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From: Libyad817@aol.com
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 15:21:33 EST
Subject: 'Tatanka Alliance' in Northern Plains
To: kolahq@skynet.be
CC: tjsnow@hotmail.com
 

[joint press release from Black Hills AIM and Sierra Club]

     Black Hills AIM and the Northern Great Plains chapters of the Sierra
Club have formulated a plan for a 'Tatanka Alliance', to achieve an
unprecedented cooperative effort among environmentalists and traditional
Natives to achieve ecosystem restoration in the Region, centered around the
Buffalo.

     "The Lakota call these great beasts 'Tatanka'," said Brian Brademeyer,
chairman of the Black Hills Group of the San Francisco-based Sierra Club. "We
feel that Native American peoples and the bison were integrated into a
complex, astonishingly diverse natural relationship, the true ecosystem of
the Great North American Prairie. The culture and spirituality of these
peoples were based on reverence for the natural world and the relationships
which the land supported."

     The plan calls for a visionary change in direction for grazing on public
lands, built around promoting the return of bison as the naturally adapted
herbivore of the Great Plains, on public grasslands and tribal reservations
as well as private lands.

     As recently as 130 years ago, the Great Plains were home to huge herds
of free-roaming bison, estimated at possibly 100 million animals. In one of
the most shameful acts of environmental warfare ever known, the US Government
promoted intentional destruction of the magnificent herds as an expedient
means to subjugate the Plains tribes.

     A century later after near-extinction of the bison, the region suffers
under a land-exploitation system which is both economically and ecologically
unsustainable. Cattle herds replaced the meat source of the Plains, but
meatpacker concentration and monopoly have progressively depressed the
cattle-based economy.

     Economically-squeezed livestock producers have reacted, in turn, by
putting the squeeze on the land - by poisoning native predators and
inconvenient species, by overgrazing and other pressures that are degrading
the grassland ecosystem almost past the point of recovery.

     "This is where Indians come in," BH AIM (American Indian Movement)
executive director David Seals added, "as the environmentalists have finally
come around to realize we know what we're talking about. Our elders like
Fools Crow have always said the Tatanka and Pte must return, if the People
are to live. There has been some tension in the past between us and
environmentalists, who usually reacted negatively to our demand for Treaty
Rights as crucial in any equation in the West; but now they see the situation
is desperate.

     "The calls for a return to Traditional Government, all across Indian
Country,  such as the one we are seeing in Pine Ridge from the Grassroots
Oglala Oyate, is tied essentially, around here,  to the Fort Laramie Treaties
of the last century. With a grassroots Native political system, we can begin
to beat the colonial mindset from Washington, and the reactionary State
Capitols. We have to get rid of the manipulative and dishonest Bureau of
Indian Affairs tribal councils that routinely paralyze any effective action."

     The Governor of Montana, for instance, has instigated a murderous policy
of killing bison escaping Yellowstone National Park, as a threat to the
struggling cattle industry. The conflict between national bureacracies like
the Interior department, who are opposing the Montana State policy, has
caused a juggernaut that only Indians, and the Buffalo themselves, can
legally and morally untangle.

     "We recognize that tribes and individual ranchers who wish to use public
grasslands cannot do so," Brademeyer concluded. "We have to have the
cooperation of the Indians, and many other concerned people on the land, if
this is to succeed."
 

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