fee? No, no. So how you own land. It's called... It's not restricted. It's in fee. You own the title to that land, right? A lot of land held by tribes is in trust or in restricted fee. So a common area land, like let's look at the on-indoganation in New York State. They have the exterior boundaries of the reservation. They own restricted fee land. So they own it but they can't sell it without US permission, right? Trust land is similar and it's treated the same as restricted fee but it's held in trust. So the US has more control of what happens on that land or has been seen to have a little more control than it would in just restricted fee. But within the exterior boundaries of the reservation you can have this checkerboarded ownership of land of non-indians and Indians and... But that doesn't necessarily mean that the tribe has jurisdiction over the non-indian fee land. And the civil and criminal jurisdiction issues on an area of land like that is extremely complex and continues to be argued in the courts. And most of the time our jurisdiction... Most of the time we lose those cases especially since the 80s and 90s and up until today we've... There was really a change in kind of how the Supreme Court decided Indian law cases. So if we go back into the history of federal Indian policy you see this kind of weird schizophrenic, you know, those marshal cases that I talked about. They really set forward kind of schizophrenic principles that Indians are sovereign but they're just a ward and they're uncivilized. So we have to take care of them but they're sovereign. And so you have different areas of time, policymakers who support tribal sovereignty and will use those cases to help support that sovereignty. And then there are other administrations that come around, not talking about any current administration, but that use those cases against us and degrade policy and degrade any kind of rights that we may have gained in other eras. So it's really been, you know, Indians today live in this... Live in such an insecure world. You know, our statistics are horrible. You know, the suicide rate for our youth, our high school graduates, everything that you could possibly think of that there's a statistic on, we're usually the lowest. We're the worst. And it's because we live in a society that is constantly changing. We can never depend on whether or not our rights are secured, whether or not we're going to have land jobs, be able to practice our culture. you