From: [n--t] at [blythe.org] (NY Transfer News)
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Lakota Present Petition to UN,Clinton
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 93 22:51:58 EDT

Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1993 15:42:44 -0600 (MDT)
From: [FAC TODD] at [WSC.COLORADO.EDU]

Lakota present petition to U.N., U.S. President

by Mark Todd and Kym O'Connell-Todd

Last week, representatives from the Teton Sioux Treaty
Council presented arguments for sovereignty at the U.N.
Working Group on Indigenous Populations in Geneva.

Spokesperson Antoine Black Feather addressed the group
during meetings held July 15-17, urging recognition of the
Black Hills Teton Sioux Nation, and other indigenous peoples,
by the U.N. General Assembly. 

At the same time, the Treaty Council forwarded their petition
to President Bill Clinton in a prepared statement, which Black
Feather read in Geneva.

In both the communique and U.N. presentation, Black Feather
stated: "We demand the unfettered opportunity to exercise
our inherent right to be a self-determining people once again;
and to form and establish a national government and body of
law which is exclusively of our own design and free from any
interference or influence by the U.S. Government or any of its
agents."

The statement also announced the Teton Sioux Nation's inten-
tions to renounce U.S. citizenship, reestablish the legally 
agreed upon territorial boundaries of the Lakota Nation (as
defined by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty) and to completely
disengage from further control or supervision by the U.S. 
Government.

Black Feather said that North American indigenous people 
seek nothing different from the peoples of the Soviet Union,
Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, China, South Africa, Tibet and the
many countries of Central and South America.

"While we applaud the U.S. Government's public support for
many of these liberation struggles," he said, "we must remind
the United States that charity first begins at home. We must,
again, remind them that we Lakota are an oppressed people,
within the United States' own borders. The time is long-past
due for the U.S. Government to fully and faithfully rectify the
dishonorable and deplorable circumstances of our past com-
mon history.

"We give the U.S. Government the opportunity to live up to 
their own best intentions as stated in the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, when the American colonists broke free from their
British oppressors. We, too, are making our own declaration 
of freedom from oppression, but this time the U.S. Govern-
ment is the oppressor."

In support of the petition he delivered, Black Feather 
reported that conditions on the Sioux reservations make his
people defenseless against the ravages of economic, political 
and social diseases. He explained that, among other 
conditions:
* The average life span is 44 years  only two-thirds that 
of the average white American;
 
* Nearly half the Lakota infants are born with varying symp-
toms of fetal alcohol syndrome;
 
* Thousands of Lakota women and men have been sterilized,
against their will and without their consent;
 
* Substandard health care is delivered by the various Indian
Health Service clinics;
 
* Greedy and corrupt tribal officials (appointed only after
U S. sanction) convert and confiscate for personal benefit
thousands of acres of Indian-held land; and
 
* Reservation lands are exploited as sites for garbage and 
toxic waste dumps;

For the next ten days, the Teton Sioux representatives will 
work with other indigenous peoples to draft the Declaration
of Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The draft is intended
to go before the General Assembly on Dec. 10 and establish 
clear guidelines for negotiations between indigenous peoples
the governments inside which their boundaries lie.

                           -30-


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