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Doing so abrogated fundamental indigenous rights unilaterally. The ruling was used to violate hundreds of treaties. Like other Native Peoples, Lakotans were grievously harmed.
Their sacred Black Hills were stolen. So were valued resources on them. Lakotans want back what's rightfully theirs. Their ancestors thought the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty granted them victory. They were wrong.
Yet in 1904, even after Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, some believed the Treaty was "the only instance in the history of the United States where the government has gone to war and afterwards negotiated a peace conceding everything demanded by the enemy and exacting nothing in return."
Until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, Native People got what no one had the right to deny them in the first place. In fact, rights afforded them nominally never existed in fact.
The entire history of Native People in America reflects horrific struggles lost. From 1492 to today, they experienced promises made and broken. Disenfranchized people remain. Most are bereft of hope.
On reservations or assimilated, they're out of sight and mind. Once they lived peacefully on their own land. White settlers changed things. Western civilization destroyed their way of life. There's nothing civilized about it.
They're either ignored, mocked, or demonized in films and society. They're called drunks, beasts, primitives, and savages. America always was a white supremacist society.
Rich powerful elites run it. Native People and most others don't matter. They're systematically used and abused. They're not served. It's the American way.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at Email address removed .
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