 Good afternoon everybody good afternoon. It's amazing actually to look at and see these flowers and it's March 12th and it's 29 degrees outside but this is a good day for all of us to be here and the first thing I would like to do is introduce and invite up to the stage Morningstar, Morningstar Zephyr who is Lakota from the black hills of South Dakota and she will do a prayer for us. To begin this very beautiful day I welcome you all. Thank you. I'm Petra Washday. Thank you for having us. Everyone can pray along in their own way. I'm going to use some of my Lakota language. Wankatonka Tunkashla Unchimaka, grandfather, great mystery, mother earth. We pray to you in a humble manner. We give thanks to our ancestors who have sacrificed to get us here today. We pray for the water protectors across the world. We ask that you universe come into the hearts of the people behind the pipelines and give them compassion for their own grandchildren and great grandchildren. We ask for protection in our travels and we ask for strength for the upcoming battle. We give thanks for all our blessings, our happiness and our hardships, our struggles and our successes. Thank you Wopila Tunkha, Pilame Mitakiase. We are all related. Water is life, many Wichoni. Before I began my gig here at the Brooklyn Museum, which was about 17 years ago, I had the great pleasure and blessing to be introduced to Indian country and to work with many native people across Indian country. So I'd like to welcome into spirit Ruben Snake, who was my spiritual mentor and Vandaloria, who was a very friend and a great great writer and leader and teacher, and also Michael Haney, who fought very hard for against mascots. And so I welcome them into the room with us today. I'd like to thank the Novo Foundation because once again they have provided funding to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation so that we can continue our states of denial, the illegal incarceration of women, children and people of color. We're going on to our fourth year and this is the first time actually I've stood up here and welcomed people since our past election or non-election depending on how you choose to look at it. And it feels particularly good that we have these programs available for everybody. 1991 so that's almost 30 years ago. I started the American Indian Ritual Object Repatriation Foundation and for a decade I worked as an advocate to help and assist and move spiritual, if you will, ceremonial, if you want materials back to native nations. And it was incredible work for me and I met Alfonso Ortiz who was Tehwah he also has passed on and he said to me, well if you're going to have a repatriation foundation you better go back and go to school and get your PhD and study American history because you don't know anything because what they taught you isn't what is so. And so I did that and I spent many years doing that and as a result I learned a lot but mainly I learned a lot from the people that I met in addition to the multiple readings that I did. And my PhD thesis was called 25 years ago the conquest of the Western Hemisphere, the reculturalization of the first peoples and as I am about to learn today from Steve Newcombe who I met 30 years ago, language has changed and it is no longer the conquest of the Western Hemisphere as he will tell us because the Western Hemisphere has yet to be conquered. I love the idea that we're looking at our language anew. So the idea for this panel as part of states is to show to everyone the continuing thread from Columbus' arrival and centuries of genocide to the current situation at Cannonball and certainly the situations that exist for Native people, the first peoples across the United States of America. And in two very short hours we're going to try and trace the roots of claimed rights to the continuing fight for lands and treaty obligations between sovereign nations and the United States and also against state sanctioned violence that has continued since 1492. One of my favorite t-shirts came out I don't know when it was but there was a wonderful photograph that said battling terrorism since 1492 I think probably many of you had seen it after 9-11. And so the fifth 500th anniversary was in 1992 which was a year after I started the Repatriation Foundation and at that time there was a film and there were a lot of programs called Surviving Columbus that was a survival of bigotry over it and covert racism, abuse, political and mass incarceration. And colonization and the colonialization is the framework of the historic and systematic and systemic nature of our contemporary mass incarceration system. And the hyper incarceration of American Indians shows the continuing genocide of Native Americans in the United States. So my goal in planning this day is therefore to remind us, to educate us and to support the facts that we are not taught about the conquest of Turtle Island and the continuing struggle of the First Peoples to protect the land, Mother Earth for their peoples but as we heard and as we know for all peoples. So my welcome to you is going to begin with select readings from Leonard Peltier's prison writing and I'm then going to move on to my role as moderator which I normally don't do but because I have worked in this area for as long as I have I feel particularly honored to moderate the panel, the wonderful panel that we have together today. So we will have time afterwards for Q&A and I am going to begin by doing some readings. This is by Chief Arville looking horse. Let it be known that Leonard Peltier is the son of our great grandfather, a spiritual warrior of the Lakota, Dakota and Lakota nations. He shares the spirit of our ancestors who fought for the rights of our people such as crazy horse and sitting bull. He is a man who has borne witness to the pain and suffering of our grandmothers, women and children as a son dancer and the name of his book by the way, Prison Writings, My Life is My Son Dance. As a son dancer, he sacrificed his life to the people seeking justice for all of our relatives. He offered himself to Wankantanka so that the people may have peace and happiness once again. I Chief Arville looking horse, 19th generation keeper of the sacred white buffalo calf pipe ask that Leonard Peltier receive the blessings of the great spirit for his words to become etched in the minds and hearts of all people. This the preface by Ramsey Clark who was counsel till Leonard Peltier and former Attorney General of the United States. I want to tell you why the freedom of Leonard Peltier is so important. There are well over 200 million indigenous people on the planet, maybe as many as 300 million. They live on six continents and on countless numbers of islands and everywhere they are the most endangered of the human species. Yet the survival of humanity depends upon their salvation. Leonard Peltier is a symbol of that struggle. I am distressed, saddened and outraged that so many Americans have forgotten or perhaps never known who he is and what he represents. If we forget him, we forget the struggle itself. Strangely, he is much better known outside of this country than here in Europe, in Canada, in South America, in Asia, in Africa. Enlightened people around the world see him as the struggle of all indigenous people for their lives, their dignity, for their sovereignty, their future. And they wonder how is it that this man has been held for so long when his innocence is known by those who hold him? Here in the United States, his voice and the urgent message of indigenous peoples everywhere has been muffled, if not silenced. Those who put him behind bars and insist on keeping him there after nearly a quarter of a century believe he has been consigned to the dustbin of history along with the cause of native peoples everywhere. We must not allow that to happen to continue. Chapter 1, 10 p.m. Time for the nightly lockdown and head count. The heavy metal door to my cell lets out an ominous grinding sound that slides abruptly shut with a loud clang. I hear other doors clanging almost simultaneously down the cell block. The walls reverberate as do my nerves. Even though I know it's about to happen, at the sudden noise my skin jumps. I'm always on edge in here, always nervous, always apprehensive. I'd be a fool not to be. You never let your guard down when you live in hell. Every sudden sound has its own terror, every silence too. One of those sounds or one of those silences could well be my last. I know, but which one? My body twitches slightly at each unexpected footfall, each slamming metal door. Will my death announce itself with a scream or do its work in silence? Will it come slowly or quickly? Does it matter? Wouldn't quick be better than slow anyway? Poem, I am everyone. I am everyone who ever died without a voice or prayer or hope or a chance. Everyone who ever suffered for being an Indian, for being human, for being indigenous, for being free, for being other, for being committed. I am every one of them, every single one. Yes, even you. I am everyone. Chapter 26. The energy interests are simply biding their time for the most profitable moment to begin yet again. The death of a people and of a way of life, not to mention the death of the land itself, never enters into the consideration of those who voice this abomination on the Lakota people and on the people of America as well. In this sad and tragic age we live in, to come to the defense of Mother Earth is to be branded a criminal. By pulling the necessary strings these companies managed to stoke the government's fear of internal enemies and to co-op the energies of the FBI and the BIA, federal agencies that are sworn by law to protect us, not exploit and destroy us. Chapter 34. I was taught by the elders that there are three kinds of original instructions. There's the original instructions for all humankind, sort of like ten commandments that's true for all of us human beings. Those kinds of instructions come only through the highest individuals like Moses or Jesus or Muhammad or white buffalo calf woman. Next, there's the original instructions for each people, each nation, each tribe. Those come through great spirit warriors like Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull or Geronimo or Gandhi. Then third, there's the original instructions for each one of us as individuals for the path our own individual spirit is supposed to follow. And finally, his last poem, the end of the book, The Message. Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity. But silence is impossible. Silence screams, silence is a message just as doing nothing is an act. Let who you are ring out and resonate in every word and every deed. Yes, become who you are. There's no sidestepping your own being or your own responsibility. What you do is who you are. You are your own comeuppance. You become your own message. You are the message. Thank you to Leonard Peltier for everything. Please join me in welcoming our panelists to join me on the stage for this very important and timely discussion. Unfortunately, if everybody would come up, Steven, Steve, Phyllis, and have a seat, I will join you. And we only have 15 minutes for each speaker and then discussions, but we will have a Q&A afterwards. So I ask my panelists to please come up and join me on the stage. Thank you very much and thank you all for being here today. So, thank you. Thank you, Phyllis. And where's Steve Nukum? We're missing Steve Nukum, but he will come, Steven Pavar. And here's Steve Nukum. Tiokasan Ghost Horse. Yes, please go ahead. I'm going to introduce all of our panelists and then we'll begin. To my right is Tiokasan Ghost Horse, and he is the host of syndicated First Voices Radio, NYC, heard on 70 FM since 1992. He is Cheyenne River Lakota from South Dakota. Tiokasan is an international speaker on peace, indigenous, and Mother Earth perspectives. He focuses his work on the philosophy, the cosmology, diversity, and perspective of indigenous peoples worldwide, and the anthropocentric thinking processes of the West. He serves on boards of charitable and children's organizations dedicated to bringing non-Western education to native and non-native children. To his right, yes, to his right is Steve Nukum, who is Shawnee Lenape. He is a legal scholar and advocate for indigenous nations who has carried on global campaigns since 1992, which is actually when we met. With Virgil Kilstrait, an elder of the Oglala Lakota Nation, he founded the Indigenous Law Institute to challenge imperial Vatican documents from the 15th century. It is those documents that resulted in the dissemination and domination of the original nations and First Peoples. Published in 2008, Pagans in the Promised Land, decoding the Doctrine of Discovery, provided the context for the documentary, The Doctrine of Discovery, Unmasking the Domination Code. We look forward, thank you for being here, Steve, into hearing from you. We are very honored today also to have Phyllis Young. Phyllis has been a lifelong activist. She is co-founder of Women of All Red Nations, former chair of the Board of Trustees of the NMAI, and former member of the Standing Rock Tribal Council. In the 1970s, she fought to reinstate the Sundance. In the 1980s, Phyllis fought against the forced sterilization of Indian women and is now focused on suicide prevention. She is a relative, as I had said earlier, of Vindaloria, my dear friend, whose dozens of books include the Trails of Burgund Treaties. And you have just come from Standing Rock and Washington, and we look forward very much to hearing what you have to tell us today. Stephen Pivar from 1971 to 74, Stephen was a legal aid attorney on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation. From 1976 to the present, he has been a national staff counsel for the ACLU who has litigated, he has litigated 200 federal cases involving constitutional rights. His areas of specialty include the rights of American Indians, their tribes, prisoners' rights, free speech of public employees, the separation of church and state, and voting rights. He is the author of the Rights of Indians and Tribes and currently teaches American Indian Law as an adjunct professor at NYU Law School. His book is here and he's going to be happy to sell you one and sign it for you if you want some. Afterwards. So this is our wonderful panel. Again, I want to thank you very much for coming today. It's a delight to begin and I think I will ask Teokasen if he would like to take the podium and begin. Begin at the beginning or not quite at the beginning. Stephen, Steve Newcomb is going to begin at the beginning and you're going to begin where you begin. So did we begin? All right. Yeah, I would like to say a little bit here and I know I have 15 minutes so we're in that box called time, right? And many of you know that there is really no word for time and concept in the Lakota addiction, I guess you'd call it, but we, you know, there is no beginning and no ending so we're going to think about that while we speak and I wanted to call this incarceration of the mind that, you know, first of all, thank you for being here tonight and giving my heart and that's just how it has to be because we're in a relationship, right? And the first things first with the first consciousness of to ask Mother Earth with our tobacco which I did earlier before I came in and that for some things to say that our adequate expression to you and to the ancestors of the seven generations being each a seventh generation with full and expressive responsibilities to fulfill and to keep in relationship to all and the strength of those who cannot speak for themselves and to those who are wiser than me and more knowledgeable and more experienced than me and to honor those who ask for no merit and those without beguilement of others. I ask you to guide me and if I don't tell you what I truly feel within me I would call resentment. I've resented because I haven't told you everything I wanted to and I know some of you may use that intuition value that you also well, he didn't tell me the whole thing so you might resent me and that might cause indifference between us and we might not want to talk after this so but I want to also say to begin the story and I'm glad that Elizabeth brought the 1492 quincentennial story in San Francisco and I don't know who was there if you guys were even born then maybe you were babies some of you but at that time in October Columbus is whatever you know, there was 200,000 of us that marched I don't feel you remember that 200,000 people supporting indigenous peoples in San Francisco and along that streets they had people lined up just like you saw in Standing Rock they were lined up they were lined up in a roof with guns and automatic weapons pointing at the whole crowd of us and then that same day they were having a Columbus Day in San Francisco and a block of panarchists dressed in black black masks came along there must have been 300 of them they marched they came with us but when it turned to Columbus Street near the Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco they took a left and they went down over they went down into the parade and as we were marching to the City Hall in San Francisco you could hear sirens going off and what they eventually did they stopped the parade they stopped the flotilla from coming in with the fake that Nina Pinta and Santa Maria from coming into the Bay of San Francisco so that was one story that we brought there and it was shortly after that that I met my friend Steve here our friend Steve here and 1992 and it was up on a mountain it was really by chance really and I really enjoyed talking with him but also when in 2013 it was Steve Virgil Kilstrait and myself we were sitting in a lobby retreat center and of all places Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland and when we sat there you know we were talking about the two largest concentration camps of World War II you know where they killed millions of people we saw the gas chambers we saw all of these things and I in our discussion I posed this question to Virgil about the Lakota language and the question was that do we have a word in Lakota for domination? His answer was no we have no word nor a concept for domination think about that so no word or concept because Mitakujasin is to be related to everything seen and unseen and whether we think it's alive or inanimate it's a truer relationship because of our relational aspects that is not based on hierarchy elitism or supremacy so from that point forward all of my perspective from that point has been whether the language that I'm personally using equates to the Latin-based English language and its domination language so I began to see the language in perspective of lacking English lacking wanting needing rather than the Lakota perspective of abundance and I began to see who and where are my reference points were they coming from? to anything native? we were being dominated by the western system of logic and reason and the situation of native peoples across mother earth and I know that currently there are 7000 languages spoken in the world about 5400 of those 5400 of those languages are indigenous languages and I would say native from now on and yet we number less than 1% of the total population of earth 7.3 billion people on earth were less than 1% about 340 million and many of those native languages I've come to know after studying for almost 30 years is that many of these languages have no word or concept for domination either it's because if we realize that of the English is derived from Latin the Roman Empire's language or any Latin derived language for that matters a conquering war language of materialism ownership dogma class war religious patriarchy domination disconnection and cultural killing we then we then know denial is encoded into language through rationalizing its own existence because it has to and if I had thought to do anything with relationship then none of these terms I use would exist but then that would leave us all this judgment and where I have to where I want to leave as a just a difference is that nothing to do with idealism but I know not but I'm not thinking about anything without evolution so I came more research of all the people in the United States and I want to mention this guy because he's kind of a honorable mention to me and you all know him Albert Einstein and he came to the United States in 1930 how many of you know that 1930 he came here and he went to visit two peoples the Hopi he visit the Hopi and he had remarked he remarked this after visiting the Hopi he said and these are children without ever picking up a book in remote parts of the country and he said among all people twelve-year-old children of the Hopi were the best prepared to grasp the theory of relativity because it's their language or in relationship or in relationship with everything so you could not leave and even use the word division you couldn't divide the vision because you were in division you couldn't use their division words so you think about if he had visited all the other original nations of Turtle Island and around the world what he would have told the people of the world that this is what we were at once as Europeans maybe in this case the uncolonized and so when I think about that when I think about you water protectors out there you know I can say it was to Standing Rock four or five times and I spent a month there but I didn't go in front of cameras and I didn't go looking for attention I wanted to go and sit with the people who were praying and I did that and I knew this that the Lakota Dakota and Nakota and Native people in general are born within think about this and it born with an inherent resistance to authority because our DNA guides us to relationship because of our relational language like Midakoyasi is just not it's just the human inclusion but all that is including us within and of itself and so the way of the native in general is to equate knowledge and information that you will hear here the way of the the native is to equate it with morality now the West will take it and equate it with power over somebody because that's the domination of the language morality says respect and the other one domination and civilization means rules and regulations whereas the other one native relational language is one with morality of respect and so we have that paraphrasing point from from Vindaloya Jr. who was mentioned earlier here is that you know the paraphrase goes something like this it's true that Westerners believe that humans either evolved from apes and or also were created through Adam and Eve or was it Lilith but we'll never know so anyway Westerners also believe that we are a standalone species special and to the last and the last to be made and because of it we humans are the supreme intelligence on this planet and perhaps even further out and with that the Lakota the nations really say yeah that's true we were the last to be made we're the youngest and the newest of all the species but instead of being supreme and intelligence we are the most ignorant and that opens up possibility so you can't even use the word freedom in the Lakota language because if you're free why use the word for free because you see all the relationship and no one is tied to anything but that we do depend on each other and I'm not really telling you how to be and what to do as and I have the last to tell you what how a culture is but I want to also use this word that you know because of how we are colonized we use the language and such in domination and anthropocentricity and we all become paradolians paradolium means that he as a human species want to see human and everything because if it has value for us then it means something but if it doesn't we're gonna say that's not valuable to us so as native people the colonizing that's happened to us we've said we have to educate ourselves without ever knowing what the word educate means and some of you know the etymology of education to educate means to seduce it means to educe it means to draw out or lead away from I'm gonna fill it in spirit and insert controlled information in other words what I'm saying is when you say we look for education you're asking somebody to take that spirit away for you and throw it with stats and facts and you know other things that we can dualistically you know repeat language back and forth saying victory and loss and loser defeat and victory because it's dualistic and I used to be a computer programmer and I got to know the binary language and I got to know the English language where we're speaking in binary codes all the time we're reacting to we're supposed to do this so we go ahead and do it and thinking that we're victor we're victors of it so if you can stay with me is that you know there are people out there that have not educated the wisdom out of themselves and I think part of the part of that is those of you who have felt the consciousness at Standing Rock and those of you who have felt that consciousness of going through the ceremonies of Native people in the Western Hemisphere so I want to just kind of close up here but you know we go back in history because I was told that the oldest elder the oldest wisest elder that we refer to as Native people as my little Theoshpae in South Dakota says the wisest elder is not your grandma it's not your grandfather it's Mother Earth are we asking her did we ask her to come here because that's what it's all about she puts out the balance so Chief Joseph of the Nez Perch says he was talking to a to a commissioner back in the 1800s and a commissioner was trying to convince him that he needed to have the advantage of having a government funded school located on a reservation and commissioner says why don't you want schools and Chief Joseph says they will teach us to have churches and the commissioner says do you not want churches and Joseph said no we do not want churches and commissioner says why do you not want churches again and Joseph said they will teach us to quarrel about God to think and to know that we do not want to learn that we may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth but we will never quarrel about God we do not want to learn about that and so with that closing I just want to say those of you who've been through this process from 1st grade to 12th grade that John Gatto teacher of the school New York State in 2008 he was New York State's teacher of the year he said this and you're going to hear a lot from Steve about authority and domination it will make sense he said schools are to establish fixed habits of response to authority and that's why it takes 12 years from 1st grade just to 12th grade you're to respond reflexively when anyone in a position of authority tells you what to do remember I went back and said that native people's DNA that because of our relational languages that we cannot we're related and how can we be dominated how can we understand how what that authority is telling us to do and we want to get along with everything and everybody but we have to be careful because the English language our colonization by the English language has led us into anthropocentrism meaning that we as a human species are the only special species and we forget about even even who we are because we're only about us we're only thinking about native people only about humans rather than the rest of life because it'd be pretty lonely if we were the only thing left and those languages I talked about earlier I found this out way back when and you think about 25 years of being on a radio you have about 40 languages that go extinct native languages that go extinct every year and with that rate at the end of this century there may not be any more indigenous languages spoken so now the consciousness of Standing Rock comes up even more we have that idea about we are stuck in incarcerating our minds with the language we use and the duality and it's a long way but I just want to just say this again that thank you for being here and asking me to come and just I was told one thing they say Tiokasen you've been on a radio so long so you have to learn how to be bold be brief and be gone thank you thank you Tiokasen I want to thank Tiokasen for reframing everything and for starting to take the glasses our rose colored glasses off our eyes and know that there is a different way of looking and seeing and experiencing and I thank you very much for that for those who are interested in following up on the quote of Vines it comes from God as Red which is a wonderful book that that he wrote so Steve Newcombe I was going to say take us back to the beginning but when I talked about that earlier you said oh I'm going before the beginning so go for it Gishel Amir Mill I'm going to walk on Millie I'm going to walk on Willie Nepali Willie Nepeline Wanishi Gishel Amir I wanted to pay my respects to our Lenape ancestors from this region of Great Turtle Island and thank Elizabeth Sackler and Claire and Rebecca those folks that helped to put this panel together this event together and I'm not going to talk about domination this afternoon no I'm kidding but the from Columbus to Cannonball Cannonball has to do with the and of course Phyllis Young will speak to this be able to speak to this much more clearly than myself but it has to do with a place where the river rolls stone so that they become round and they're sacred stones they're oriented toward a spiritual understanding, cosmology and that spiritual cosmology extends back to the beginning of time through our oral histories and traditions I want to also while I'm thinking about it remember to acknowledge my friend and mentor Virgil Kilstrait a traditional headman of the Oglala Lakota Nation a dear friend who took me under his wing so many years ago to begin this work but going back to the thing about the sacred stones the domination mindset the mentality of war and conflict takes those sacred stones and frames them as cannonballs something useful to hurl out of a piece of technology toward human beings to destroy them in an effort to create a system of imposition what I'm going to be speaking about briefly here is only a very concise succinct encapsulation of more than three decades of work a big part of which involves conversations with a dear friend who's here today Peter Durico and Peter and I have been carrying on conversations since 1989 and those have been very important to my development and I won't really acknowledge him the thing is that when we talk about the original instructions the traditional ancestral teachings such as Burgell-Killstrate talks about with the seven laws of the Oceta Shikohin as an example and the Wopeh, the seven laws to share and to care and to give to do honor and respect to have patience and fortitude bravery and courage to have humility and humbleness and to seek wisdom and seek understanding those kinds of understandings are critically important to a spiritual way of life that involves ceremony, prayer and acknowledgement of the importance of water as the source of all life and ways in which our ancestors evolved over countless generations over thousands and thousands of years to use a Western concept evolved ways of understanding relational existences where all life forms are honored and respected I just visited the Maori nation the Maori people I just flew back from Aotearoa as the non-Maori people call it New Zealand but I had a wonderful opportunity to sit with an elder and learn about Mana and Mana is the spirit, the life force that every single thing has every single person has and he pointed out that there's no understanding within their language system their conceptual system that allows one person to impose Mana on another person or to impose Mana on other forms of life and if you go just like what Tiochusen was saying if you go and survey indigenous languages or as I would prefer to term it original nations, languages you'll find that the same theme exists throughout all of them so Mitakuyasen all our relations is a critically important understanding insight and it has to do with a spiritual way of seeing and knowing, discerning communicating with ancestral spirits through ceremony and it's very involved so then take those seven laws that I mentioned and then contrast that now with an alternative image a conception conceptual system that goes back to Vatican documents from the 15th century and in saying this what I'm about to explain to you very succinctly is in contrast to much of what is understood and taught in federal Indian law circles although there are some law schools that do at least allude to this through the work of Robert Williams and at the University of Arizona and others there are ways in which these particular patterns I'm about to explain are not really used very much or at all and so one of the key things that I'm working on is a reframing to examine English terms to go deep into them so that we have a much better insight into what we're actually saying sometimes we're saying one thing and we don't understand that we're intending to say one thing we're actually saying something else so these Vatican documents from the 15th century are for example a doom diversus from 1452 issued by Pope Nicholas the 5th to King Alfonso of Portugal it contains a formula in there that I'm going to give you the exact terminology and when you think of wrongful incarceration when you think of the murdered and missing women up in north of the US Canadian line the murdered and missing women down below the US Mexican line the thousands of people that have perished down in Mexico through all kinds of horrific conflicts think of Honduras think of you know Bertica Serres and her assassination think of the book Thy Will Be Done and the way in which the powers of that be quote unquote are in orchestrating policies of destruction for entire peoples genocidal policies that involve destruction of entire ecosystems and think of these words I'm about to explain to you because they encapsulate a paradigm so these are the words invade, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens, pagans and other enemies of Christ to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery and take away all their possessions and property that was repeated that exact same paragraph was repeated over and over again now if I take those words and I turn them into a mathematical formula so we'll just use a little simple arithmetic invade plus capture plus vanquish plus subdue plus reduce to perpetual slavery plus take away all their possessions and property equals question mark so what is the word that goes you know filling the blank on the question mark there are two possibilities and one is civilization and one is domination and it turns out that they're synonyms and the definition of civilization that goes with that is from the Webster's new international dictionary the third edition the forcing of a particular cultural pattern on a population to which it is foreign state was defined by Max Weber very important German sociologist as the relation of men dominating men in order for the state to exist the dominated must submit themselves to the authority of the powers that be property is defined by Lance Liebman who teaches right over at Columbia excuse me Columbia University and his co-author now deceased Charles Monroe Har as the first establishment of socially approved physical domination over some part of the natural world the term dominion used in Johnson versus Macintosh from 1823 ultimate dominion is also part of this paradigm and patterning so when once you begin to understand that all of these terms plus the term sovereignty or the sovereign which Jean Baudin coined in 1577 is meaning supremacy over citizens or subjects unrestrained by the laws and realizing that the sovereign is subject to no laws or restrained by no laws but everyone is subject supposedly to the laws of the sovereign once you understand the totality of this constellation of meanings that I'm explaining here today then you begin to see that's why that's why everything turns out the way that it does for original nations and peoples the term indigenous does not mean original nations and peoples it does initially it says there's a starting point of an original free people existing in some place when a secondary population or ethnic group comes in and through conquest settlement and other means establishes dominance over them that's indigenous this is the indigenous part the domination over that's according to the United Nations working definitions there's more than one talking about pre-invasion well to talk about pre-invasion then there's an invasion talk about pre-colonial there's a colonial system which is a domination system colonization which is the invasion of a particular territory of a particular group of people and through various means to thrust yourself into that as Samuel Morrison said the rear admiral historian thrust yourself in there and to control or eliminate the original people the original population all of these patterns explain once you really get it explain the way in which all of the destruction has happened the world is in the grip of a system that was unleashed by the Vatican but it long predates that system it goes back to the Roman Empire and even before that thousands of years before that through a language system that we are now communicating in more than 60% of English comes from Latin tribe, tribal these are terms of subordination that's why I prefer the term nation that's why I prefer original nations rather than indigenous nations but you know choose your misnomer because they're all misnomers so you have to know why you're using a term the context in which you're using it and attempting to explain all this to you is somewhat challenging because we all have limited amount of time but the thing is I'm going to sum up here by saying that United States federal Indian law for dominating our original nations and peoples is not American Indian law because no Indians made it it's ideas that white guys put down on paper and orchestrated as conceptual impositions on our territories on our nations on our peoples to the destruction of our ancestors or as Andrew Jackson famously said they just melted away right but the thing is that these we have this predicament that we're in a system that I'm explaining today that is reinforced even when you attempt to resist it so then you're in this double bind what very important concept of damned if you do damned if you don't so then what do you do with that it's not saying these things to get people into a place of despair we have to redouble our efforts and be very spiritually centered very spiritually attuned intensified in our course of action and working to decode and understand exactly what we're dealing with and so maybe that's probably enough I wanted to wrap up by giving you a little bit of a lyric that a friend Pila Lornell encouraged me to create for the younger audience and I'm not really a rap person but attempt a lyric and it's in honor of Standing Rock and it goes like this we are the original nations of Great Turtle Island we're praying for all our relations entirely free originally forever that way we shall rightfully be rejecting claimed discovery you say you discovered our lands and our lives we all know that's nothing but lies with a colonial design to dehumanize you can't discover another nation's home with permission from a pope in Rome and rightfully impose a capital dome kings, queens, potentates bearing symbols of church and state claim to right to dominate their ancestors sailed under color of God divine right to take that was nothing but fraud we're sustained by our spirituality and our abiding reality so they've tried to destroy our sacred sites and ceremonial places yet we've held tight they're never gonna erase us from this blue orb of day and night with living waters and sunlight we pray for all the elements of life we are the pre-American nations standing with Standing Rock our relations entirely free originally forever that way we shall rightfully be rejecting your assumed superiority many we choni we know water is life for everyone thank you I think that was fabulous and I think you actually could have a second career as a rapper that was beautiful and I thank you thank you again for focusing us on specificity of words and language because it is that which creates reality thank you very much Phyllis as I had said earlier I'm so honored to have you join us today you've been busy and I would love to hear if you care to tell us and what you would like to tell us about Washington about Standing Rock about arrests and Standing Rock about what life has been like for the last six months if you could and I know Daniel could you put the photograph up of the TPs please in Washington D.C. the TPs were put up last week and when I found this photograph I couldn't help but notice the severe phallicness of the Washington Monument and the beautiful wombs of the TPs and I think the image alone speaks volumes about our cultures please I'm setting my time because I I learned to speak English and I could really talk a long time I offer you my hand with a good heart I just would like to talk about the TPs first of all I want to say about Christopher Columbus and the Spanish name his actual name was Cristobal Colón and Russell Means always said I would never want to be named after the lower part of anyone's body and he acted out accordingly he said so those are my my memories of of some words about Christopher Columbus you see the TPs around the Washington Monument I said this morning that we have to not get lost in the protests mainly nationally because we are all protesting what we don't like in America so we are we came for our political statement from our nation and indigenous nations across this country to remind America that we do have a relationship with the United States of America that are of the highest standards and principles treaties that are derived from the Constitution and they have been terribly breached by an executive order that has ordered the Army Corps to issue a permit and changed it swiftly to a memorandum but still the same he also Trump I don't like to say his name it also means something in English and he's trying to do that to us so he also issued a gag order to interior prohibiting dialogue between the trustee and the nations and that is our treaty relationship and that is our trust partner that governs our relationship with the United States and that he has severed that relationship by that gag order and the executive order so perhaps it's a better step for us one step along for us farther to sever on our terms and to declare our freedom because America can only secede from us our nations are the predecessor sovereign of America so as we created the camp last April we created the sacred stone camp which are part of our cultural belief systems that water is the first gift from the creator Mini Wichoni and all life begins in water we are we come from the seven stars and that represents the power of women and the power of women is birth giving birth and meaning life so we believe that all life is derived from those stars all life derives from water and that we have an obligation to protect that for all life so we created sacred stone which is the second gift which is Ian which is the rock the stone represents our ancestors our grandfathers those who sacrifice generations so that we could be here and on those stones are marks and signs and effigies that remind the next generation of what their obligations are and so we have acknowledged the sacred stone and created a camp and by creating a camp we are putting the US government on notice that we are a traditional camp that it is our ancestral territory and it's based on ancestral law and natural law so when so many people came by July we opened the sacred stone camp in April in August there were so many people we had to create an overflow camp so we named it Ocete Shakoi which are the seven council fires the seven council fires represent our ancestral custom which predates the constitution and the written law so that we are exercising what we feel has always been part of our our life way which is the natural law so we were telling the government by establishing that Ocete Shakoi that we were not going to accept any unilateral decision of the court because of our treaty status but also because of the ancestral laws that we have that we are more obligated to to humanity and to life and to all the cultural values that we have to embrace and ensure that our people endure and ultimately survive because that's what our ancestors did for us so we had to create Ocete Shakoi we were forced to and we didn't ask any questions we just pushed the overflow to the land that was next to sacred stone and it just happened to be army core taken area which was our original territory so we didn't ask we did it and people came from all over the world from over 400 nations of our own people in this country brought their flags and people from about 30 countries so we created a new community but we we had to provide for them very basic necessities food, shelter make sure that that all the people insured and watched their neighbors and protected each other was a beautiful movement and no one wanted to leave because there was a spiritual part to it that a lot of people don't understand that we have that we have a sixth sense we have a fifth dimension and we have a spiritual connection that mandates a lot of obligation that we have to share with everyone and it's a renewal it's a rebirth of our people but it hasn't come without a struggle for 40 years ago we took back our religious freedom we defied the policies of the government that prohibited our spirituality and our religious freedom for 40 years from 1910 to 1978 and we implemented we took back consciously we made an effort to take back our spirituality our womanhood our motherhood our identity our language our culture we embrace them we learned how to love them and we thank the underground for having carried those mysteries and secrets for 60 years and at the same time we had a lawsuit in congress I'm sorry in court in the US district court for 70 years and the Supreme Court ruled that they would pay us pennies and not return the land so we have never accepted that since 1980 and there's supposedly over four billion dollars in the US Treasury that we have never accepted for the Black Hills or treaty territory no court in this country no court in the world has the unilateral right to take from us we have 33 treaties with the United States more than any other nation from 1805 with Zebulun Pike in Port Sandusky, Ohio to 1868 in 2018 we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1868 and we are planning our freedom our statement so we've had a lot of historic moments in the last year we had a descendant of Harney you heard of Harney Peak and the Black Hills they named after a military person in our territory our sacred homeland a sacred mountain but the descendant of Harney came and he we had a great celebration because they renamed that Harney Peak Blackout Peak so it was a historic time and we had Custer's great great great granddaughter who came who wanted to have peace with us because she had a terrible cloud over her all her life very sad but she wanted to apologize but she also wanted to give us the message that there were no longer errors there are no family members left to carry on the Custer name, heritage and history so a lot of historic moments it's a time, it's a place it's our time it's something that we have to offer America we have been locked in and locked out for generations and now our children are rising up we're taking back the language we are promoting our value systems and our ways of worship we are free freedom America has been an indentured freedom America's freedom is about confinement, conformity, bondage, slavery and all the principles that Christopher Columbus brought to this country there is no longer rica in America we are going to change the Constitution we are going to allow our children to learn our ways freely and we are going to ensure that our freedom is free and we're going to embark on an ambitious agenda for alternative energy we are working on different areas of with what we used to call co-fusion but it's ALENR we're working with scientists to develop models developing a model in the college and we are also doing a demonstration model with the house for a generator so that we are creating energy we know that we have a long way to go because of the capitalism that is dominating just like it is the fossil fuel industry so our journey has been remarkable, strengthening and really made me feel good as an elder in my twilight years I can see the movement of young people across this country with new technologies that they have to embrace the principles, standards and doctrines that made this country what it is our families were part of that so I'm encouraged by the little progress that we made in the one year that happened I'm encouraged by the young people that give us hope for the next generations but we have a struggle ahead of us so as a mother, as a grandmother, as a woman I say this that the linear age of man is over and that it's incumbent upon the women to embrace the circle, to stop the destruction and the toxic environment that is occurring all over the world we are universal people we are a pluralistic society and that encompasses all and the Thunderbeings are telling us what we refer to as the weather the wind, the rain, the hail it's all, the signs are there and the wind is the female and she plays by no one's rules and she likes to be mischievous but she's the eye of the hurricane she's the storm in the tornado and she's giving signs telling tales of climate change and we have to adhere to those and we have to stop because she's tilted and we can never put her back and we don't know the time that we have here maybe another millennium it may be 20 years, 30 years but we have an obligation to the generations that are coming to make a continuing good life for them and so I want to thank particularly the Americans who responded who encouraged us who gave us strength and that we look forward for renewal in the natural way, in the good way to protect Mother Earth, to love her she's been rotating backwards so we need to make sure that we do the good things that we are going to do for the natural world to retain her water so that she can provide water for our children our grandchildren so I'll stop here because my time is up thank you Phyllis, thank you very much those were words of I don't like necessarily the words hope and optimism because they're so loaded with stuff but things have felt so dark and you bring light and I believe and I thank you very much for that thank you Steven, I'm going to throw you a curve ball but I think you'll be alright with it in your February 24th blog you were talking about treaties and as Phyllis just brought up the number of treaties 33 there are really I think a thousand treaties but the 33 with the Lakota peoples and also so how from your point of view as a lawyer, ACLU what is going to happen now with the federal government taking this aggressive stance as it is in relation to the treaties and also we haven't discussed and I'll just bring it up briefly that there were hundreds of people who were arrested during the time at Standing Rock and at Cannonball and who is going to represent those people and how can we help them so there's sort of three questions they're the first about the treaties please thank you and it's an honor to be here with this distinguished panel and I appreciate the invitation as you mentioned in the introduction I do teach American Indian law at NYU Law School so I could talk for a long time and about these issues very briefly with respect to your question about treaties of course are agreements between nations and when the United States was first formed we recognize that the Indian peoples the native peoples who were here were nations and we negotiated with them as nations it wasn't until 1871 that Congress passed a law ending treaty making out of a belief that Indian tribes were no longer sovereign nations with which we any longer had to negotiate as nations through treaties almost 400 treaties have been entered into between the United States and Indian nations nearly all of the tribes in the continental United States have at least one treaty with the federal government and virtually all of them have been violated to give you just one quick example and what is happening in Standing Rock is a second example which I'll get to in response to your second question in 1867 Congress approved ratified a treaty with the Kayawas and Comanches and those tribes had seen what had happened to so many other tribes and they would sign treaties that guaranteed them certain land and before the ink was dry the federal government stole the land despite the treaty so the Kayawas and Comanches came up with an idea that some other tribes also adopted and that is they required in their treaty a promise that no additional land would ever be taken unless the federal government commissioned a vote on the reservation and three-fourths of tribal members voted in favor of relinquishing additional land which they were certain would never happen Well, the government about twenty years later indeed wanted to take some of the land that had been reserved to the Kayawas and Comanches so they commissioned a vote and of course it failed Undaunted, Congress then passed a law removing nearly two million acres of land that were guaranteed to those tribes in a treaty and a Kayawa chief named Lone Wolf filed a lawsuit against a man named Hitchcock who was the Secretary of the Interior at the time so it's Lone Wolf versus Hitchcock and it reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1903 and the issue there was well clearly the tribes had a treaty a guarantee, a promise that the United States had made to them which in the eyes of the tribes was a sacred bond and yet here was Congress some twenty years later passing a law that broke the very promise that they had given to these tribes the U.S. Supreme Court in a shameful decision ruled in Lone Wolf versus Hitchcock that the United States government can indeed break any and every treaty whenever it wants to on the rationale that although treaties are as set forth in Article 6 of the Constitution the supreme law of the land they have no greater dignity than a statute and in the same way that one statute, one law can repeal or change, modify an earlier law the Supreme Court held in Lone Wolf a later statute can repeal or abrogate or change an earlier treaty so that decision gave license to the federal government to abrogate every treaty it wanted to and indeed in the hundred year 120 years since then the United States has indeed done that so that will help answer the question in any event about treaties with respect to the Standing Rock Treaty here's another perfect example of how tribes have been screwed by the federal government as you pointed out so well the Sioux entered into a number of treaties with the federal government the two largest main treaties in 1858 the Great Sioux Nation were guaranteed a large amount of land west of the Missouri River that included the Black Hills all of what is now western South Dakota part of Montana and once again the United States gave its solemn word that if you relinquish these other territories and gave them to the United States and if you ended hostilities protecting the lives of white people we will forever for as long as the sun shall shine and the river shall flow we will guarantee that you can live in peace in this remaining territory well once again as white settlers moved out west Custer found gold in the Black Hills the United States forced the Sioux to sign yet another treaty in 1868 that removed most of the land that had been guaranteed to the Sioux in the 1851 treaty one of the issues that's now in Standing Rock is that the northern part of the Missouri River floods most years so once it became federal territory as it did after it forced the Sioux to relinquish most of that land the government decided it needed to build dams on the upper Missouri and of course whoever was unfortunate enough to have the land located there would have their land flooded well no surprise the federal governments chose to build seven dams on the upper Missouri and selected Indian reservations for all seven not white land Indian land was flooded by the Army Corps of Engineers one of those dams is now the subject of what is happening at Standing Rock the Standing Rock had to absorb vast flooded lands also and it created a lake known as Lake O'ahu which is sacred to the Standing Rock well the energy transfer partners the big oil company that wants to build this pipeline from northwestern North Dakota where vast oil reserves are located to a refinery in Illinois and the original route of the pipeline took it far north of the Standing Rock Reservation but white landowners objected so the oil company changed the route to satisfy the white folks and move the pipeline so that it's a half a mile north of what is now the Standing Rock Reservation underneath Lake O'ahu a rupture there would be catastrophic it would not only foul all of the sacred waters and the shores adjacent to it of the Standing Rock Sioux but spoil water that is used by 18 million people downstream so water protectors from around the world came as has been explained to protest what was happening and what is happening on the underneath Lake O'ahu to help answer your third question in May of last year the Army Corps of Engineers initially gave an easement to the oil company to build that pipeline and the Standing Rock Sioux filed suit in July of last year to seek a halt at the same time thousands of people descended on this area and protested the construction of the pipeline underneath the Missouri River and in December as one of the last things that the Obama administration did is the Army Corps reversed itself and said yes we at a minimum we must have an environmental impact assessment there's a federal law known as the National Environmental Policy Act NEPA and NEPA requires that whenever there's a project on federal land which Lake O'ahu now is controlled by the Army Corps of Engineers that could significantly impair the environment there must be an environmental assessment known as an EIS an environmental impact statement and the Army Corps recognized that of course there must be an EIS before this oil company is allowed to drill under Lake O'ahu there's never been a project on federal land anywhere approaching the magnitude of this project that did not have an EIS so the Army Corps rightly said at long last we must have an EIS well the second day of Trump's administration as you pointed out Trump signed both an executive order and a memorandum asking instructing the Army Corps of Engineers to reconsider and within days the Army Corps reversed itself and gave the oil company an easement within 24 hours the oil company which certainly had been tipped off by the Trump administration was already drilling underneath Lake O'ahu they already had the vehicles and the drilling equipment there they knew that the Trump administration was going to do this and it is now currently they're almost completed the drilling probably within a week oil is going to be flowing underneath Lake O'ahu so both the Standing Rock tribe and now joined by three other tribes Cheyenne River and the Yankton Sioux and the Oklahoma Sioux at Pine Ridge have filed independent lawsuits against the Army Corps of Engineers last week I co-authored a brief filed and written primarily by the National Congress of American Industries objecting to this and when I say I I signed it on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union the ACLU my employer and we along with NCAI and 34 federally recognized tribes and 10 Indian organizations are urging the court to rule in favor of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and at a minimum require the Army Corps of Engineers to insist on environmental impact statement before the oil company turns on the switch and that oil goes under the river that pipeline is going to carry more than 2 million gallons of oil a day a day and a rupture underneath Lake O'ahu truly would be devastating especially because when it's underneath the river most people won't know about it until significant oil has been released so I hope that has answered the major questions you had but if you have some others and I want to try to release a... It certainly has given us a very clear description of the dark side right pretty much what everyone else has been saying I've tried to put it into some context Yeah, yeah and the protestors why were people arrested at Standing Rock and who is going to defend them? Yeah So there's two major overarching issues at Standing Rock one is the tribes rights to protect itself and its waters and its land its treaty rights and its natural rights from what is happening but separate and apart from that are the rights of the individuals who went there to protest and the ACLU and other organizations largely the National Lawyers Guild another organization is trying to protect the individuals who have been arrested there have been more than 800 people who have been arrested and all of them are facing trial the first trials were at the end of December of last year and all of them were found guilty there were a couple more people tried in January of this year and they were found guilty mainly of obstruction of justice or obstruction of a highway 50 people have been arrested for felonies so they could spend years in prison based on actions that they took in protest of the pipeline none of the felonies have yet been sent to trial the National Lawyers Guild has raised some monies and if anyone is interested I'm not connected with the Lawyers Guild but I do have contact information if anyone wants to donate money to them but they are helping to coordinate and find lawyers who are volunteering their time to give representation to the more than 800 people who have been arrested and who are facing trial and it's of course very difficult to in a remote area in North Dakota to find lawyers to come out there and spend some time in the winter in North Dakota and give free legal representation to these people but a concerted effort is being made to do that I think I spoke with you the day after I was listening to a webinar from Cannonball and at that point there that evening 40 people had been arrested and by the next morning the word came out that it was about 200 people had been arrested so my question for you right now is are there any people who are still in jail and what was Bale said at for these... Fortunately yesterday afternoon I was able to reach on the telephone one of the two lawyers who are paid by NLG, the National Lawyers Guild to coordinate the effort of assigning a lawyer to each person and her name is Sandra Freeman and she's in North Dakota and is spending several months in North Dakota and she told me that Bale has been now given to every single person many people donated money for that and no one is now in jail all of the people who were found guilty in December and January were given suspended sentences so fortunately that's good and they didn't get jail time but they were fined and are required to pay fines so the good news is that today no one is in jail but the bad news is... I'm sorry? There are four who have no bail there are three men who are still in jail they are the ones that apprehended the DAPO security and the government is going against them and Red Fawn has no bail so there are four who have no bail who remain in jail Now when you say have no bail Bale was set but they just can't meet it or they were denied... There is no bail Bale is denied by the judges Okay, well I'm glad that you have information that I didn't This is what Sandra Freeman told me yesterday Well, it seems that none of us can be sitting still during any of this and we all have to do what it is that we can I'd like to open the microphones up to questions and while you're... Before you go there, Len... Is this on? Okay, I just wanted to mention one thing that because I think you gave a very concise kind of summary of the federal Indian law typical kind of understanding of how things are laid out in terms of an explanation What's kind of missing from that account, however is a very important piece of information that I can sum up very concisely that in 1954 in the case Tihitan Indians versus the United States involving whether or not the Tihitan Indians should receive monetary compensation for a taking of their timber the main argument of the United States Justice Department was that they should not receive monetary compensation because historically the Christian nations of Europe had acquired jurisdiction over the lands of heathens and infidels and even citing to Genesis 128 and the Book of Psalms in their legal brief and made that argument before the U.S. Supreme Court so that the difficulty that I have with the typical account of federal Indian law is that the role of the papal bulls the role of the English charters of subjugation and Latin terminology of that sort and this religious warfare of Christian nations against non-Christian nations is completely left out of the account of federal Indian law and I think that's fundamentally important because that's what's beneath all this idea that you can just go ahead and disregard a bilateral agreement and unilaterally say it doesn't count anymore and shove a pipeline through unceded territory of the Oceta Shikohan Nation so. Yeah, thank you for bringing that up that's the Johnson versus Macintosh ruling of the Supreme Court and it also accounts for why many of us grew up being taught that there was nobody here when Columbus arrived because according to the papal bulls the land was vacant because it was populated by heathens even if it was 60 million. So I thank you for bringing that up. I'd like to point out before we begin with questions just that the National Lawyers Guild I think could use support if you were so inclined and Kat Griffin is here and I want to thank her. She's a member of the Council for Feminist Art and she's a gallerist and she's been very involved with investigating divestiture because one way that one thing that has been very effective has been the divesting and of course Norway was the first bank actually to divest three months ago and out as you're leaving on the table is some information we have taken we have gotten permission from Kat's flyers that she put together on divesting for you to take if that can be of use to you. So now let's open for questions. Hello. My name is Robert Upham. I'm from Fort Belknap Indian Reservation. I'm enrolled at Sisson-Wapden Lake Traverse Zoo. A lady from the Northwest named Janet McLeod along with Audrey Shenandoah they made statements about power whether it be spiritual power or legal power and they said that the Supreme Court not the Supreme Court not the Constitution but the power comes from other earth. So when you guys are talking about these treaties in Lowndale versus Hitchcock I wish that somebody could be up there that's Indian that could tell where the real power is whether it be the hurricanes or the wind or the water that there's a spiritual power, spiritual law and there's a man-made law and I wish it wouldn't always be one-sided because as much as you guys reiterate stuff up there we got people here that are learning things and much like when we was in Standing Rock there was people that wanted man-made instructions but there's spiritual instructions there and when there's non-Indians helping us and there was many non-Indians helping us at Standing Rock and they always wanted to know in their head what was going to happen next not in their heart and so if you really believe in spiritual power that's what we have on our side as Indians so as the gentleman was talking about treaties we made those treaties with the pipe with the spiritual power and no white man's law can take that away from us, our side unless that don't understand treaties properly there's two sides to a contract so just because the white guy decides not to obey their sides of contract that doesn't sound too just for somebody standing up there saying oh well it has no foundation I want to say what I really want to say like that needs to be said from an Indian perspective let me tell you what it means guys that are here you know so so so not very long I wish more things would be said about the 1803 treaty somebody told this to me that in 1803 when the United States wasn't even 30 years old they made a treaty with the Sioux people when they did the Louisiana Purchase they asked the Sioux nations to recognize them they asked us now you got nations like the Lumbees and the Duwamish asking the United States to get recognized but I appreciate how many treaties we made the number of treaties but I would love that to be so much stated about how they asked us for recognition you see what I'm saying so even us as Indian people we asked the creator to recognize us and I heard like some of your foundations for your legal scholar your legal foundation has to do with separation of church and state that's not the way we see the world so that's what I want to say make statements however you want to so Robert I'd like to address that I'm sorry go ahead go ahead Robert we're having a constitutional treaty convention April 27 28 29 and 30 we have adopted the United Nations study on treaties and we will be implementing them based on the Vienna convention and the international principles so that every one of those 33 treaties is legitimate so we have a process that we're going to initiate and we're also having a great peace commission and that will be representative of women from all of the treaty nations in April as well my name is Peter Dorico I want to just follow up but this man said I think it's the spiritual question is clearly the the basis of what we need to walk away from here today I'm thinking we hear a good panel and thanks to Sackler Foundation and Liz for putting this together but what am I supposed to do now go out and get a cup of coffee am I supposed to think about anything and so I think there's a couple of loose ends and they relate to this spiritual question one of the loose ends has to do with the legal aspect and one has to do with a much deeper peace just to follow up with Steve Newcombe said a moment ago 1955 you all have heard of 1954 Board versus the Brown versus Board of Education almost everybody has heard about that the same court 13 months later decided T hit on versus the United States Steve already told you about it saying the Tlingit people did not own their own land because Christian discovery gave it to the United States the United States has its version legal version of spirituality which it calls Christian discovery that was in 1955 in 2005 and now we're getting very close to the present day 2005 Ruth Bader Ginsburg wonderful great liberal feminist justice said in footnote number one city of Cheryl versus the United Nation discovery gives power to the title to Indian land to the United States that's in 2005 so the United States law on which all the statutes are based that people are using in litigation around standing rock like environmental protection national historic protection all of those laws are premised on the same notion that the United States has title to the land why because it was Christian discovered that's the that's the Achilles heel of the litigation that's been going on so far standing rock does not need to rely on U.S. laws of environmental protection and historic preservation that's a fundamental mistake second thing just to make a big leap what else do I walk out of here this afternoon with we have a dominating system that goes back two thousand or more years five thousand years however long it is since the Bible has been the Bible we have a colonizing God we have a God who said I will give my people a promised land it belongs to those people over there but you go kick those people out and kill them and I will give you their land and we have the three branches of that family the family of Abraham I call it the dysfunctional family of Abraham we have those three branches of one family that have engulfed the planet earth with their fight with each other over who gets God's promise to give them somebody else's land so when I walk out here today I have to think how deep this domination code goes it's active in United States law today and it's active in everybody's mind who's walking around thinking in that Judeo-Christian Islamic framework that's where I think we have to start our day to day minute to minute rethinking thank you thank you very much Peter thank you so I'd like to sort of say something to Peter about domination also the definition of the words we use I spoke about it earlier but when we talk about reality reality in its original etymology real means royalty and so when we're saying we got to live in reality we're living within the rules of royalty what the ownership of that land of the rules and regulations so we can say this is the United States reality and not understand what relationship we have as native people within our forced domination or colonized language of reality so when you think outside of the walls outside of the box you're talking about relationship relational languages not just how much that tree cost and how long it's going to live so information becomes sort of you know it doesn't matter when you go back to the larger quantum physics of the languages of native people they totally can swallow up reality and explain it and explain it in relativity so that's all we have to understand even when we have treaty conferences we know that that's going to be the underlying thing and so we have to get out of the box of reality and go you know stop thinking that we only have one way to think because I know as well as many you there are many intelligences in the world not just the western way thank you very much to your cousin yes hi thank you very much for just a wonderful afternoon of great comments and discussions I had read something about the fact that the energy transfer partners that there's been an ongoing manipulation of the law because the pipeline itself was sectioned enabling this company not to get the environmental impact statements that it needed to do because they sectioned it over time and over sectioning different territories that it was never presented as a linked over a thousand mile pipeline which would have necessitated and you know an impact environmental impact and I'm wondering I mean am I what I read is incorrect or is this true could you provide any insight about that history please section by section not the whole entirety and so they were required by law there's um you have to go back to 1981 because I believe the issue is the right-of-way um was issued to northern border pipeline which quietly went under the Missouri River as a gas line so we're attempting to do baseline study for benzene um initially so that we know what the level is before the the oil pipeline comes through but Keystone pipeline was attempting to use that as well as Keystone XL to use that right-of-way um there was never an agreement under um the antiquities law or the um ARPA or any other law that was required in 1981 so I maintain that there is no right-of-way um to piggyback on because all the other pipelines are going to piggyback on that northern border pipeline but there was no agreement with interior there was no consultation with Standing Rock or any of the nations in Dakota territory for the northern border so we're questioning that we're also questioning the nationwide permits number 12 which was recently created is only five years old they're in their infancy um before that Army Corps used section 404 for clean drinking water for the oil pipelines so we challenged them so we do have claims for five million a day um from February 15 uh 2015 on the spills that have occurred and um there is a major question on that right-of-way and the sectioning of the pipeline for authorities over 200 so yes we we need our day in court to to prove and to show how they have violated the nationwide permit under Army Corps as well as Interior type 13 um authorization for pipelines uh there's another part of the answer um and that is an environmental impact statement is required only for actions taken on federal lands the vast majority of the pipeline is being constructed in private lands and the oil company is paying royalties or lease lease money to the private owners who have signed leases allowing the pipeline on their private land so um the oil company is has smartly uh negotiated with private land owners and avoided the need for an environmental impact statement but because the white land owners that I was referring to earlier in North Dakota refused to grant the lease the oil company was then uh needed to reroute the pipeline underneath federal land and that's when it uh came up against NEPA the environmental uh the national environmental policy act which required an environmental impact statement thank you for those answers I would say underhandedly unceded Ochecha Shikohan territory designated as or wrongfully designated as federal land that's how I would say it so thank you um we'll take the four more questions and then we're gonna have to okay I'll try to keep this short oh that's alright um on a positive and a more lighter note I just wanted to thank you guys I know it's not easy to get up there and you know you gotta take the good and the bad criticism so I thank you for representing our nations in a positive way and I wanted to ask Phyllis moving on for the youth are there any outlets or events that you are going to be having up there to inspire and motivate the people and unify the people anything in the future can you we're trying to move forward um on all fronts so we are having the Great Peace Commission the 149th anniversary um of treaty nations that we'll be contacting um in Canada and the United States of all women and uh and then we're having a constitutional treaty convention Standing Rock has voted in 2004 for traditional governance we are non IRA and so the people have spoken and we are going to embark upon moving toward traditional governance and implement those so we will no longer be um we part of the federal um system so we're going to move we're asking Ocete Chakoy to follow suit and so then we've taken care of the women the governance and we'll be having the the treaty conference to address the standards and principles the reparations um we are going aggressively we have 111 lawyers who have agreed to help us to address the treaty status we're having a film festival May 3rd, 4th and 5th of the it's the first weekend in May um for the youth on Standing Rock and we have filmmakers from all over the world who are interested in helping us we've hired an executive director we have a producer who came with us um and so we're going to incorporate a lot of history we're going to be showing the hundreds and hundreds of um films of and the documentation of what has occurred in the last year we're going to infuse uh history um the seven um sacraments if you want to bad word in front of Steve um but the seven principle the value system that we have we have kinship rules all of those those principles that have been prohibited uh two generations we are now we have them on CD we have we will have them on film we think it's a good initiative for America on how to treat your children how to treat your husband how to treat your mother-in-law um so we have some beautiful principles and standards that we can offer so that's all part of the film festival we will have this will be the first inaugural film festival and um we will be moving it'll create its own identity and website so we're doing that for the youth in June we're having a water summit to address the water rights and to address the question terrible question of quantification which we do not believe in in our society so but how do we how do we tame that wild imagination that Indian rights don't belong to us uh we hold title to the entire Missouri river um to the headwaters of Montana to the tail of the of the river when it meets a Mississippi so we're going to push and shove and uh we believe that we we know who we are and we are going to aggressively um take on so through social media and otherwise we have a great great uh plan for the film festival for the youth on standing rock in May and the water tribe the water summit in June wonderful morning star thank you for the question and I think you got some wonderful answers I hope you're taking notes yes hi first thank you all for being here um it seems to me that oh thanks it seems to me that uh the native spirituality is helping to keep this land Turtle Island US whatever you call it more peaceful um I just finished a powerful book by Mark Curtis called secret affairs British collusion with radical Islam which goes on and on and on to explain for like over 75 years the collusion of Britain with radical Islam includes Saudi Arabia eventually the US and we see the chaos and it's around the world with Middle East the Balkans you know predominantly because of oil and natural gas so when I would think about what's going on here as brutal as some of the treatment has been it's standing rock comparatively it seems rather peaceful and I seems to me some of that has to do with the you know the energy and the the uh the spirituality that you've all mentioned so my question is is there any suggestions or advice for people as a way to maintain that peacefulness yet also help stop the pipelines which is sort of an obvious thing but is it can any any ways that you know things about the spirituality that can help enhance that already thank you I told you I really can talk long in English first of all our movement was based on peace and prayer and as I stated earlier it took us a lifetime to get here we took back our our spirituality we had uh we had four Sundancers in 1974 that defied the government policy and they Sundanced publicly for the first time at Greengrass in South Dakota and uh he stepped out but there was a young man here who a young man then who was only 17 years old there were four of them Russell means head means Ed McGaugh and Mitchell Zephyr they were the four Sundancers they were the front line in our spirituality in 1974 they defied the policy publicly and they danced and it was the beginning of the new freedom that we took back to worship in our own way we are the most beautiful people in the world we have the most beautiful language that is flowery and spiritual even a gun is called holy bad what can she just a gun all of our language is derived from Kashiwa Wakantanka Wakha children Wakayasha sacred beings we're taking that back we have lived and survived under the conditions of colonialism and all the social pathologies that came with it how to beat your children how to send them to boarding school three generations under that prohibition we're in boarding school three generations have undone it and we're going to move forward in a spiritual path we have a lot to offer America in terms of new new ways kinship rules, respect, dignity we have a beautiful beautiful way of life and so yes we asked we asked everyone who came to the camp we did junka which is one of the seven seven values that we hold we adopt in we do not adopt out so we are the only people in the world who can pick and choose our own relatives and we take the best the most intelligent the hardest workers the ones with the biggest hearts and we have the best relatives so we have junka and we made junka with everyone who came to that camp and we showed them how to pray at our fire how to respect each other we are not under constitutional king so you cannot use your your foreign languages here so we taught lessons every day and we told them to go out and back into your communities you are now our relative spread our way of life our spirituality pray there were people who came who did not know how to pray there were Christians who did not there were people who came that didn't know anything about being Christian we have a gentleman who's coming back to be baptized in the Christian way so we're sponsoring him so likewise we sent the word that to share our way of life take it with you and pray every day because it's spirituality it's not religion which is a God box on the street corner that you go once a week and you say I did this I'm sorry and go back and do it again spirituality is free it's every way that you can pray it's any time you can pray when you wake in the morning to the morning star in the evening to the evening star so prayer is everywhere all the time and so that's what we embrace and you can share that with yourself and your family and take it with you so yes we are going to missionize our way of life thank you yes hi my name is Jen Mendoza and myself and my brother here Zeke and several of other of us in the back here just traveled here from Oceti Shapoen and I personally got there the day of the dogs August 3rd when they released the dogs on people trying to stop the pipeline and we stayed until the end until they raided us on the 23rd and I actually have several questions but I did want to say thank you so much for being here we just kind of happened upon this event today but thank you all for being here I do know how difficult it is and sometimes re-traumatizing to talk about all of this so thank you and thank you for allowing us to ask questions but we did notice that like the gentleman before us talked about how peaceful it was and I wanted to bring up the point that it was peaceful on our end we were in constant state of ceremony but the systems of oppression and systematic violence were used against us in every single way that they could psychological warfare chemical warfare we were tear gas we were shot at we were they used nerve gas on us a lot of us are suffering from PTSD like we feel like we just left a war zone we with stood the coldest temperatures living in tepees like we only had fire to keep us warm there were times where donation stopped coming in we didn't have food there was media blackouts the world forgot about us and then we also faced inner tribal conflicts and on December 5th we were told that the prayers had been answered the pipeline would be stopped and the tribal council asked us to leave even though we knew that Donald Trump was on his way in and that that pipeline was probably going to go through we were told our prayers had been answered and we are just curious what happened after December 5th and when we what we called that false victory to make the world stop paying attention to what was happening in North Dakota what happened to the tribal council what happened with Dave Archambault telling us to leave a lot of us feel betrayed and I'm not just speaking for myself I'm speaking for all of us who stood there until the end through the raids through the trauma through the psychological warfare through all of the things that I just mentioned what happened and how do we move forward in this movement when we were asked to come and protect that water to protect treaty rights to protect you know the sovereignty of indigenous people or original nations people when we're up against fighting ourselves so that's a really difficult question but that's something that we're all carrying in our hearts and in our minds and we would love clarity and if you want to add anything to that all I want to ask is where was the help we all needed help emotionally physically and mentally we all needed help where was everybody like I understand some people have their lives to live and that there's they have places to be things to do but any help helps we'd be grateful for the help that people had to offer I just want to ask where was it we've all these great wonderful people in this world but we just didn't have the means of getting the information out to these people who could help so why is that why is it that they did this to us our own people we're people who live here with everybody everybody of all colors we live with them we respect them so why won't they respect us why is it like this that's all I got to say thank you no I will I was part of the camp coordinator and when from the time we started those camps every every aspect that or every social issue that you have in a community was there and people came and went you know we are mobile people we didn't go into the either camp to start building homes to start digging in to settle it was not a settlement we're not the Gaza and trying to make permanent settlements the tribal council set up a winter camp it's still there no one went there no one took advantage of that on December 4th when the veterans came in I believe that made a difference and when they came in we had to stop the capacity of that that movement because and we had to cap it at 2,000 because there were 5,000 coming when we said only 1,500 were coming and we could not accommodate more people the capacity was 13,000 the maximum that came to the camp and then we were in a panic so early on the Standing Rocks who tried provided 5,000 a week for the the sanitation facilities we had major bills payments and we provided all the food for as long as we could when the we had two ceremonies one was for the Wankia Oyate to come the weather the thunder beings to come and help us we had six snowfalls actual blessings that we felt but overwhelming snowfalls the most snow in the state of North Dakota in 11 years so that had a tremendous impact on our communities we are rural we have communities that are two communities that are 50 miles away from headquarters so our people didn't have the necessary the road clearings there were people we didn't have a we usually have snowmobile to take out the sick people to take them to the hospital we didn't we were lacking services within our eight communities that the chairman had a priority to and he was facing a million dollar fine for every month that Ocete Chakoy was there but he provided the tribal council provided a winter camp going into Canemba a whole 80 acres where those two towers were no one came there no one took advantage of that winter camp no one didn't want to move from that flood zone so when with that much snow the potential for flooding in that entire area would a jeopardize the entire camp so I give credit to my tribal chairman because he had an obligation to his community to the entire Standing Rock and he had accommodated longer than we anticipated to be in that camp we didn't know that we were going to be there for eight nine months and as people came in came out drugs were there alcohol was there we fought it from day one we fought the internal the inner tribal the we took the best care of the people that were there and when the when the tribal council went on record to move back out from the we didn't have the money the tribe was not getting the money there were ten thousand accounts that were online that were not coming to our tribe so we didn't have the money for the snow removal for our own people and it's still ongoing there's a storm there today so it continues and we kept out the U.S. Marshals we kept out the law enforcement we kept out because they had guns we didn't allow guns in the camp we did what we could and if people we did evacuation plans we provided for we consolidated activities with the churches the local ministries so everyone who was in the camp had bus tickets and gas money and food money to go home repair of vehicles so we did I don't want to interrupt but I don't know if you know this but those things were not properly distributed to the people who had given up everything their jobs, their homes, their families, everything there were people there that had literally the clothes on their back and those things were not distributed to them I don't know if you know that so we didn't have I had to move out of the camp I work for the tribe and we did the best we could we never envisioned that there would be that many people and this long a time and we were ready to fall over after eight months so we're human beings that was a human conditions that we had to endure and I apologize to you if you suffered in any any way and that you made it to to New York thank you, I'm sorry Robert you can speak well I believe in my spiritual my son suffered from cancer whether I go to Jesus I've been, I've been you were at South Korea my life in South Korea I don't pay to South Korea South Korea don't even pay to South Korea long as he's been in prison Nelson Mandela also when he was in prison he was in his head he was in prison in his head he was planning on switching around in the story he claimed already many people claim that what we're going to come to you're going to be with us you need a home victory don't come here with us as you're praying if you were to send out you'd be crying about being hungry we don't do that when we send out we pray you're here with us Sundance and sacrificing your time your job, my job too I had an art gallery I had grandkids to go home to thank you for relieving me to let me go home water protectors if you really are a Serbian ceremony you don't go home I know it's even hard to go back from the Sundance but that's a good thing it's hard to read in New York City when you come back from the Sundance but that's the much of a good thing do not take our spiritual movement and change it by you being wounded if you're not powerful enough to feed there don't be our ally so my question is important I'm going to have to slow us down a little bit Alright, I'm sorry no, I'm not slowing you down I'm sorry, what are you trying to say now? No, Mainland City in America has been handled by many people that's standing out here Did you know there was a there was an incident where somebody was standing around a community died of what? Cross-black, you know, died in the frozen weather nobody died in their camp I'd like to say the following, and then I thank you for your remarks, and we'll move on. I'd like to say the following, and that is that I think that all of us, whatever religion, whatever peoples, whatever communities we come from, if we are conscious and aware, we know that the road ahead of us is not going to be easy for any of us. For American Indians, for Muslims, for Jewish people, for Mexicans, we are looking at a very, very difficult, dangerous moment in time. And we have to draw upon our inner spirits and the outer spirit in order to fight, in order to resist, in order to do whatever it is that we will have to do for our freedom, for our health, and for our children. And I'd like to end it there, and I'd like to thank all of you for being here today, and I'd like to thank my panelists very much for coming and spending the time with us. Would you like to say a few words? I did want to say that I wanted to thank you for your commitment and your sacrifice and what you put into supporting and standing with Standing Rock. And that thank you goes out to everyone, at least from me personally, for everyone who made that commitment. At the same time, it's important to understand that Standing Rock Sioux Tribe takes on a tremendous amount of responsibility in having that many people in their territory. And like it has been said here several times, there's only so much that can be done when you get to a capacity limit. So that's all I want to say, but I did want to at least make that statement to acknowledge what you did do in your commitment. So thank you. Thank you for saying that. I just wanted to like reiterate that my question was more of a political one and combating the tactics of the enemy moving forward rather than, you know, anything about my personal trauma. It's not about me. So maybe if we could talk later or something. Thank you. Additionally to each of you, I'd like it for being with us. I was the fourth in line for a question. Okay. Okay. I like to talk about solutions. I think they're the key note of all conversation and bridges and gaps. We were supposed to meet in Mikisei. We're supposed to make a drug and alcohol earth lodge. And we have made three sheds and to me the main focus is the children. Myself have made sacrifices with water. And I understand that sacrifice with water and food. So understand the natural laws of the universe. So the commitments that we need to make and are you guys going to finish that model that we made for the drug and alcohol treatment for temporary houses for people that are struggling with drugs and alcohol because it's a major problem on the reservations. And it was also going to have a garden. And I think that's the main thing concern about everyone's leaving here is what are we going to do? Myself have three cups with me at all time and glass containers trying to not use as much trash and myself being with Tunkashila. And then the other thing is not spending money with corporations. These people are going to leave here and they're searching for spirituality but the foundation of it is the prayer that you put into it when you're walking on this earth. And I think that's a key note. Solutions that small that they can do is, you know, don't buy plastics, get glass containers, try to stop using trash and stop trying to. If you love what you call America, don't trash it up. Use less trash. Have a garden. Find local gardens. Stop chucking at the grocery stores. A small people, I have a garden myself so I can say that. Buy from local gardeners. We need to help our family. Those kind of things. Buy arts and craftsmen. Local artists. Buy local. Stop spending your money with corporations. So again, for the standing rock, the hump-hopper relatives, I think it's important that you finish that. That we were going to put in their life long, be there forever for your children, for drugs and alcohol. This is a major problem. It's oppression. Like she said, it's oppression all over. And all the countries of the oppressions of consuming, we have to start giving more than we're taking. So I'll just say it with that because I know you want to honor them with this. Yeah. Can I say one last thing real quick? One thing I forgot to mention and along the lines of what this gentleman had just said in terms of attempting to shift our thinking and our behavior, we have a movie out that I co-produced with Sheldon Wolf Child called The Doctrine of Discovery Unmasking the Domination Code. And you can get it at 38plus2productions.com. So I just wanted to mention that. A selfless plug. Thank you very much.