Chase Iron Eyes is the Native Outreach Director for the Kennedy Campaign. David Harper is the current leading tribal outreach efforts for utility-scale solar and energy storage projects with more than 30 Native American tribes throughout the Western United States. Chairman Jacob Keys is the founder of Skydance Brewing Company, a Native American owned craft brewery in Oklahoma City. He is a leading entrepreneur, business leader, and he has a podcast on business leadership. He has been named one of the Top 50 Native Entrepreneurs by Native Business Magazine, and his brewery won the Best New Brewery in 2021 for Pop Culture Magazine. And he is the Chairman of the Iowa Tribes of the Sioux Tribe of Oklahoma and the Founder of SkyDance Brewing Co., a Native-owned craft brewery. And I have visited him at an incredible establishment where I've visited at that incredible establishment. I spent about 20% of my time over the past 40 years as an environmental advocate working on Native issues. They recognize the genocide of Native Americans as the original sin of American democracy. 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 for our culture, our political culture in this country. I want to begin by talking about some of my work on these issues and some of the work I've done over the years as a 20th century environmental advocate, as a member of the Native American tribe and a tribal leader. I hope you enjoy this amazing group of people who have a chance to be a part of the conversation and a voice for Native Americans in the next generation. I know that we can all of us in this conversation about Native American democracy and a place where we can learn from each other's stories and learn from our past and learn how we can make a difference in the world. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast and I hope this is a must-listen and share it with your friends and family and your family and friends. Thank you for listening and sharing it on social media and your support of Native American Podcasts. . - and I appreciate your support and support of this podcast. -Podcasts -Pt=1&referenced=1p&ref=a&qid=3&q=1s&qref=3
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, I have a great show today.
00:00:02.000I 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.
00:00:16.000He was Raised on Standing Rock Indian Reservation until the age of 19.
00:00:22.000He earned his undergraduate degree at University of North Dakota studying political science.
00:00:29.000He 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.
00:00:49.000And we crossed paths at that point, and he helped lead the efforts to reclaim sacred lands in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
00:00:58.000He raised over a million dollars to launch the land back He was with me for 10 years
00:01:28.000fighting 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.
00:01:54.000They were going to create a lake the size of Lake Erie and destroy an area larger than France.
00:02:25.000For 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.
00:02:42.000And 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.
00:03:10.000I feel like Chase is a member of my family or others, as are David Harper.
00:03:17.000And 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.
00:03:29.000He previously directed tribal engagement The Alliance of Tribal Clean Energy, a non-profit that served as the development tribal liaison for the Navajo Power.
00:03:43.000He represented the Colorado Indian tribes.
00:03:48.000His name is on a dozen different major power projects throughout the western states.
00:03:57.000And 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.
00:04:24.000He is a leading entrepreneur, business leader, and he has a podcast on business leadership.
00:04:35.000He is Native Business Magazine, named him Top 50 Native Entrepreneurs, and his brewery won the Best New Brewery in 2021 for Pop Culture Magazine.
00:05:15.000My 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.
00:05:32.000They 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.
00:05:56.000And my uncle, during his presidency, entertained a long line of tribal leaders.
00:06:05.000And 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.
00:06:27.000And I visited Choctaw, I visited Cherokee, I visited Hopi, Apache reservations, of course, all the Sioux reservations, the Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, Rosebud.
00:06:42.000And 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.
00:07:03.000My father, two weeks before he died, he spent a day at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
00:07:11.000Which is the poorest county in America, year after year.
00:07:15.000And my father saw a Sioux family living in the burned-out hulk of an automobile, and he cried.
00:07:25.000And it was one of the only times that people had actually seen him cry.
00:07:30.000And the word spread throughout the Sioux Reservation.
00:07:32.000He spent about six, seven hours there.
00:07:36.000I 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.
00:07:44.000He kept them waiting all day, and his aides were panicking and saying, we've got to leave here.
00:08:25.000With Tim Gallego, and I later on served with him in founding Lakota Times, which is now called Indian Country Today.
00:08:35.000I was a founding editor of that publication, which is the biggest newspaper in Indian Country.
00:08:47.000And then around 1993, Matthew Cooncum came down to New York as my help with that I ended up blocking that project.
00:08:58.000I 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.
00:09:12.000And 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.
00:09:33.000And they fell in love with it, and they fell in love with the Cree people.
00:09:38.000And in the end, we were able to block that project.
00:09:42.000After 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.
00:10:10.000They had never again signed a treaty or fought a war.
00:10:14.000The treaty negotiations have been going on for a century, and meanwhile, McMillan Blodell is logging, that was basically robbing all their wealth.
00:10:23.000Some of the trees, these are 2,000-year-old cedars, Sitka spruce.
00:10:28.000Some of them have a value on the stump of $20,000, and McMillan Blodell is strip-mining them.
00:10:35.000And then sending them over to Osaka with the bark still on them, too.
00:10:41.000And making hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:10:45.000All 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.
00:11:04.000And it put McMillan Bladel out of business.
00:11:08.000And then I ended up doing a lot of work on treaties and dam projects.
00:11:16.000The 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.
00:11:45.000And 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.
00:12:00.000And 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.
00:12:11.000But the environmentalists took the position that there should be no development whatsoever.
00:12:17.000And 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.
00:12:31.000Oh, I represented Pequots up in Manitoba and fighting tar sands and, you know, many, many.
00:12:40.000I represented the Ramapo Indians in New Jersey.
00:12:44.000We 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.
00:13:14.000But, 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.
00:13:29.000So tell us a little bit about your story, because that's what you do.
00:13:43.000I've worked in the utility environment for the past 10 years.
00:13:50.000And 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?
00:14:22.000But 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.
00:14:55.000On the utility scale, on microgrids for tribes.
00:14:59.000And we're finding that nobody told the utility that the tribes are wanting to develop their own energy.
00:15:08.000And 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.
00:15:32.000And so there's a lot of inconsistency.
00:15:36.000And 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.
00:15:51.000So 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.
00:16:03.000So the tribes aren't able to move their projects that they're proposing.
00:16:08.000And so a lot of them are just stopping.
00:16:10.000And a lot of them just aren't completing the process.
00:16:13.000And that's one of the things that we've been seeing in Indian country is that the lack of two things.
00:16:21.000The lack of the tribes' ability to be engineers.
00:16:26.000There's no, you know, tribes don't have electrical engineers that That look at these huge projects.
00:16:32.000And the second one is the inability of them to find the finances to get the feasibility studies to go to the next level.
00:16:41.000It'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.
00:17:15.000How do we understand that the administration needs to help the tribe even more so than where we're at today?
00:17:24.000Well, 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.
00:17:38.000To make sure that all the questions you have to ask when you develop these alternative energy, wind, how often does the wind blow?
00:17:50.000Are you going to be able to justify the investment in the turbine?
00:17:54.000Wind turbines can bring in huge amounts of money, an acre of corn in the western states.
00:18:02.000We'll yield a couple hundred dollars a year, an acre of corn with a wind turbine on it.
00:18:09.000It's worth about $8,000 in revenue a year.
00:18:15.000They 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.
00:19:57.000We 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,
00:20:17.000people 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?
00:20:32.000I never thought that was even possible.
00:20:34.000And 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.
00:20:43.000And 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.
00:20:54.000And so they asked me to serve as vice chairman first in a temporary status when we had a vacancy.
00:21:07.000And 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.
00:21:19.000And so, you know, that's an interesting topic for us, for our tribe, because we have what's called the Gray Snow Eagle House.
00:21:26.000So our tribe, we're the Bako Jay people, which is Gray Snow people.
00:21:39.000Some of them will be rehabbed there and set free.
00:21:43.000But 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.
00:21:53.000And they're extremely important to us, which is the whole reason we started the aviary.
00:21:57.000But these turbines, a lot of times, they kill a lot of eagles.
00:22:01.000And so we're currently in a battle in our area.
00:22:05.000We're fighting a couple companies who are trying to come in and put turbines all around our tribal land.
00:22:12.000And 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.
00:22:26.000We try to put them back in the area where they were injured and where we picked them up at.
00:22:30.000And so we're trying to lead other stuff, you know, solar projects and other green energy projects.
00:22:36.000But 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.
00:22:46.000We 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.
00:23:02.000And then after we got the grant money, they changed the wording to say we shall partner with a utility.
00:23:09.000And 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.
00:23:22.000So I testified in front of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and we thought that went great.
00:23:28.000And then we got word back, you know, two weeks ago that they're not going to change that wording.
00:23:33.000And 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.
00:23:40.000So, again, like David was talking about, now you have money that doesn't get utilized or, you know, we don't have the capability.
00:23:48.000We don't have our own utility company, so we don't have the ability to utilize these millions of dollars.
00:23:54.000And 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.
00:24:02.000Yeah, I mean, you know, I've watched this for my whole life.
00:24:07.000The 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.
00:24:22.000They 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.
00:24:39.000Many 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.
00:24:49.000The BIA has never in its history functioned properly.
00:24:53.000Really, it's a disgrace to our country.
00:25:00.000It's been a thorn in my side for my entire life.
00:25:06.000When 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.
00:25:37.000And each of them is trying to develop their own potentials.
00:25:41.000You know, we don't like the idea that Indians receive handouts or that tribal nations receive handouts or that we don't pay taxes.
00:25:49.000You 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.
00:26:04.000We 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.
00:26:15.000And 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.
00:26:29.000And in 1934, They passed the Indian Reorganization Act, which created the tribal councils as we know them today, the modern tribal councils.
00:26:37.000But it ended the Indian allotment era, which resulted in a lot of land theft, 90 million acres.
00:26:44.000And it ended what is euphemistically called the boarding school era, where languages, cultures were completely erased.
00:26:52.000And you see that even now with the violations of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
00:26:57.000There's just There's so much facing us.
00:27:01.000Harper 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.
00:27:15.000In 1958, my mom and my grandmother, they would be called an ethnic cleansing today.
00:27:22.000They were removed from the most fertile grounds on the Missouri River.
00:27:27.000This happened to like seven different tribes.
00:27:30.000In some cases, look at all the tribes in the Northwest.
00:27:33.000All the dams that Bonneville Power built, you know, not just the Army Corps, but the salmon runs that were impacted and ended.
00:27:43.000And you see some of it being healed today.
00:27:48.000Sometimes there's preferential access for tribes that there's a case to be made there.
00:28:10.000But 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.
00:28:24.000We've been subjected to a colonial process that has damaged us.
00:28:28.000And some of us, you know, find different ways to cope, but we need recovery farms.
00:28:33.000I know you talked about recovery farms.
00:28:35.000There's a lot that Indian Country needs, but first, we just need a friend.
00:28:41.000We 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.
00:28:50.000But I just wanted to say those remarks and kick it back to you.
00:28:55.000Yeah, and you know, you and I have talked a lot about this, about the health of the Indian country.
00:29:01.000During 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...
00:29:17.000You know, they were incentivized greater than any population in the world to take the vaccine.
00:29:22.000And some of the tribes, they were given $1,000 bonuses to take the vaccine.
00:29:27.000Many of the tribes, many of the reservations, it was 100% compliance with vaccine.
00:29:34.000And so why did we have the highest vaccination rate in the world and the highest death rate in the world in Indian country?
00:29:41.000And, 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.
00:29:52.000And the chronic disease rate on their reservations is the highest in the world.
00:29:56.000Some of these reservations have 70% diabetes rate, obesity rates, asthma rates.
00:30:04.000All of these, you know, these chronic...
00:30:10.000The average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases.
00:30:14.000It'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.
00:30:31.000What we call white death on the Indian Reservations called white death, white sugar, white flour, white grease, grisco.
00:30:41.000And those things are like arsenic to Native Americans.
00:30:46.000And 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.
00:30:55.000And one of them runs Black Mesa Waterkeeper, which is down, we're fighting Peabody Mine down in the Navajo and Ohopie Reservations.
00:31:08.000And Ohopie buddy of mine, and I'm not going to tell his name is Howard, but he helps run that organization.
00:31:16.000We 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.
00:31:26.000He was an advisor to President Clinton, etc.
00:31:29.000We went on a long hike one day up to look at some of the petroglyphs, the ancient petroglyphs.
00:31:36.000And on the way down, Howard was vomiting the whole way down.
00:31:41.000And we got back to the raft, and Mark said, you know, why are you vomiting?
00:31:45.000And he said, because when I exert myself because of my diabetes, it caused me to vomit.
00:31:52.000Mark said, well, you know, you can cure diabetes with food.
00:31:55.000Just by changing your diet, you can cure it.
00:32:11.000And he said, because those are all your sacred foods.
00:32:14.000And Mark said to him, what are your sacred foods?
00:32:17.000And he said, they're cookies and biscuits and cakes.
00:32:20.000That's what we eat when we have a ceremony.
00:32:23.000And Mark said to him, that's not your sacred foods.
00:32:26.000These are foods that were imposed upon the tribes.
00:32:30.000And that, you know, it's an illusion to think that it is death.
00:32:36.000There's a reservation, a Pima reservation, Arizona, New Mexico.
00:32:43.000It is the sickest group of people in our country.
00:32:47.000They 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.
00:34:05.000This 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.
00:34:26.000And you then besiege them with poisoned food.
00:35:13.000And 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.
00:35:35.000Definitely want to leave room for David or Chairman Keyes, if you guys have any questions.
00:35:39.000You know, it's a broad discussion about Native policy in general, and it's so big.
00:35:46.000This is a semester's minimum worth of kind of digging into what are some concerns, and we've heard about extraction and infrastructure.
00:35:58.000You know, the building of dams, the building of a cobalt refinery down by Lawton, Oklahoma, same thing is happening at Thacker Pass.
00:36:06.000There's a renewable culture being propagated and that's good.
00:36:12.000We certainly need to address the fossil fuel incentives over the last, you know, since the industrial age.
00:36:20.000But we have to be truthful about this because tribal nations...
00:36:24.000We 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.
00:36:35.000So when we talk about mining and extraction and development, some tribes are okay with that.
00:36:47.000Some, 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.
00:37:10.000And 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.
00:37:22.000Natural rights, birth rights, human rights of American people.
00:37:27.000Because we are fighting the same corporation.
00:37:30.000One of the reasons why I jumped to Bobby's side is because Bobby's a fighter already.
00:38:17.000But 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.
00:38:28.000And, you know, on the spring, on the back of The anti-war movement, the civil rights movement.
00:38:36.000Native nations have always been seen as tribal nations, as distinct political entities.
00:38:42.000Now, 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.
00:39:04.000This law was being violated by states like South Dakota.
00:39:09.000And 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.
00:39:27.000It's not consistent with a couple of centuries of United States law.
00:39:31.000And 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.
00:39:41.000We don't want to weaken tribal sovereignty.
00:39:47.000Sometimes you have confrontational state governors and so forth.
00:39:51.000So I want to provide those comments and leave the tribal leaders an opportunity to comment on those.
00:39:59.000Yeah, I would say is that a couple things.
00:40:04.000One 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.
00:40:21.000We have a religious base and we believe in our Creator.
00:40:26.000And 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.
00:40:42.000If you went into our grave and you dug up our people, you'd go to jail.
00:40:48.000Or we'd go to jail if we did that to your graveyard, but you do that to ours, there is no respect.
00:40:54.000There'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.
00:41:06.000And 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.
00:41:24.000But when we get to that point where we are recognized in the same religious perspective as all the other religions Then we can talk.
00:41:35.000Then we have a foothold of where we're at together.
00:41:38.000Then we're looked at as human beings that have a spirit, mind, and body that is religiously looked at as people.
00:41:50.000And so, you know, that's how I look at things when I see things that...
00:41:55.000When 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.
00:42:08.000And we've been here since time immemorial.
00:42:24.000It is so complicated, but yet so simple in our mind as Indian people.
00:42:31.000I always think how the elders would simplify life, and that's all it is.
00:42:36.000It's just simple living our life and who we are.
00:42:42.000Yeah, you know, I agree with a lot of what David's saying.
00:42:47.000You 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.
00:42:58.000So we battle with the governor here who's constantly attacking our sovereignty.
00:43:05.000They don't understand what sovereignty is.
00:43:07.000And 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.
00:43:16.000And 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.
00:43:25.000But 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.
00:43:37.000And when you have a lack of economic development that creates poverty, Those are the things that lead to a poor diet.
00:43:44.000Many of our people, they're not eating food as a medicine or a way to treat their body.
00:43:51.000They're eating food just to have something to eat, just to put something in their bellies.
00:43:56.000We'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.
00:44:07.000When we met before, Bobby, you mentioned that I think you might have said earlier, too, is that before colonization, we didn't have diabetes.
00:44:16.000These health effects that our tribes are dealing with right now.
00:44:20.000It wasn't until we got introduced to all these things that you're talking about, the white death.
00:44:25.000And 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.
00:44:33.000Let 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.
00:44:42.000And so I really appreciate, Bobby, you pushing that message and changing that You know, idea of what food is and what health looks like.
00:44:51.000You 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.
00:45:07.000King and played a critical role in making this country a true constitutional democracy for the first time in its history.
00:45:15.000Prior 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.
00:45:37.000And as a result of not being able to vote, they also couldn't use public transportation or Public parks or water fountains.
00:45:46.000They were put in segregated prisons and mental hospitals.
00:45:50.000Every aspect of their lives was segregated, just second-class citizens.
00:45:55.000My parents were also conscious that there had been a genocide of the American Indian.
00:46:05.000And 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.
00:46:15.000America had not kept its word with its treaties.
00:46:19.000My 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.
00:46:45.000But my father also, my father during The three months he announced as president in March of 1968.
00:46:54.000And then he died three months later in June, June 6th of 1968.
00:47:00.000During that three months period, he made 70 different stops on his campaign.
00:47:05.000Of those 70, 10 of them were on Indian reservations.
00:47:09.000Well, this was a huge priority of his.
00:47:12.000And 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.
00:47:29.000Imagine 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.
00:47:45.000Because the whole Sioux Nation was gathered there.
00:47:48.000And she was a little girl in a teepee at that point.
00:48:05.000But it's really kind of extraordinary to me, even when I was a kid.
00:48:09.000Oh, you met somebody who was at Custer's Last Stand.
00:48:14.000Well, 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.
00:48:31.000And that was the treaty with the Sioux tribe, which is one of the biggest tribes in our country.
00:48:37.000I think the second biggest after the Navajo.
00:48:39.000But 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.
00:48:52.000As 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.
00:49:05.000Eight years after that, gold was discovered in the Black Hills.
00:49:11.000And Custer was sent to take the Black Hills away from the zoo in violation of the Treaty of Fort Laramie.
00:49:19.000So this is what happened to all the treaties.
00:49:22.000And I love the point that Chase made about the Indians were forced onto 1% of their former lands.
00:49:35.000They were the lands that everybody thought, okay, this land has no value to anybody.
00:49:39.000We don't want it, so we're going to let the Indians keep it.
00:49:42.000As 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.
00:49:57.000And so now the corporations want that land, and they're doing the same thing.
00:50:03.000That 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.
00:50:12.000Our nation, if it's going to live up to its ideals, has to show that it can be trusted with full faith and credit.
00:50:23.000When it gives its word, it's going to keep it.
00:50:25.000And 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.