“It’s the Black Hills gold rush all over again,” said historian Waziyatawin, Ph.D., Wahpetowan Dakota from Upper Sioux and a University of Victoria research scholar. “Nowadays, the press is reporting on a green energy land rush and Department of the Interior efforts to free up millions of acres for wind and solar development. Open prairie land, such as that on Indian reservations in the Plains, is suitable for such enterprises. So the U.S. government is going after the poorest of the poor to find the resources it needs.”

http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/80412587.html

On Dec. 4 an action was taken against Crow Creek tribal land near my district that shook the absolute foundations of Indian law all the way back to the 1800s. Yet, few people were in the small room in Highmore, S.D. to see this monumental action and few other tribes even know it has taken place. Any tribe with land should shutter with the magnitude of what this precedent could mean for themselves or their individual tribal members.

The Internal Revenue Service collected against 7,100 acres – 11 square miles – of Indian owned land in Hyde County, S.D. This particular parcel was part of the original Crow Creek treaty boundaries, but the treaty was subsequently broken and this land was sold to LeMaster. Interestingly enough, our tribe was able to use settlement money from another federal land taking to purchase this land back in 1998.

http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2009/12/prayer-ceremony-at-crow-creek-sioux.html
Update:

December 7, 2009

Dear Brothers and Sisters;
Recently, the IRS has seized and auctioned 7100 acres of our prime development land on the Crow Creek Reservation. We have tried to raise funds for months to save our land. Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful. We have tried to stop them from auctioning off our land through the justice system, however justice did not prevail.

It is no secret that Buffalo County is the poorest county in the nation and that 78% of the people on our reservation live far below the poverty line; this is why we are reaching out to our Native Brothers and Sisters. Only you know the importance of retaining our land base.

Recently, we were granted a trial for a judge to decide whether or not we should be allowed to keep this property, which they already sold to a non-Indian. This allows us 120 days to raise 4 million dollars to purchase our land back and clear up the levy that the IRS ($600,000) has on the property.

Any financial assistance that you could give to us would be greatly appreciated. We have set up an account at Wells Fargo in Chamberlain, South Dakota and all donations are tax deductible. The bank can be contacted at 605-734-6001 or contact Leroy Bear Thompson at 605-245-2304. Your kindness and generosity is greatly appreciated.

Contact: Wells Fargo Bank
Attn: Cindy Adams
201 S Main
Chamberlain, SD 57325
Account Name: Save CCST Lands Fund
Account Number: 9917827345
Contact: Cindy Adams 605-734-6001
Contact: Leroy Thompson, Jr. 605-245-2304 or 605-730-0091

Sincerely,
Brandon Sazue, Chairman
Crow Creek Sioux Tribe
Posted by brendanorrell@gmail.com at 9:15 PM

Action Alert! Please sign online petition Crow Creek Sioux Land is NOT For Sale
Saturday, December 12, 2009, 1:35 AM




Please help spread the word about our online petition to support the Crow Creek efforts! There is NO reason why we shouldn’t have several thousand signatures before this weekend is done!

Everyone PLEASE UNITE together on this issue. This issue could set a precedence and next time it could be your lands!


Crow Creek Sioux Land is NOT For Sale
http://www.petitiononline.com/CrowCrek/petition.html

To: Bureau of Indian Affairs, President Obama, SD Governor Rounds, SD Senator Tim Johnson, SD Senator Thune,U.S. Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin
On December 3, 2009 the Internal Revenue Service unlawfully auctioned off 7100 acres located on Crow Creek Sioux Tribal land.

The land is owned by Crow Creek Tribal Farms, Inc. a Tribal corporation and distinct legal entity from the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe.

According to the recent motion for temporary restraining order, filed by the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, the IRS seized and auctioned the land to recover $3,123,789.73 dollars in unpaid employment taxes. The document states, Because of erroneous tax advice received from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe became delinquent in the payment of employment taxes collected by the IRS beginning in 2003. The BIA had informed the Tribe that, because it was a federally recognized Tribe, it was not necessary to pay federal employment taxes.

The Crow Creek Indian Reservation was created by the 1868 Treaty, Act of April 29, 1868, 15 Stat. 635, and by Section 6, Act of March 2, 1889, 25 Stat. 888.

The Crow Creek Sioux Reservation encompasses Buffalo County and portions of Hyde and Brule Counties . Crow Creek Sioux Tribe is consistently documented as one of the poorest Reservations in the Nation, with 78% of their members living below the poverty line.

This despicable and irreparable action from the IRS, could ultimately eliminate 20% of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribes Reservation lands.

This action taken by the IRS could ultimately set a precedence, allowing the continual land grab on Tribal Lands. We must ALL UNITE and take a stand on this issue, to voice Tribal Lands are NOT for Sale !

We the undersigned, hereby request the immediate return of the unlawfully auctioned Crow Creek Sioux Tribal Lands.
Click this link to sign the petition!

http://www.petitiononline.com/CrowCrek/petition.html

Winter Rabbit (9+ / 0-)
Kimberly Teehee, a member of the Cherokee Nation, was appointed by President Obama as Senior Policy Advisor for Native American Affairs. Could it help to contact her? I can't find an email address, but the Whitehouse switchboard number is 202-456-1414.

by dharmafarmer on Tue Jan 05, 2010 at 05:03:31 AM PST
[ Parent | Reply to This |

“Neither story is the whole truth, but both are true. And it’s a credit to Steven P. Miller that his ‘Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South,’ a study of the evangelist’s relationship to the cause of civil rights on the one hand and the cause of conservatism on the other, does justice to the tensions and complexities involved — for Graham, for the South and for the country. In Miller’s account, one of 20th-century America’s most important religious leaders emerges as a representative political actor as well, whose example is worth pondering less because he was courageous than because he often wasn’t.

The story of the civil rights era is usually told as a collision between heroes and villains: the marchers on one side and the K.K.K. on the other; the Martin Luther Kings and Lyndon Johnsons making the way straight for justice, and the George Wallaces and Bull Connors standing sneering in their way. But the movement’s successes and failures were ultimately determined by the choices of more unheroic men — men like Billy Graham.”

“Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.”

“’No state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’

How should judges interpret this clause? Presumably, they must ask what it means for the laws to protect people equally. Yet that question takes judges straight to the nerve center of American ideological controversy. Liberals and conservatives disagree passionately about what it means for the laws to protect groups equally and about when it is appropriate for the laws to treat one group better than another.”

“The late Chief Justice William Rehinquist wrote that ‘manifold provisions of the Constitution with which judges must deal are by no means crystal clear in their import, and reasonable minds may differ as to which interpretation is proper.’ Could you tell us something about the values and purposes that will guide you when you interpret provisions like the Equal Protection Clause? How do those values and purposes distinguish your approach from those taken by other justices?”

As of 2008, OSI has successfully prosecuted 107 Nazi persecutors. OSI has also worked closely with the Department of Homeland Security to stop more than180 former European and Japanese Axis perpetrators and suspected perpetrators of acts of persecution at U.S. ports of entry and bar them from entering the United States.

In addition to the well-known Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46 [of 22 defendents], there were Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings held between December 1946, and April 1949, which tried 177 persons. Individual countries also prosecuted war criminals in national courts of law. The British held trials of the commandant and staff of the Bergen-Belsen camp, those responsible for forced labor, and the owners and executives of the manufacturer of Zyklon B, among others. The Netherlands, Hungary, Norway, Poland, West Germany, and Romania were some of the other countries that brought war criminals to trial.

Let us look, if you will, just at the past month, February 2000. In one month, my office won two prosecutions. One at the United States Board of Immigration Appeals, the other, two weeks ago, at the United States Supreme Court, involving the case of former Auschwitz SS man Ferdinand Hammer. The Canadian government, just last week, won its citizenship case against Helmut Oberlander, a member of a mobile killing unit. And just last month, the British authorities won the appeal of the Sawoniuk case, a Ukrainian perpetrator, at the High Court in London. And only a few months ago the Croatian government, which frankly had to be dragged kicking and screaming into this prosecution, successfully prosecuted Dinko Sakic, the former commandant of the Jasenovac concentration camp.

After World War II, centres, commissions and offices were established with the purpose of bringing Nazi war criminals to trial. They collect information, investigate crimes, pass on names of Nazis to their respective governments and take action against Nazi criminals in their own countries.

‘Zentrale Stelle Ludwigsburg’ is Germany’s documentation centre, which collects evidence for the prosecution of crimes committed during the nazi regime in the period 1933-1945.

Immediately after World War II, the provisional Polish government established the ‘Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland’. The main commission has since then investigated nazi crimes committed in Poland during World War II and these days exist under a different name, the 'Main Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation'....

The ‘Simon Wiesenthal Center’ in Vienna, founded by the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, is perhaps the most famous documentation centre. Since World War II, the centre has tracked down many Nazi war criminals.

Poland was relatively quick to convict the camp personnel from Auschwitz – at least those that could be found. Trials were initiated against at least 600 members of the Auschwitz camp personnel. Among these were the two camp commandants, Rudolf Höss and Arthur Liebehenschel, who were sentenced to death in 1947. Rudolf Höss was hanged in Auschwitz in 1941. A total of 21 were executed....

In West Germany the so-called Auschwitz Trials were conducted against the camp guards from the concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz. The largest of these trials took place in Frankfurt am Main between 1963 and 1965, where 20 were accused. 17 were given jail sentences....

On 3 July 1964 twelve of the personnel in the extermination camp Sobibor stood accused of participating in the murder of Jews in the camp. All twelve were accused of assisting in the killings. The trial itself began in Hagen on 6 September 1965 and ended on 20 December 1966. More than 100 witnesses were called.

The overwhelming majority of post-1945 war crimes trials involved lower-level officials and functionaries. In the immediate postwar years, the four Allied powers occupying Germany (and Austria) -- the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union -- held trials in their zones of occupation and tried a variety of perpetrators for wartime offenses. Many of the earliest zonal trials, especially in the U.S. zone, involved the murder of Allied military personnel who had been captured by German or Axis troops. In time, however, Allied occupiers expanded their juridical mandate to try concentration camp guards and commandants and others who had committed crimes against Jews and others who suffered persecution in areas the Allies now occupied. Much of our early knowledge of the German concentration camp system comes from the evidence and eyewitness testimonies at these trials....

Allied Control Council Law No. 10 of December 1945 authorized German courts of law to pass sentence on crimes committed during the war years by German citizens against other German nationals or against stateless persons. For this reason, occupation officials left Euthanasia crimes -- where both victims and perpetrators had been predominantly German nationals -- to newly reconstructed German tribunals. These proceedings represented the first German national trials in the early postwar period. Both the German Federal Republic (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) continued to hold trials against Nazi-era defendants in the decades following their establishment as independent states. To date, the Federal Republic (in its old manifestation as West Germany and in its current status as a united Germany) has held a total of 925 proceedings trying defendants of National Socialist era crimes. Many detractors have criticized German proceedings, particularly those held in the 1960s and 1970s, for doling out acquittals or light sentences to aging defendants or defendants who claimed superior orders.

Many nations which Germany occupied during World War II or who collaborated with the Germans in the persecution of civilian populations, especially Jews, have also held national trials in the years following World War II. Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Romania, and France, among others, have tried thousands of defendants -- both Germans and indigenous collaborators, in the decades since 1945. The Soviet Union held its first trial, the Krasnodar Trial, against local collaborators in 1943, long before World War II had ended. Perhaps Poland's most famous postwar national trial was held in 1947 in Krakow. The proceedings tried a number of functionaries of the Auschwitz concentration camp and sentenced Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss and others to death.

“an important first step toward improving the health of our democracy. We are all familiar with the problems that have recently plagued our elections: Long lines, lost ballots, voters improperly turned away from the polls. These are basic failures of process. Until we fix them, we run the risk in every election that we will once again experience the kind of chaos and uncertainty that paralyzed the nation in 2000. We can do better. We must do better. But to do better, we need more than anecdotal information. We need better, nonpartisan, objective information.”

These achievements have created new laws that must be implemented, and a momentum that should be sustained. For democracies cannot be static: they must move forward.

Freedom of religion and expression lead to a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state, which is why steps like reopening the Halki Seminary will send such an important signal inside Turkey and beyond. An enduring commitment to the rule of law is the only way to achieve the security that comes from justice for all people. Robust minority rights let societies benefit from the full measure of contributions from all citizens.

I say this as the President of a country that not too long ago made it hard for someone who looks like me to vote. But it is precisely that capacity to change that enriches our countries. Every challenge that we face is more easily met if we tend to our own democratic foundation.

Human endeavor is by its nature imperfect. History, unresolved, can be a heavy weight. Each country must work through its past. And reckoning with the past can help us seize a better future. I know there are strong views in this chamber about the terrible events of 1915. While there has been a good deal of commentary about my views, this is really about how the Turkish and Armenian people deal with the past. And the best way forward for the Turkish and Armenian people is a process that works through the past in a way that is honest, open and constructive.

“Think of America at this point as a muscular teenager, full of talent, adolescent energy, and youth’s over-reaching impulses. This is a critical stage in human development and for our nation it could go either way. Some nations that acted like willful children when they were young formed balanced societies when they became adults. Other nations have never really grown up.

The question, I think is whether-we-the people who proudly call ourselves Americans – can mature as a society. The country can develop a deeper sense of what matters most in life and what doesn’t. It can shed some self-destructive reflexes and acquire a wiser sense of national self-interest that is anchored in the nation’s ideals. Wisdom tempers egotism. This is true for both people and nations.

Or, the United States can plunge ahead self-indulgently, repeating destructive habits, acting out reckless ambitions, and getting into deeper trouble. We all know children who, for whatever reason, got older but never found themselves. This is possible for nations too, especially ones that refuse to reconcile themselves to new realities.

I am betting we will grow into our maturity and hoping that lots of Americans agree.”

hattitude...there's a little more strut in your carriage when you wear a nice hat. There's something special about you.

The black and massive form of the preacher swayed and quivered as the words crowded to his lips and flew at us in singular eloquence. (p. 190)

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears.

He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national and, indeed, the global fiscal climate.

For we know that, Lord, you're able and you're willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.

And while we have sown the seeds of greed -- the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.

Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.