Lakota Sioux Nation justified in separation

In December of 2007 the Lakota Sioux Nation announced their separation from the government of the United States of America and declared sovereignty. They've done their legal home work and they based their sovereignty on the Treaty of 1851 and on the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868. Both of these Treaties were written at the convenience of the U.S. government and both were broken by the government as were 398 other treaties. The Lakota have waited for 155 years for the U.S. government to honor these two treaties. This hasn't happened.

There appears to be a news blackout on this story in America in spite of the fact that the United Nations (and 20 countries so far), has recognized Lakota

Sovereignty as perfectly legal and acceptable. Learning of the motivation for this movement will stimulate interest in the sometimes jaded history of our great nation. Native people have suffered the genocide of "Manifest Destiny," the extermination of the buffalo which was the food, clothing and housing source of all the plains tribes (as well as others), the confiscation of their lands and forced relocation of the survivors of the "Indian Wars" onto concentration camps (called reservations). This, with the ensuing sickness and deaths brought on by the distribution of tainted and unfamiliar rations of prison camp food and the circulation of small pox infected blankets in the dead of winter provided by the U.S. military.

Children were taken from their families and sent great distances to be enrolled in military schools for the purpose of removing any vestige of their cultural heritage. They were issued Christian names and forbidden to speak their languages or to do anything "native" under penalty being beatings and placement into solitary confinement without food for extended periods. These conditions were so despicably harsh and alien for the children (only Europeans beat their children) that many of them died before there was sufficient time to adapt to their new trauma following the slaughter of their families in the "final solution of the indian problem."

To accommodate European expansion in America, the great war hero, President Andrew Jackson over rode the congress, the senate and the supreme court to enact "The Indian Removal Act of 1830." The Cherokee were first to be forcibly removed from their ancestral home lands to Oklahoma. Four thousand human beings died of exposure, starvation, wounds or were killed in the first march. This became known as "The Trail of Tears" and there were 92 of these forced marches.

A very large percentage of our troops fighting in Iraq are Native Americans. Native troops are the most highly decorated minority in all four branches of our armed forces. Try to imagine what native people might accomplish if their lifespan wasn't the shortest of any population group in America and if more native children made it through the eighth grade and had some hope for their future.

Our government has not exercised fair dialog or conducted itself in an honest and humane fashion in their dealings with Indigenous people. Native Americans make up about 1 percent of our 300,000,000 population. They have no representation in the congress or the senate and no public spokesman. What they do have is great sorrow. Wouldn't it be wonderful, in this enlightened period of American History, if our government would consider the untold suffering it has caused the first inhabitants of this land and approach the issue of sovereignty in a humane fashion? A very large percentage of Americans has some Native Heritage. How does this make you feel inside?