SD legislators swimming in the swamp
By Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
Native Sun News Today Columnist
nativesunnews.today
South Dakota Senator John Thune and many others in Washington are mindlessly riding on the coattails of president Donald Trump and leader Mitch McConnell, hoping against hope that they can bully us all into agreeing with their greed, wishing all of this chaos to go away.
The Trump Tower is its symbol of what it hopes for: To build a tower and a wall and a moat to calm the populous, the future directive of our current leadership in this country. It is wrong, and these political leaders should be ousted ASAP.
Even the kings of past centuries, with their towers and castles and moats found that they were not safe from the populous they seemed to fear. The building of The Wall for America (and more towers) will not be the panacea we in the modern world seek.
The vain hope is that Nancy Palosi as head of the so-called people’s House of Representatives will give in to the idea that providing the billions of dollars for a MEXICAN/US CONCRETE WALL will do it. Thune and McConnell and all of their complicit enablers are witnesses to an age of displacement unheard of in modern times, and for many who did or did not vote for these abusers, they are a huge disappointment. For their faithful fans, though, not so much. Polls tell us that there seems still to be much support for the Trump agenda and his 13th century ideas.
In the meantime, the government these folks are in charge of and that we citizens know and depend on (though we criticize it a lot!), is “shut down”, immigrant children are dying, missing, their parents are in jail and the director of Trump’s office of Refugee Resettlement keeps a spreadsheet of detained undocumented teenagers who want/need an abortion, so he can prevent them from obtaining this female health procedure.
This most recent “moral” tactic is put into public view by a movement called “Christian Reconstructionist” (5/14/2018 The Nation.com) which most of us here in our area have hardly heard of. Maybe that tone in governing is what our complicit state governor expressed when she said at her inaugural moment that she was putting together a cabinet and a government that for four years would be “dedicated to the Lord.” Is that Governance? Democracy? Is it the Church? Is it called Theocracy? What? What? I wonder what Hamilton of Jefferson would say?
All of this didn’t just start yesterday. And so, we might even have the sense that in a disordered world we can weather this awful civic moment…we can find some way to proceed with our lives.
Unfortunately, some here in our midst cannot go much longer with this “shut down,” because needs that can come only from the federal government must be met. I am talking about the Tribal Governments (there are nine of them here in our state) who, until the current political catastrophe of this federal administration occurred, were thinking that we as indigenous people were doing ok. We were “making it.” Life is always hard in some parts of the country, but tribal nations are great survivors. Hope is still the name of the game.
The good news is that in spite of the dismal rhetoric that often surrounds us, we of the American tribal world are the only indigenous people in the world to have defended our own imperfect governance systems on our own lands even in the face of one of the most aggressive colonial and powerful nations of recent times, and more to the point, we have a better educated population than in past times; our young people have access to reservation-based community college systems where our languages and customs are taught, and though poverty remains an issue, the economic outlook seems to be improving with new programs, new budgets that make for housing and home building experimentation, among other innovations.
There are moral and legal obligations that the federal government has toward its indigenous people. Treaties and Nation-to-nation Agreements are part of our history. We’ve learned, though, throughout the years that opposition to tribal governance from state officials often intervenes in this obligation, which makes the current lack of a federal commitment to any of us and all of us all the more vital.
Speaking of opposition, a
politician named Neal Tapio from Watertown during the last campaign (who ended up being defeated by Dusty Johnson for a seat in the US Congress), said that reservations were a “disaster,” a “failure of American Socialism,” and that “reform was clearly needed.” Dusty agrees that the “reservation system” is not working but believes that it is important for the US government to “work with the tribes unilaterally.”
There is nothing new about this talk in our part of the world, indeed thirty years ago politicians were calling for ending “the reservation system.” Clint Roberts of the SD western district faced Tom Daschle with this kind of campaign. He said “Indians would be better off if we got rid of reservations.”
Daschle seemed more moderate, and ended up sitting on the Senate Select Committee for Indian Affairs for many years. He didn’t help a whole lot when he spoke against the sovereign rights of the Sioux Nation in what came to be known as the “Black Hills case” of the 1980’s.
Nothing looks moderate these days, but John Thune, Mitch McConnell, Kristi Noem and others seem to be standing at the ready to “normalize” the current outrageous oppression of the rights of our multi-region population by the Trump administration.
Contact Elizabeth Cook-Lynn at ecooklynn@gmail.com
Copyright permission Native Sun News Today
Join the Conversation
