What do you think tribal sovereignty means in the 21st century and how do we resolve conflicts between tribes and the federal and state governments?
Tribal sovereignty means that, it's sovereign.
You've been given sovereignty and you're viewed as a sovereign entity.
And therefore the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities.
I just love that soundbite so much, y'all.
The one guy in the audience, you can hear him start clapping, he thinks it's so funny.
Anyway, so this is Anti-War Radio.
Welcome back to the show.
Our first guest today is Russell Means.
He's the chief facilitator of the newly declared independent Republic of Lakota.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you very much for having me.
Well, it's an honor to talk with you.
Of course, I talked with Eric Garris, the founder of Anti-War.com.
I told him I was going to be interviewing you and he immediately started with all kinds of stories of you and Justin and Justin Raimondo and him and the Libertarian Party back in the 1980s.
It's pretty interesting stuff, a small world, I guess.
Yes, it is.
All right, well, so I didn't even realize, sir, how quickly this story had gotten away from me.
It turns out it's been almost a year since you and I'm not exactly sure who all else went to Washington, D.C. to the State Department over there to Condoleezza Rice's office and, I guess, delivered her papers declaring independence on behalf of the Republic of Lakota.
Is that basically right?
Well, with a small correction, an important one, is we withdrew from our treaties with the United States.
We unilaterally withdrew according to the protocol of the Law of Treaties, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which is all nations are signatories to that law.
So we are, and what happens with that withdrawal from our treaties is that we revert back to the legal status we had prior to the signing of the treaties, which means we're free and independent.
So our territory, as you can see from our website, goes into five states, western South Dakota and parts of North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and about 70% of Nebraska.
Right.
And in not too much, a little bit, I guess, of research I was able to do on this, I saw that you really emphasized the point that you're not seceding because the...
We were never part of the United States because of the treaties.
And that's why on federal Indian law throughout the United States, I mean federal Indian land, it's called, because they hold the land in trust, and therefore we cannot utilize the land for economic purposes unless we want to farm.
And then it's impossible because we can't get credit because the United States of America holds the land in trust.
Nevertheless, we do have a sovereign status, which means the United States of America's constitution does not apply to us on the Indian reservations of America.
Consequently, we have no protections against government or police or politicians or individual entrepreneurs or anyone that wants to bilk us and our resources.
So we end up in a welfare state if we stay on the land.
So consequently, what has resulted in this colonial barbarity is a diaspora of 75% of our people who have been forced just out to make a living, just have a home, been forced off the reservations in order to exist.
So we have a diaspora throughout America.
Well, so George Bush really is not even anywhere close when he said in that quote that the relationship is one between two sovereigns.
That's how you're trying to make it now.
But it's been basically a relationship between occupier and occupier this whole time.
That's right.
The classic colonial third world setup.
And so in order to eventually take all of our land, the only economic enterprise allowed are casinos, which further enhance and ingratiate the colonial governmental setups, which causes it to be a third world situation at the whim of Congress.
We are at the whim of Congress and the executive.
And the Supreme Court offers no protections because we don't have any rights.
So the policies of federal government, which are not laws passed by Congress and the laws of Congress are what rule us.
Consequently, we don't have a prayer and we're built to the nth degree.
One only has to go to an Indian reservation and you can see that the surrounding areas are benefiting from the so-called welfare we receive.
We don't receive checks in the mail.
What we receive is welfare that goes immediately to the surrounding areas, the white businesses and the white cities and towns that border on the reservation.
Consequently, like you take South Dakota, for instance, which has nine Sioux Indian reservations in the state, we are less than 10 percent of the total state population, but we're 25 percent of South Dakota's tax base.
And we don't pay property taxes because our land is held in trust.
So that's all the federal government money that comes and kind of bounces off the reservation and lands in the pocket.
You nailed it.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I think it's you mentioned there that you can't get credit.
The Indians can't get credit because the land is held in trust by the U.S. So you don't have any collateral to put up.
That's exactly right.
What a scam.
I have to tell you, Russell, I have to tell you, I guess I've known my whole life that and I think that, you know, my view probably approximates that of the average white person in America.
I've known my whole life that Indians are always very poor on their reservations, but not really why.
But you just nailed it because you don't have any property rights.
Correct.
So that's why, you know, the uninitiated and the racist persons in America, they say, well, why don't the Indians just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?
They've got land.
Yeah, right.
Wow.
So, well, and I think also, you know, people who are advocates of property rights seldom are the leaders of civil rights movements.
And so if you have anybody sticking up, any white sticking up for the rights of Indians, they're more likely liberal leftists who don't understand property rights at all and aren't going to be much help in that situation.
Actually, the liberal leftists are the worst thing that's ever happened to America, let alone Indian people.
But they are supremely, extremely racist against Indian people.
The liberal left is our worst enemy.
It's been the Democrats in Congress that have consistently, for over two, well, for about two centuries, almost two centuries, that have put the most debilitating laws into effect that strip us bit by bit of our freedoms.
Well, let me try to play the devil's advocate here a little bit.
I think I got one.
If the Indians on the reservations got title to their land and had real property rights to it, they could turn around and sell it all off to the whites, and then there'd be nothing left.
So maybe this is at least done with a view toward protecting the Indian lands from being all sold off to the highest bidder.
That's exactly the excuse they gave to the world, and they still do today.
However, I want to give you a very huge example of how wrong that is.
They stole the Black Hills from us, the Black Hills of South Dakota, and go into Wyoming.
They stole it from us, and then they tried to—I'm making a very long story, short, very short—then they tried to say that, well, we didn't have any rights to claiming it back, even though our treaty, which is supported by the Article VI of the United States Constitution, they just ignored that treaty and they said, well, you know, it's too late now, so we'll buy it from you.
But at 1870 land prices, at $17 an acre, there's over 80 to about 90,000 acres of land.
So they calculated the money.
It came out to—it was less than $17.
I'm sorry, because it came out to $17 million they were going to pay us for the Black Hills of South Dakota, because they said we didn't know anything about its riches.
And then they said, well, it's been all these years, so there's interest.
So they awarded us in 1979 $105 million.
Well, if the case was that if we didn't have the land, we would sell it, we have refused.
Even though we are the poorest people in the United States of America, and the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation, the second largest reservation, is the poorest, not only in America, but in the world.
Even though with those statistics, we continue to continually refuse the money.
And the interest-bearing account that it was in in the Department of Treasury up to a few years ago, it got to about $1.2 billion.
And then Congress says, oh, wait a minute, these guys aren't accepting the money.
And this is really starting to add up hugely, because it's now $1 billion.
Oh, my God, you know, 5% per annum is really going to make that grow.
So they took it out of the interest-bearing account, and that money's laying in limbo somewhere, not drawing anything.
But we still refuse it, even though our median income is between $3,500 to $4,000 per family.
And as you may or may not know, the level of, if you earn below $14,000 in America, you're considered poverty.
And we have less than 20% of that.
Geez.
All right, well, so let's talk a little bit about what you're trying to do about this.
I'm interested in this movement for renewed independence.
Basically, your claim is that the treaty's already broken, the U.S. broke it, and all you're doing is officially withdrawing from it, right?
That's correct.
And now, what exactly is your position within the Lakota Nation, and how does it relate to all the various tribal councils and all those politics?
I mean, I really have no idea how all that stuff works.
Well, if you want to look at Colombia or Guatemala or any other regime around the world that America has colonized economically, you will find the same thing on the reservation.
In fact, that colonial technique was bred and born on Indian reservations in the United States.
And in fact, it even goes to you American people, who you can't see it because of the educational veil they put over your eyes and dumbed down your brain, is that every major policy they've employed in colonizing the world, they now are put upon the backs of the American people.
You don't even know it, but you're the new Indians of the 21st century.
And that's very, very sad.
But what we're doing in the Republic of Lakota...
Well, wait a minute.
Let me stop you right there.
I'm sorry, because I did ask you the question, but that's very interesting.
You're saying the model that the U.S. government used to colonize the Indians and has used in waging its empire around the world is the same model that is now being instituted onto the American people in front of their very eyes, whether they realize it or not.
That's correct.
And how exactly do you define that model?
Well, it's very easy for you American people.
Look at your health policies and those corporations.
That form of health policy that you're now suffering under was bred and born on a reservation.
Your land policies, which the corporations have taken out and eased off the family farmer and family rancher, because guess what?
They're in the way of progress.
That's what they said about Indian people.
So now you have corporate farming controlling the land.
That policy is bred and born on Indian reservations.
The continual land grabbing was bred and born on reservations.
Your educational system, bred and born on reservations, the dumbing down of America, not allowing you to know your own history, not allowing you anything except specialized vocations so that your focus will be absolutely narrowed to your meager existence in life.
And then finally turning your entire country from a producing productive monolith in an economic giant in the late 50s and beginning in a 25 year period.
By the mid 80s, the United States of America had switched from being a productive producing country to being a consumer country with even more limitations on your world view, if you have one.
So all of these policies are the colonization of the American people.
And now if you want to look on the world stage, Hitler, Adolf Hitler, the Nazi wrote in the 1920s, this is before he became Chancellor of Germany, wrote in his book that the United States of America has the right idea on separating unwashed unwanted races from the master race.
And that is put them, pen them up.
And that gave birth, the Indian reservation system gave birth to what he called labor camps in which we now know as concentration camps.
The Bantu Development Act passed in 1964 in South Africa, which institutionalized apartheid, was bred and born from the Indian Reorganization Act of America passed 30 years prior in 1934.
So apartheid and Nazism, those two regimes are dead and gone.
But the role model continues to exist.
And this is what you have in the West Bank of Palestine is the land grab and the stealing of the natural resources of the Palestinian people.
Now, Iraq is the latest Indian reservation, you've got Afghanistan as an Indian reservation, and you're hoping, you're hoping to advance through Pakistan.
And under Obama, you probably will.
But you know, it's interesting.
I'm sure you've seen the colonial giant called the United States of America.
It was all bred and born on Indian reservations.
Well, you know, I'm sure you've seen the news stories where American soldiers at firebases camped out in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan refer to Central Asia as Injun country.
Exactly.
That Iraq also, you know, when they go on patrol while we're going out to Injun country.
As though, you know, all of all of Asia is the Wild West to be conquered and manifest destiny and and genocided, apparently.
That's exactly right.
It really is incredible.
And, you know, when you bring up the Nazis there, it it's sort of unfortunate.
They were so evil that to invoke them at all sorted.
I mean, it always just ends up sounding like hyperbole.
Except it's true, though, that that Hitler cited Andrew Jackson and the forced march to Oklahoma of the Cherokee, that they copied their eugenics programs, which, of course, were used against American Indians in this country.
John Gatto has written about how when the Nazis would tie a woman down and cut her over, he's out against her will.
They call that the Indiana procedure, because that's where it was pioneered.
That's exactly right.
All right.
Well, OK.
Now, so to my question again, the politics of the Lakota nation, I'm very interested in, you know, I think some people in the media might portray this as nothing more than the Montana freemen pretending that they're declaring independence or McLaren and the Republican Texas guys who tried to secede from the union a few years back and and not give this much credence.
How legitimate is your position among in, you know, making this claim to declare independence?
Republic of Lakota dot com.
We we quote Gandhi in which he said, first, they ignore you, then they make fun of you, then they fight you, then you win.
Now, what we're doing is completely nonthreatening and it's completely legal and lawful, backed by the Constitution of the United States and international law.
But we're happy to be ignored.
We're happy to be considered kooks and irrelevant.
That's fine, because right now and we have been involved for the last 12 months in re solidifying the foundations of our freedom.
And we have volunteers, non-Indian volunteers who have emigrated to the Republic of Lakota, working with and for us as Lakota now, because they have become citizens.
And these are both black and white, and, and Chicano people that have come to the Republic of Lakota seeking freedom.
We like on our website, we encourage and we we we allow these people in to come into our country as long as they're self sufficient, and that they understand that being free is not free.
And that freedom means you are free to be responsible.
And if you're a responsible person, of course, you don't make a paper entity into your economic equal, or in fact, superior like they have with corporations in America.
And to allow that to happen is irresponsible.
So you see, you have America that is full of irresponsible people who have allowed themselves to be enslaved.
Now the, the Republic of Lakota, we have a provisional government, of which I am chief facilitator.
And we have other facilitators and directors and, and what have you that are there.
Like I said, we're rebuilding the foundation.
And once that foundation is now absolute, we have absolutely no no anything to do with the colonial system of America put in place called tribal governments.
That means, of course, the only proof we have that we, we represent the people I ran for tribal president on the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation this past November.
And even though it's some say a crooked election, I got 45% of the vote.
So in so far as the largest Sioux Indian reservation with the most people in our entire country, and we're going to do this on every reservation, we're going to run a candidate for president based on freedom, and that number and that vote.
So this is going to take two to three years to complete that strategy, that political strategy.
And then we can present it to the world as bona fide of the people we represent, we're also going to be hiring, we're instituting our economic packages and our educational packages, our political packages.
And, and that's the strategies are health, health.
Also, we have four areas that we are instituting, because the people are not going to gravitate to you unless you can, can produce some tangible results of freedom.
And this is exactly what we're doing.
And where we are living in the area of North and South Dakota, which is the Republic of Lakota, that has been termed the Saudi Arabia of wind energy.
And yet, and then that wind, and this is what the experts say, there's it's there's enough wind in the western part of North and South Dakota, that can that can produce all the electricity the United States of America needs 24 seven.
What?
That's true.
That's what the experts state of the whole country of the whole country enough wind power just in western North and South Dakota.
Wow, it must be cold as all get out up there.
Well, in the wintertime, it does get cold.
And that's, that's fine.
It actually snowed a little bit last night here in Austin, Texas.
I couldn't believe it.
Sorry.
I still have that on the brain here in the middle of this interview.
Sorry, global warmth.
But the point is, we have the energy.
Now, do you think that coal companies, which are subsidiaries to the oil companies, you think that they're developing that?
And no, they're allowing a few wind farms.
Look what we're doing, you know, just like British Petroleum and their ads on TV, right?
This is what we're doing, you know?
So that's all you'll get is piecemeal wind farms to for show places.
Well, that kind of brings me to the other question, if you can, which you did answer my what I was really getting at there.
Well, which is your strategy to to really build consensus and win elections throughout the reservation system to prove your legitimacy and that kind of thing.
But when you bring up the competition between oil and coal companies and a newly independent Lakota nation, are we not I mean, are you not seriously facing the question of invasion by the U.S. government to put down any such thing if this was to really be successful?
We're not going to go after the blatant competition with the coal companies by producing wind farms.
We know that because the coal companies and the oil companies, the energy companies essentially own the grid.
So even if we did put up wind farms, we'd still have to give the the energy over to the grid, which and which the coal companies own.
Right.
So we want to do it house by house and to solidify our nation.
And that technology is practically it's very inexpensive.
It's almost free.
Well, and it sounds like you could you could really make Lakota nation very wealthy with that kind of.
Yeah.
You know, I learned in in the ninth grade back when the United States of America was still a producing, productive country and back in the 50s when I went in ninth grade, I took economics.
And the basic law I learned in that in that class was that those that control the energy control the economics.
So look at America, if you want proof.
Consequently, that's what we want to do is each individual controls their own energy.
We have not only that, but on the northern plains, we have the sun shines on us over 300 days of the year.
So that's enormous power.
We also have under our reservation and under the Black Hills geothermal water that has been totally ignored and not developed whatsoever.
Well, what about this?
It looks to me like on the map you also have Omaha and right now.
Now we really get to the rub.
Are the people of Omaha going to want to join?
Is the U.S. government ever going to recognize what they would see, at least as a secessionist power running off with a giant city like that?
Oh, wait a minute.
You know what?
Our strategy is piecemeal and individual.
So if we want to promote individual liberty, you have to have individual economics.
Promoting individual liberty and true individual liberty can only come through consensus.
And so we have to build our nation, rebuild it just like we how it was destroyed.
And that is neighborhood by neighborhood, each neighborhood.
So it is a mini state.
Understand this.
It's a mini state and they take care of everything.
When neighborhoods grow into a region and an area, all of a sudden you do not have any need for police.
You don't have any need for courts, lawyers or jails or prisons.
That's what freedom is really all about.
So the people of Omaha, they can keep Omaha if that's what they wish.
We don't want.
We want individual liberty through individual successful economics.
So you're basically trying to you would hope that the people of Omaha just simply as individuals one at a time would change their citizenship over because it's the right thing for them to do.
Well, if they want to be free, like I'm saying, we've got a lot of immigrants already and these are professional people.
These aren't people looking to homestead.
These are people.
Not only are they homesteading and buying property and joining our nation in buying property from the existing power structure, but these are we have one gentleman working at the headquarters.
He's an NBA from Harvard and he just drove out in his his Mercedes and he has no income yet, but he's a volunteer for the nation.
He's working there.
We have a businessman who gave up his corporation from Houston and he's he's our director of communications.
So we have many people throughout the United States that are assisting us through the Internet.
And now we have Internet expertise.
And if you go to Oregon and Connecticut, if you go with what it says online about how you want to institute a gold standard of sound money, I think it could be that you're going to find 300 million Americans rushing to join up the Lakota nation to try to save their economic life compared to the economic catastrophe the U.S. government is leading the rest of us into here.
That's exactly right.
Well, they're making you into a reservation, you know, and Obama's going to to start putting those into that place.
You know, they're going to rebuild the infrastructure at minimum wage.
Well, you know, I usually don't even get into this at all because mostly I don't really care, but I guess I'd like to care about the future of the Libertarian Party.
And it seems like it would be nice if there were actually, you know, any libertarians running the thing or running for office in the name of it.
Any chance that you might run for president again or run for the nomination for president again of the Libertarian Party?
No, that's.
I think the Libertarian Party continues on the.
You know, their role model is the Democratic Party and or the Republican Party.
And then, you know, to enroll to enroll yourself after the existing power structure is the wrong way to do.
Look how the United States, excluding the Indians, was founded and excluding the Africans was founded back in 1776.
And before that is they rejected totally the model that they were being ruled under.
So that's exactly what has to happen.
The Libertarian Party doesn't have a clue about consensus building or they go into existing areas, Idaho, Vermont, wherever, and try to build libertarian communities in the existing structure.
Well, we have the Republic of Lakota and believe me, libertarians are not flocking to freedom.
Well, I don't know.
It's sounding better and better to me the more I listen.
Right.
And it's about ready to pack up my truck.
It's you're welcome.
But I'm telling you, you know, you have to be self-sufficient and willing to work for freedom.
And that's what that's the criteria to becoming a Lakota.
Well, you got broadband access.
That's all I need.
That's what we have.
Wow.
Well, this is such a great story.
I wish I knew more about it so I could ask you better questions.
But I think I've learned a lot so far.
And I hope that I can bring you back on the show as a war as events warrant to to learn more about this.
This is just great.
That would be good.
Best of luck to you.
Thank you very much.
All right, everybody.
That's Russell Means.
He's the chief facilitator.
Of the Republic of Lakota is antiwar radio, and we'll be right back.
