RFK Jr. The Defender - Native American Rights Panel with Chase Iron Eyes

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, I have a great show today.

00:00:02.000 I have a panel of Native American leaders and the organizer of this event was Chase Iron Eyes and Chase is the native outreach director for the Kennedy campaign.

00:00:16.000 He was Raised on Standing Rock Indian Reservation until the age of 19.

00:00:22.000 He earned his undergraduate degree at University of North Dakota studying political science.

00:00:29.000 He then graduated the University of Denver Law School Chase was charged with felony inciting a riot, a five-year prison term maximum, as a result of participating in the Standing Rock protests against the DAPL pipeline.

00:00:49.000 And we crossed paths at that point, and he helped lead the efforts to reclaim sacred lands in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

00:00:58.000 He raised over a million dollars to launch the land back He was with me for 10 years

00:01:28.000 fighting in the successful battle against The James Bay project, which was a proposal to build the biggest construction project in the history of the world, 625 dams and dykes to dam 11 major rivers that go into the eastern side of James Bay and Hudson's Bay.

00:01:54.000 They were going to create a lake the size of Lake Erie and destroy an area larger than France. 0.56

00:02:02.000 And it was all Cree-Indian lands.

00:02:05.000 The Cree were never consulted. 0.98

00:02:06.000 They never lost a war.

00:02:07.000 They never signed a treaty.

00:02:09.000 And they had no place at the table.

00:02:13.000 And they came to New York.

00:02:15.000 The Cree Grand Chief, Matthew Coon, came.

00:02:18.000 And I asked my help, and we ended up fighting.

00:02:22.000 This is about 1993.

00:02:25.000 For many, many years, and we spent a lot of time up in the Mistasini and Chisasibe, these communities, 800 miles up in the North Country, 800 miles from the nearest paved road.

00:02:42.000 And we ended up winning that battle and Everett was a Sioux leader who came to help us and I spent a lot of time sleeping in teepees with him and catching fish and hunting caribou and eating a lot of wild game and became very close and he did Naming ceremonies for a lot of my children out on Standing Rock back in the mid-90s.

00:03:10.000 I feel like Chase is a member of my family or others, as are David Harper.

00:03:17.000 And David is the current leading tribal outreach efforts for utility-scale solar and energy storage projects with more than 30 tribes throughout the Western United States.

00:03:29.000 He previously directed tribal engagement The Alliance of Tribal Clean Energy, a non-profit that served as the development tribal liaison for the Navajo Power.

00:03:43.000 He represented the Colorado Indian tribes.

00:03:48.000 His name is on a dozen different major power projects throughout the western states.

00:03:57.000 And then my final guest is Chairman Jacob Keys, who is a chairman of the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma, and he is the founder of Oklahoma City's first Native American-owned craft brewery, Skydance Brewing Company, and I've visited him at that incredible establishment.

00:04:24.000 He is a leading entrepreneur, business leader, and he has a podcast on business leadership.

00:04:35.000 He is Native Business Magazine, named him Top 50 Native Entrepreneurs, and his brewery won the Best New Brewery in 2021 for Pop Culture Magazine.

00:04:55.000 Anyway, this is a wonderful group.

00:04:57.000 I want to begin just by talking about some of my work on these issues.

00:05:04.000 I spent about 20% of my time over the 40 years as an environmental advocate working on Native issues.

00:05:13.000 I had a long background in this.

00:05:15.000 My father and my uncle saw what had happened to Native Americans in our country They recognize the genocide of Native Americans as the original sin of American democracy.

00:05:32.000 They believe strongly in our country and American democracy, but they believe that we could never live up to our potential as the world's exemplary democracy if we didn't go back and make amends and reconcile in one way or another with the people who had made the ultimate sacrifice and laid the groundwork Or the rise of our culture, our political culture in this country.

00:05:56.000 And my uncle, during his presidency, entertained a long line of tribal leaders.

00:06:03.000 They often came to my house.

00:06:05.000 And my father, when we were growing up, whenever we went on a vacation together, a wilderness vacation or Whether we went skiing or whitewater kayaking or mountain climbing, which my father wanted us to see the whole country, the first thing we would do when we landed at the airport is to go look at the native, go visit on native reservations.

00:06:27.000 And I visited Choctaw, I visited Cherokee, I visited Hopi, Apache reservations, of course, all the Sioux reservations, the Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, Rosebud.

00:06:42.000 And the Navajo Reservations, I went many times down to Red Rock and Comanche, or many, many of the big reservations in the western states I went to when I was a kid on the Mohawk Reservation in upstate New York, which was a very important group for my father.

00:07:03.000 My father, two weeks before he died, he spent a day at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

00:07:11.000 Which is the poorest county in America, year after year.

00:07:15.000 And my father saw a Sioux family living in the burned-out hulk of an automobile, and he cried.

00:07:25.000 And it was one of the only times that people had actually seen him cry.

00:07:30.000 And the word spread throughout the Sioux Reservation.

00:07:32.000 He spent about six, seven hours there.

00:07:36.000 I don't know exactly how long, but he was keeping a group of white people, 20,000 white people, who were waiting for him at Rapid City.

00:07:44.000 He kept them waiting all day, and his aides were panicking and saying, we've got to leave here.

00:07:49.000 Indians don't vote anyway. 1.00

00:07:50.000 And he said, you don't know your candidate if you think that's a good argument.

00:07:54.000 And But the last day of his life, he won South Dakota, which nobody had expected.

00:08:01.000 And he won it because the suit came out and voted in unprecedented numbers.

00:08:06.000 And he got almost 100% of the vote.

00:08:08.000 I think there were two votes against him on the entire reservation.

00:08:11.000 And every time I go back there, people say to me, we're still looking for those guys.

00:08:18.000 And I became friends at that point.

00:08:22.000 I was only 14 years old.

00:08:25.000 With Tim Gallego, and I later on served with him in founding Lakota Times, which is now called Indian Country Today.

00:08:35.000 I was a founding editor of that publication, which is the biggest newspaper in Indian Country.

00:08:47.000 And then around 1993, Matthew Cooncum came down to New York as my help with that I ended up blocking that project.

00:08:58.000 I played a key role in there by talking Mario Cuomo, who was then my sister's father-in-law, into canceling a $16 billion contract with Hydro Quebec, and that killed the project.

00:09:12.000 And we had brought up legislatures, about 20 legislatures, from the New York State Legislature to go camping and We do a whitewater trip with the Cree way up on one of these rivers that was going to be dammed, the Great Whale River, which is called Wat Magushtui.

00:09:33.000 And they fell in love with it, and they fell in love with the Cree people.

00:09:38.000 And in the end, we were able to block that project.

00:09:42.000 After I did that, I was asked by five tribes on Vancouver Island The New Chalnooth, Hesquit, and several other tribes to come out there and represent them in the litigation against McMillan Bloedel, the biggest logging company in Canada that was fighting to log Clackwood Sound.

00:10:07.000 Those tribes owned Clackwood Sound.

00:10:10.000 They had never again signed a treaty or fought a war.

00:10:14.000 The treaty negotiations have been going on for a century, and meanwhile, McMillan Blodell is logging, that was basically robbing all their wealth.

00:10:23.000 Some of the trees, these are 2,000-year-old cedars, Sitka spruce.

00:10:28.000 Some of them have a value on the stump of $20,000, and McMillan Blodell is strip-mining them.

00:10:35.000 And then sending them over to Osaka with the bark still on them, too.

00:10:39.000 It was insane.

00:10:41.000 And making hundreds of millions of dollars.

00:10:45.000 All the people who own those trees sat by and watched, and we were able to Win that litigation, and then I assisted in the treaty negotiations that ultimately gave the right to that tribe to the timber that was on their land.

00:11:04.000 And it put McMillan Bladel out of business.

00:11:08.000 And then I ended up doing a lot of work on treaties and dam projects.

00:11:16.000 The Puente Indians in Chile represented five tribes in Ecuador, or seven tribes, a group called Confederation of Amazon tribes, and litigating against Texaco and Chevron and Petro-Ecuador about pollution in the Eastern Oriente, that part of the Amazon.

00:11:45.000 And I went to war at that point with the environmental movement because The Indians wanted to have some development on their lands, and the environmentalists said, no, we don't want anything.

00:11:58.000 We need to keep it forever wild.

00:12:00.000 And I ended up feeling like the people who lived on that land had a right to economic development, and they were very conscientious about the environment.

00:12:11.000 But the environmentalists took the position that there should be no development whatsoever.

00:12:17.000 And I ended up becoming, you know, in a kind of fist fight with a lot of my friends in the environmental movement because I was representing the Indians groups in their interests.

00:12:31.000 Oh, I represented Pequots up in Manitoba and fighting tar sands and, you know, many, many.

00:12:40.000 I represented the Ramapo Indians in New Jersey.

00:12:44.000 We won a landmark case against pollution by Ford Motor Company, and I don't want to make this podcast all about my record, and I've already talked too long, but I just want to, you know, I want to welcome my guests, and I've spent some time with you, Chairman Keyes, and, you know, David, I'd like to start with you because I don't know you at all.

00:13:14.000 But, you know, I've worked on some of the energy development issues, stopping traditional extractive industries on Indian land and figuring out how we can do sustainable development on the land.

00:13:29.000 So tell us a little bit about your story, because that's what you do.

00:13:34.000 Sure.

00:13:35.000 My name is Dave Harper.

00:13:36.000 I'm a member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes located in Parker, Arizona.

00:13:40.000 I am a Mojave Indian.

00:13:43.000 I've worked in the utility environment for the past 10 years.

00:13:50.000 And actually, you know, one of the issues that we have is that, is exactly what you're talking about, is how do we maintain our traditional footprint of traditional cultural values while looking for economic development and looking for betterment of our people?

00:14:08.000 And how do we do that?

00:14:10.000 And so, you know, a lot of the tribes, they see this as grandma needs her utility bill reduced.

00:14:20.000 She's spending too much money. 1.00

00:14:22.000 But what we don't realize is that when utilities scale a solar or energy comes into the tribe, It isn't just impacting the small elderly people.

00:14:35.000 It affects the region.

00:14:36.000 It affects the state.

00:14:38.000 It affects the utility.

00:14:39.000 And it affects even the region of the Western world.

00:14:45.000 Because we're taking from the utility.

00:14:48.000 And there's a lot of animosity between the tribe and the utilities.

00:14:52.000 I work across the country.

00:14:55.000 On the utility scale, on microgrids for tribes.

00:14:59.000 And we're finding that nobody told the utility that the tribes are wanting to develop their own energy.

00:15:08.000 And that a lot of it has to do with the tariff tax that are being imposed by FERC. Even though the transmission lines are on tribal land, the tribes are still being taxed tariff to be in the queue On their own land while they're waiting to develop their utility-scale facilities.

00:15:32.000 And so there's a lot of inconsistency.

00:15:36.000 And even though there's a lot of money in the last administration gave billions of dollars for tribes, It's like dangling a carrot in front of them because the feasibility studies to get to the next area aren't covered.

00:15:51.000 So tribes having to pay $200,000, $300,000 for feasibility studies to get to the huge amount of money that are being allocated for tribes is impossible.

00:16:03.000 So the tribes aren't able to move their projects that they're proposing.

00:16:08.000 And so a lot of them are just stopping.

00:16:10.000 And a lot of them just aren't completing the process.

00:16:13.000 And that's one of the things that we've been seeing in Indian country is that the lack of two things. 1.00

00:16:21.000 The lack of the tribes' ability to be engineers. 0.99

00:16:26.000 There's no, you know, tribes don't have electrical engineers that That look at these huge projects.

00:16:32.000 And the second one is the inability of them to find the finances to get the feasibility studies to go to the next level.

00:16:41.000 It's like you can have all this money, but the road or the map says that you have to have X amount of money as you move along in the feasibility studies that the tribes don't have.

00:16:57.000 That really stymies the tribe.

00:17:01.000 But yet, the tribe still is looking for economic dependence to create a better economic, social outcome for their people.

00:17:11.000 So how do we do that?

00:17:14.000 How do we move?

00:17:15.000 How do we understand that the administration needs to help the tribe even more so than where we're at today?

00:17:24.000 Well, it doesn't make any sense to dangle that money at the tribes without providing them the little tiny bit of money that they need to do a feasibility study.

00:17:38.000 To make sure that all the questions you have to ask when you develop these alternative energy, wind, how often does the wind blow?

00:17:50.000 Are you going to be able to justify the investment in the turbine?

00:17:54.000 Wind turbines can bring in huge amounts of money, an acre of corn in the western states.

00:18:02.000 We'll yield a couple hundred dollars a year, an acre of corn with a wind turbine on it.

00:18:09.000 It's worth about $8,000 in revenue a year.

00:18:15.000 They can produce huge amounts of revenue and allow these tribes And solar energy, many of the tribes are in areas that are perfect for solar energy.

00:18:27.000 They're high altitude.

00:18:28.000 They have 300, 320, 330 days of sunlight a year.

00:18:35.000 And many of them are near enough utility lines that they can hook into existing utility lines.

00:18:45.000 But then there's all these other questions about, can the line transport the electrons efficiently?

00:18:51.000 Is there room in the line?

00:18:54.000 Is the utility going to let you on the line?

00:18:56.000 What price is the utility going to pay you for that power?

00:18:59.000 Is there net metering?

00:19:01.000 Are they going to give you the same deal that they give the other utilities?

00:19:07.000 And all of these are questions.

00:19:09.000 because I need to be answered before you can get financing.

00:19:13.000 And if you can't answer those basic questions, then it's all an illusion.

00:19:20.000 That big money that the Biden administration gave to the tribe, supposedly, is illusory if you can't answer the basic questions.

00:19:31.000 You can't draw up a business plan, essentially.

00:19:37.000 David, I'm grateful for you working on that, and I know that you have been successful with a lot of these projects.

00:19:49.000 Jacob, Chairman Keyes, can you talk a little bit about your experience as an entrepreneur?

00:19:55.000 Yeah, so, you know, we did.

00:19:57.000 We started Skydance Brewing Company here in Oklahoma City back in 2018, and I left a long career running casinos from my tribe here in Oklahoma to go start my own business, but really also to kind of be an example for Other Native entrepreneurs,

00:20:17.000 people in our community who always wanted to start a business, but they didn't necessarily see themselves as being capable or able to do that because, like me, growing up poor, where do I come up with a million dollars to start a business?

00:20:32.000 I never thought that was even possible.

00:20:34.000 And so I want to be somebody that our Native youth and other people can see and say, oh, somebody like me I've lived their dream and started a business.

00:20:43.000 And so through that journey of creating my business, that's really where a lot of our people in our tribe thought that we could use somebody like that in leadership.

00:20:54.000 And so they asked me to serve as vice chairman first in a temporary status when we had a vacancy.

00:21:01.000 And so I stepped in.

00:21:02.000 And then, of course, that sucks you in.

00:21:04.000 And they talked me into running for chairman.

00:21:06.000 And so I won.

00:21:07.000 And here we are, and I'm glad you're talking about the energy stuff, because when we met a couple weeks ago or whatever, we didn't really get to talk about one of our issues, and you brought up the wind turbines.

00:21:19.000 And so, you know, that's an interesting topic for us, for our tribe, because we have what's called the Gray Snow Eagle House.

00:21:26.000 So our tribe, we're the Bako Jay people, which is Gray Snow people. 0.85

00:21:29.000 And so we named the Eagle Aviary.

00:21:32.000 It's called the Gray Snow Eagle House.

00:21:34.000 We rescue these eagles.

00:21:37.000 Some of them will live there forever.

00:21:39.000 Some of them will be rehabbed there and set free.

00:21:43.000 But we go out and we get a call and there's an eagle hurt somewhere and the number of these birds Which to our people and to most of the tribes, eagles are sacred.

00:21:53.000 And they're extremely important to us, which is the whole reason we started the aviary.

00:21:57.000 But these turbines, a lot of times, they kill a lot of eagles.

00:22:01.000 And so we're currently in a battle in our area.

00:22:05.000 We're fighting a couple companies who are trying to come in and put turbines all around our tribal land.

00:22:12.000 And unfortunately for us, that means if they're successful and they put those in, then we won't be able to release our eagles in that area anymore, which would be detrimental because we try to put them back where they came from.

00:22:26.000 We try to put them back in the area where they were injured and where we picked them up at.

00:22:30.000 And so we're trying to lead other stuff, you know, solar projects and other green energy projects.

00:22:36.000 But then, again, our U.S. government kind of gets in our way because they think they have to tell us how to handle our own money, our own grant money and stuff.

00:22:46.000 We were awarded a grid resiliency grant and the initial wording in the grant said that we could partner with a utility and put the grant to work.

00:23:02.000 And then after we got the grant money, they changed the wording to say we shall partner with a utility.

00:23:09.000 And so basically we end up, they want us to hand over the money to one of these utilities, we pay the match, and we pay for the feasibility, we do all the stuff, and it really benefits that utility company.

00:23:22.000 So I testified in front of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and we thought that went great.

00:23:28.000 And then we got word back, you know, two weeks ago that they're not going to change that wording.

00:23:33.000 And so we have this grant money sitting there that we may not be able to use because it's not enough to do a big project with the utility.

00:23:40.000 So, again, like David was talking about, now you have money that doesn't get utilized or, you know, we don't have the capability.

00:23:48.000 We don't have our own utility company, so we don't have the ability to utilize these millions of dollars.

00:23:54.000 And so we're hoping that We have a president that can come in and be an ally to the tribes and help to change some of that stuff.

00:24:02.000 Yeah, I mean, you know, I've watched this for my whole life.

00:24:07.000 The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which, you know, from the outset was supposed to be helping economic development, nutrition, all of these issues, and they've become a captured agency.

00:24:22.000 They were captured from the beginning by You know, by really literally a long line of crooks that was even the ones, the few, the tiny handful that were well-intentioned did nothing good on an Indian country.

00:24:39.000 Many of them just use the BIA to strip wealth and equity away from the Indians, to poison them with bad food, to steal their wealth. 0.99

00:24:49.000 The BIA has never in its history functioned properly.

00:24:53.000 Really, it's a disgrace to our country.

00:25:00.000 It's been a thorn in my side for my entire life.

00:25:06.000 When I get in the White House, I'm going to change the whole culture at BIA and turn it back to what it was supposed to do, which is to do economic development and good care in Indian country.

00:25:23.000 Let me jump in.

00:25:26.000 You guys are bringing up amazing points.

00:25:29.000 Just from the start, to talk about Indian country is so complex, so varied.

00:25:34.000 There's more than 550 tribes.

00:25:37.000 And each of them is trying to develop their own potentials.

00:25:41.000 You know, we don't like the idea that Indians receive handouts or that tribal nations receive handouts or that we don't pay taxes.

00:25:49.000 You know, there's some basic perceptions in America about tribal nations, but tribal nations have always stepped up to the plate, signed treaties with the United States and said, look it, we want to protect each other.

00:26:04.000 We want to Be friends with the United States and throughout all of the history of activism and the end of treaty making, the Indian Citizenship Act, it gets convoluted.

00:26:15.000 And then in 1934, that is the last time that the federal apparatus took a very hard look at whether or not the policies of Indian country were working.

00:26:29.000 And in 1934, They passed the Indian Reorganization Act, which created the tribal councils as we know them today, the modern tribal councils.

00:26:37.000 But it ended the Indian allotment era, which resulted in a lot of land theft, 90 million acres.

00:26:44.000 And it ended what is euphemistically called the boarding school era, where languages, cultures were completely erased.

00:26:52.000 And you see that even now with the violations of the Indian Child Welfare Act.

00:26:57.000 There's just There's so much facing us.

00:26:59.000 And to hear Mr.

00:27:01.000 Harper speak about renewable energy, sometimes these tribes like Bobby came up to Standing Rock and witnessed the Army Corps of Engineers, which they had flooded us out under the Flood Control Act of 1944. 0.84

00:27:15.000 In 1958, my mom and my grandmother, they would be called an ethnic cleansing today.

00:27:22.000 They were removed from the most fertile grounds on the Missouri River.

00:27:27.000 This happened to like seven different tribes.

00:27:30.000 In some cases, look at all the tribes in the Northwest.

00:27:33.000 All the dams that Bonneville Power built, you know, not just the Army Corps, but the salmon runs that were impacted and ended.

00:27:43.000 And you see some of it being healed today.

00:27:48.000 Sometimes there's preferential access for tribes that there's a case to be made there.

00:27:54.000 Bobby, you talk a lot about...

00:27:57.000 One thing I find amazing is that you see us.

00:28:00.000 We don't have to convince you that, hey, we're human beings, we're your friends, and we want to build.

00:28:06.000 Yeah, are we going to agree on everything?

00:28:09.000 Obviously not.

00:28:10.000 But one of the items that you speak on and that you have experiences with Is the state of health in Indian Country, the diabetes challenges, the nutrition challenges, and the need for healing.

00:28:24.000 We've been subjected to a colonial process that has damaged us.

00:28:28.000 And some of us, you know, find different ways to cope, but we need recovery farms.

00:28:33.000 I know you talked about recovery farms.

00:28:35.000 There's a lot that Indian Country needs, but first, we just need a friend.

00:28:41.000 We need somebody who's been with us, somebody who's seized us, somebody that we don't have to convince that we should be partners.

00:28:50.000 But I just wanted to say those remarks and kick it back to you.

00:28:55.000 Yeah, and you know, you and I have talked a lot about this, about the health of the Indian country.

00:29:01.000 During COVID, the American Indians were the number one group in the world in COVID deaths, and more COVID deaths per population than any group in the world, and they were... 0.99

00:29:17.000 You know, they were incentivized greater than any population in the world to take the vaccine.

00:29:22.000 And some of the tribes, they were given $1,000 bonuses to take the vaccine.

00:29:27.000 Many of the tribes, many of the reservations, it was 100% compliance with vaccine.

00:29:34.000 And so why did we have the highest vaccination rate in the world and the highest death rate in the world in Indian country?

00:29:41.000 And, you know, clearly one of the reasons for that is that the people who are dying from COVID and from the vaccine were people who had chronic disease.

00:29:52.000 And the chronic disease rate on their reservations is the highest in the world.

00:29:56.000 Some of these reservations have 70% diabetes rate, obesity rates, asthma rates.

00:30:04.000 All of these, you know, these chronic...

00:30:07.000 CDC said...

00:30:10.000 The average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases.

00:30:14.000 It's hard to find an Indian today who doesn't have 3.8 chronic diseases because the chronic disease epidemic has wiped out the tribes, and a lot of that is because they're being mass poisoned by bad food.

00:30:31.000 What we call white death on the Indian Reservations called white death, white sugar, white flour, white grease, grisco.

00:30:41.000 And those things are like arsenic to Native Americans.

00:30:46.000 And yet, you know, I was with, I went, I represented, we have a lot of river keepers, a group that I founded who are Natives.

00:30:55.000 And one of them runs Black Mesa Waterkeeper, which is down, we're fighting Peabody Mine down in the Navajo and Ohopie Reservations.

00:31:08.000 And Ohopie buddy of mine, and I'm not going to tell his name is Howard, but he helps run that organization.

00:31:15.000 He was up on there.

00:31:16.000 We ran the Yampa River together, and I was with Mark Hyman, who's one of the world's greatest experts on alternative medicine and human health.

00:31:26.000 He was an advisor to President Clinton, etc.

00:31:29.000 We went on a long hike one day up to look at some of the petroglyphs, the ancient petroglyphs.

00:31:36.000 And on the way down, Howard was vomiting the whole way down.

00:31:41.000 And we got back to the raft, and Mark said, you know, why are you vomiting?

00:31:45.000 And he said, because when I exert myself because of my diabetes, it caused me to vomit.

00:31:52.000 Mark said, well, you know, you can cure diabetes with food.

00:31:55.000 Just by changing your diet, you can cure it.

00:31:58.000 And Howard was very interested.

00:32:00.000 He said, how do I do that?

00:32:01.000 And he said, well, you've got to eliminate flour.

00:32:04.000 You've got to eliminate white flour, white sugar, and white grease.

00:32:08.000 And Howard said, I can't do that.

00:32:10.000 And Mark said, why?

00:32:11.000 And he said, because those are all your sacred foods.

00:32:14.000 And Mark said to him, what are your sacred foods?

00:32:17.000 And he said, they're cookies and biscuits and cakes.

00:32:20.000 That's what we eat when we have a ceremony.

00:32:23.000 And Mark said to him, that's not your sacred foods.

00:32:26.000 These are foods that were imposed upon the tribes.

00:32:30.000 And that, you know, it's an illusion to think that it is death.

00:32:36.000 There's a reservation, a Pima reservation, Arizona, New Mexico. 0.93

00:32:43.000 It is the sickest group of people in our country.

00:32:47.000 They have a, among the US Pimas, the average lifespan, the average lifespan of 47 years, 80 years ago, these were the healthiest people in our country.

00:33:04.000 They had an 80-year lifespan.

00:33:06.000 They were slim.

00:33:08.000 There was zero diabetes.

00:33:10.000 There was zero asthma.

00:33:13.000 There was no chronic disease.

00:33:15.000 And they were among the most long-lived Americans.

00:33:20.000 If you go across the border into Mexico, that's how they look today.

00:33:26.000 The Pimas in Mexico lived to 70 or 80 years old.

00:33:31.000 They have no diabetes.

00:33:32.000 They have no obesity.

00:33:35.000 They have no asthma. 0.62

00:33:38.000 Right across that little fake line, the Mexican border, the Pimas on the north of that border are the sickest people in the world.

00:33:49.000 And it's because in Mexico, they're eating their traditional foods. 0.99

00:33:56.000 In our country, they're being mass poisoned by white death. 1.00

00:34:01.000 And so, you know, this is a genocide.

00:34:05.000 This is the final act of the Indian genocide, which is you take the people who are now the poorest, the highest unemployment, alcoholism rates, suicide rates, you take those people who are already besieged by all of these other, you know, social attacks and cultural attacks and, you know, poverty.

00:34:26.000 And you then besiege them with poisoned food.

00:34:30.000 That is going to kill them.

00:34:32.000 Everybody is going to die from it.

00:34:35.000 Nobody, you know, and that's what's happening on the reservation.

00:34:37.000 And I would say, beyond any other priority, you know, one of the things I'm going to do as president, I'm going to end that.

00:34:47.000 I'm going to tell people you can't be eating, you know, the food stamps.

00:34:54.000 10% of food stamps are used for sugar drinks or sodas, which is just pure poison.

00:35:01.000 We shouldn't allow that.

00:35:03.000 We're poisoning not just natives, but the entire country. 0.99

00:35:07.000 And it's feeding this obesity epidemic.

00:35:10.000 It's feeding all the chronic disease.

00:35:13.000 And I'm going to end that, but I'm going to start on the reservations by, you know, by making sure we know how to, these kids, teaching these kids how to be healthy and, you know, make it so that the companies that provide this poison food to them, that they can be held accountable in court, are poisoning people, because they know it's poison.

00:35:35.000 Definitely want to leave room for David or Chairman Keyes, if you guys have any questions.

00:35:39.000 You know, it's a broad discussion about Native policy in general, and it's so big.

00:35:46.000 This is a semester's minimum worth of kind of digging into what are some concerns, and we've heard about extraction and infrastructure.

00:35:58.000 You know, the building of dams, the building of a cobalt refinery down by Lawton, Oklahoma, same thing is happening at Thacker Pass.

00:36:06.000 There's a renewable culture being propagated and that's good.

00:36:12.000 We certainly need to address the fossil fuel incentives over the last, you know, since the industrial age.

00:36:20.000 But we have to be truthful about this because tribal nations...

00:36:24.000 We sit on maybe 1% of our former land holdings, but we're more than 20% of all the critical resource minerals that are underneath America.

00:36:35.000 So when we talk about mining and extraction and development, some tribes are okay with that.

00:36:41.000 Others want to be consulted.

00:36:44.000 They want consent.

00:36:47.000 Some, like the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the reason why almost a thousand people got arrested during the Dakota Access Pipeline fight is because the corporation was trying to run roughshod over indigenous rights, over indigenous treaty rights, clean water rights, were facing times of drought, climate crisis.

00:37:06.000 The list...

00:37:08.000 Is long.

00:37:10.000 And tribal sovereignty presents a peculiar kind of vehicle to, I feel, I've been trying to do this my whole career, is link tribal sovereignty with constitutional rights.

00:37:22.000 Natural rights, birth rights, human rights of American people.

00:37:27.000 Because we are fighting the same corporation.

00:37:30.000 One of the reasons why I jumped to Bobby's side is because Bobby's a fighter already.

00:37:37.000 Who's attacking Bobby?

00:37:39.000 Big Pharma.

00:37:40.000 Big agriculture, big extraction.

00:37:43.000 The war complex is attacking Bobby.

00:37:46.000 I mean, Native people sign up at highly disproportionate numbers to serve our great country.

00:37:52.000 That's how we gain citizenship in 1924.

00:37:55.000 After World War I, America saw that we volunteered the highest among any demographic.

00:38:01.000 Same in World War II. Same in every single conflict that we've been in, we've been fighting on the side of the United States of America.

00:38:10.000 And even before that, we were fighting, you know what I mean?

00:38:12.000 Like for the colonial wars and so forth.

00:38:15.000 So it is so broad.

00:38:17.000 But one thing I want to draw attention to is recently the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was instituted in 1978 as a result of the Native Renaissance.

00:38:28.000 And, you know, on the spring, on the back of The anti-war movement, the civil rights movement.

00:38:36.000 Native nations have always been seen as tribal nations, as distinct political entities.

00:38:42.000 Now, the law currently states that tribal nations are domestic-dependent nations, which is an oxymoron, but the lawsuit that challenged the Indian Child Welfare Act, which allows Federal courts, state courts, it dictates to them that they should be returning jurisdiction to tribal nations so the native family unit can survive.

00:39:04.000 This law was being violated by states like South Dakota.

00:39:07.000 Everywhere there's native people.

00:39:09.000 And Brackeen It was a suit that tried to extinguish this distinct political designation for tribal nations and say that Indians are only a race of citizenry who only have civil rights, which is just, it's not true.

00:39:27.000 It's not consistent with a couple of centuries of United States law.

00:39:31.000 And it's something that we need to be aware of in terms of the challenges that we're facing as Native people because we want to strengthen Tribal sovereignty.

00:39:41.000 We don't want to weaken tribal sovereignty.

00:39:43.000 But there's so many flashpoints.

00:39:47.000 Sometimes you have confrontational state governors and so forth.

00:39:51.000 So I want to provide those comments and leave the tribal leaders an opportunity to comment on those.

00:39:59.000 Yeah, I would say is that a couple things.

00:40:04.000 One is regarding tribal sovereignty and regarding who we are as Indian people in consultation and all the gamuts that happen at the federal level is that our elders always had said is that we are a religious people.

00:40:21.000 We have a religious base and we believe in our Creator.

00:40:26.000 And when the U.S. government finally understands that and gives us that respect and dignity of the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church, all the other churches, Native people have to have that same respect.

00:40:42.000 If you went into our grave and you dug up our people, you'd go to jail.

00:40:48.000 Or we'd go to jail if we did that to your graveyard, but you do that to ours, there is no respect.

00:40:54.000 There's no understanding that that is a religious perspective of our people and how we put away our dead and how we put away our ceremonies for those people.

00:41:06.000 And so when industry or anybody else comes to our land and they do exactly what happened in North Dakota is it's disrespectful because we're a religious base and that religion is not being honored and it's not being respected and we're less than.

00:41:24.000 But when we get to that point where we are recognized in the same religious perspective as all the other religions Then we can talk.

00:41:35.000 Then we have a foothold of where we're at together.

00:41:38.000 Then we're looked at as human beings that have a spirit, mind, and body that is religiously looked at as people.

00:41:50.000 And so, you know, that's how I look at things when I see things that...

00:41:55.000 When industry or the government comes, treat us like human beings that are spiritually based as anybody else because we are equal and that we have ties and meaningfulness to the land.

00:42:08.000 And we've been here since time immemorial.

00:42:11.000 We've died here.

00:42:13.000 Every inch of our reservation in our traditional homeland is where we put away our people and we go home. 0.99

00:42:19.000 We go home to our land.

00:42:21.000 And so That's how I see it.

00:42:24.000 It is so complicated, but yet so simple in our mind as Indian people.

00:42:31.000 I always think how the elders would simplify life, and that's all it is.

00:42:36.000 It's just simple living our life and who we are.

00:42:42.000 Yeah, you know, I agree with a lot of what David's saying.

00:42:47.000 You know, one of the things is when the sovereignty, when that idea of sovereignty is not understood by our legislators, by our politicians, you know, especially even more so like on a state level here.

00:42:58.000 So we battle with the governor here who's constantly attacking our sovereignty.

00:43:03.000 We have state legislators.

00:43:05.000 They don't understand what sovereignty is.

00:43:07.000 And like Chase was saying, they think of us as a race and not not so much as sovereign nations, as people who have treaties signed with the U.S. government.

00:43:16.000 And so some of that education, educating people and legislators around how the sovereignty works and why that exists would really help our cause a lot.

00:43:25.000 But when we talk about the health issues earlier, too, so when our lands are being taken away, that kind of stuff keeps us from being able to do the economic development that we want to do.

00:43:37.000 And when you have a lack of economic development that creates poverty, Those are the things that lead to a poor diet.

00:43:44.000 Many of our people, they're not eating food as a medicine or a way to treat their body.

00:43:51.000 They're eating food just to have something to eat, just to put something in their bellies.

00:43:56.000 We've got to figure out how we can switch that mindset, that poverty mindset to a success mindset and allow our people to live the way we used to live.

00:44:07.000 When we met before, Bobby, you mentioned that I think you might have said earlier, too, is that before colonization, we didn't have diabetes.

00:44:15.000 We didn't have...

00:44:16.000 These health effects that our tribes are dealing with right now.

00:44:20.000 It wasn't until we got introduced to all these things that you're talking about, the white death. 0.99

00:44:25.000 And so I think we just got to really focus on the federal government, state governments, and helping us continue to hold on to that sovereignty.

00:44:33.000 Let us develop economic power within our tribes and our reservations so that we can start to educate and teach our people the healthy way to live.

00:44:42.000 And so I really appreciate, Bobby, you pushing that message and changing that You know, idea of what food is and what health looks like.

00:44:51.000 You know what's interesting to me, talking about sovereignty, my family was part of the Civil Rights Movement, or African Americans, and my uncle and father partnered with Dr.

00:45:07.000 King and played a critical role in making this country a true constitutional democracy for the first time in its history.

00:45:15.000 Prior to them, there was a whole race of citizens who were not allowed to participate in American democracy, who were prevented from exercising their vote through official corruption and unofficial intimidation designed to deprive them of their right to vote.

00:45:37.000 And as a result of not being able to vote, they also couldn't use public transportation or Public parks or water fountains.

00:45:46.000 They were put in segregated prisons and mental hospitals.

00:45:50.000 Every aspect of their lives was segregated, just second-class citizens.

00:45:55.000 My parents were also conscious that there had been a genocide of the American Indian.

00:46:05.000 And that they were the poorest people in our country, and that their rights, the sovereign rights that they had agreed to, that we had not kept our word.

00:46:15.000 America had not kept its word with its treaties.

00:46:19.000 My mother, after my father's death, My mother went and spent a week out at Alcatraz when the American Indian Movement took over Alcatraz Island and it was sort of the launch of this renaissance to reclaim rights of sovereignty for Native American tribes.

00:46:45.000 But my father also, my father during The three months he announced as president in March of 1968.

00:46:54.000 And then he died three months later in June, June 6th of 1968.

00:47:00.000 During that three months period, he made 70 different stops on his campaign.

00:47:05.000 Of those 70, 10 of them were on Indian reservations.

00:47:09.000 Well, this was a huge priority of his.

00:47:12.000 And when he visited The Pine Ridge Reservation, he came back and told us he met a woman on that reservation who was present at Custer's Last Stand.

00:47:29.000 Imagine that, you know, a 20th century politician in the latter half of this 20th century meets a woman who was present at Little Bighorn when Custer was killed.

00:47:45.000 Because the whole Sioux Nation was gathered there.

00:47:48.000 And she was a little girl in a teepee at that point.

00:47:50.000 But that was 1876.

00:47:54.000 And so my father was campaigning, you know, 92 years later.

00:47:59.000 And this woman had been maybe a four-year-old girl at that point.

00:48:04.000 Or a six-year-old girl.

00:48:05.000 But it's really kind of extraordinary to me, even when I was a kid.

00:48:09.000 Oh, you met somebody who was at Custer's Last Stand.

00:48:14.000 Well, Custer's Last Stand happened because the U.S. government violated the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which was signed exactly 100 years before my father was killed in 1868.

00:48:31.000 And that was the treaty with the Sioux tribe, which is one of the biggest tribes in our country.

00:48:37.000 I think the second biggest after the Navajo. 0.99

00:48:39.000 But that That was a treaty that said that the Black Hills and a lot of other land will be owned by the Sioux, that nobody else can use it.

00:48:52.000 As long as the grass is green, as long as the rain drops from the clouds, as long as there is water in the streams, that land, nobody can take it from you.

00:49:05.000 Eight years after that, gold was discovered in the Black Hills.

00:49:11.000 And Custer was sent to take the Black Hills away from the zoo in violation of the Treaty of Fort Laramie.

00:49:19.000 So this is what happened to all the treaties.

00:49:22.000 And I love the point that Chase made about the Indians were forced onto 1% of their former lands.

00:49:33.000 And they were the worst lands.

00:49:35.000 They were the lands that everybody thought, okay, this land has no value to anybody.

00:49:39.000 We don't want it, so we're going to let the Indians keep it. 1.00

00:49:42.000 As it turns out, 100 years later, that land, by dumb luck, is the land where all the rare earth minerals are, all the cobalt and, you know, the lithium and all of these, and the gold and the silver.

00:49:57.000 And so now the corporations want that land, and they're doing the same thing.

00:50:03.000 That happened when they found gold in the Black Hills and they had to violate all the treaties and say, oh, sovereignty doesn't exist anymore.

00:50:12.000 Our nation, if it's going to live up to its ideals, has to show that it can be trusted with full faith and credit.

00:50:23.000 When it gives its word, it's going to keep it.

00:50:25.000 And its word was that these are sovereign nations That they have to be dealt with as sovereign nations, that they have rights, and that the United States, even when it's convenient to our big corporations, that those rights have to be recognized, and that the Indians have to be not just consultants, but they have the ultimate decision about what's going to happen on their land.

00:50:50.000 That's never happened.

00:50:51.000 So my presidency is going to be the first presidency where that actually happens.

00:51:00.000 And I want to thank all of you for being here.

00:51:04.000 Chase, thanks for putting this together.

00:51:06.000 Chairman Jacob Keys, thank you for joining us.

00:51:09.000 And David Harper, thanks for bringing us up to date on green energy development on native lands.

00:51:16.000 Thank you to all of you.

00:51:19.000 Thank you, guys.

00:51:20.000 Thank you very much.

00:51:21.000 Are there ways to support you guys?

00:51:26.000 Are there websites?

00:51:28.000 Can I ask you to talk about your website, about how listeners can support you or find you?

00:51:35.000 Yeah, we have a website.

00:51:36.000 It's called 7Skyline.

00:51:38.000 We put stuff on there.

00:51:40.000 We also put stuff on 7Skyline on LinkedIn.

00:51:44.000 We have a pretty good following.

00:51:46.000 So hopefully we can get a copy of this and put it on.

00:51:51.000 We've been linked with Department of Energy and Indian Energy Programs.

00:51:57.000 And then we serve actually 80 tribes across from Alaska, Hawaii, out to Maine, to Florida.

00:52:04.000 So we've been working on reservations and we got a pretty good following from them.

00:52:09.000 Good for you and German geese. 0.97

00:52:13.000 IowaNation.org.

00:52:14.000 That's our tribe's website.

00:52:15.000 And from there, you can find a link to our Gray Snow Eagle House.

00:52:19.000 So that's, you know, the more awareness we can bring to our eagle aviary, the better.

00:52:24.000 And hopefully people can start to see, you know, the reasons why we would fight against these turbines is to try to protect these birds.

00:52:32.000 Thank you very much.

00:52:34.000 And Chase, they can find you at Chase at teamkennedy.com.

00:52:38.000 Chase at teamkennedy.com or Chase Iron Eyes on the social channels.

00:52:44.000 And if I could take a couple minutes, I want to make a brief statement.

00:52:49.000 That hearing you guys speak, what comes to my mind is that treaty rights are constitutional rights.

00:52:57.000 Article 6 says treaties are the supreme law of the land.

00:53:00.000 Well, I've seen Mr.

00:53:01.000 Kennedy fight time and again to protect the constitutional rights of all Americans.

00:53:07.000 Our right to free speech.

00:53:09.000 Our right to be free from illegal searches and seizures.

00:53:13.000 Our property rights and all the businesses that were shut down.

00:53:17.000 And everybody who's still...

00:53:19.000 We're suffering and reeling from those times.

00:53:22.000 So we are set to defend ourselves against corporate aggression.

00:53:27.000 I see it happening.

00:53:28.000 I see the immunity of President Trump being discussed and permitted at the Supreme Court.

00:53:35.000 Now, there's more to discuss there.

00:53:37.000 I see the Chevron deference rule being gutted in opening up America's National parks and sacred waters.

00:53:45.000 That's one thing that we're connecting on, is 325 million Americans visit national parks.

00:53:51.000 Well, national parks are the places of our worship.

00:53:54.000 You know, these hold sacred sites, and we want to share the depth and the substance of who we are with America.

00:54:02.000 Now, Bobby and I, Mr.

00:54:04.000 Kennedy and I have, with the help of my uncle and other tribal leaders, are developing a Native New Deal.

00:54:11.000 To completely overhaul and reconstruct the trust relationship.

00:54:16.000 You know, it comes from a place of respect.

00:54:19.000 Like I said before, we don't have to convince Bobby that we're his partners.

00:54:24.000 He's already there.

00:54:25.000 And we just want to join you on that front line, Bobby.

00:54:28.000 And I wanted to say that for the benefit of the record here.

00:54:31.000 Thank you very much, Chase.

00:54:33.000 Thank you all for joining us, Chairman Keyes, David Harper.

00:54:38.000 Chase Iron Eyes, and thank you to all of you for your leadership and entrepreneurship and green energy and in justice.

00:54:48.000 Very grateful to all of you.

RFK Jr. The Defender - July 20, 2024

Native American Rights Panel with Chase Iron Eyes

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