Page 22 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • May 23, 2012 and the government took the Black Hills from them. Gradually, a large part of the agencies, now called “reservations” because the land was “reserved” for the Indians, were also broken up. The U.S. Army stayed on the reservations until 1924, when the Sioux Indians were declared citizens for their help in winning World War I. The FBI moved in substantially after they were given the right to purchase liquor legally in 1953 for their help in winning World War II. In 1973, some Indians who had helped the rest of us lose the war in Vietnam took up arms to defend themselves, essentially from their own corrupt tribal politicians, and a major federal presence led to the Wounded Knee II incident, which convinced the globe and much of America that the Indians were still around, and still scary. I worked at a daily newspaper with 100 college graduates in the City Room and those who grew up on the East Coast or in California, which was just about everybody, believed Indians were extinct. Whenever some of my friends came in to say howdy, their arrival sparked a mad rush for the elevators. No scalping took place on either side. People who were brave enough to talk to them enjoyed their sense of humor. Their idea of dry mirth was trying to find out from my colleagues which restaurants served “real” American food, and the number of the U-boat that had brought me to the United States. They told me they meant it as a compliment. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the 1877 seizure of the Black Hills had been illegal, and offered the Lakota people money for a clear title. Indian Title is still a big deal in western real estate deals, much as we do not have to think about it in New Jersey. The Lenape (Delaware) signed off on New Jersey in 1809 and left for Pennsylvania after being paid cash for what was left of their New Jersey holdings. Remnants of the Lenape exist in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and in Oklahoma. The spoken language, now extinct in daily conversation, is preserved on CDs. Most of the Lakota did not want to share the fate of the Lenape and two-thirds of the other tribes, now blended or vanished. They turned down the money, even though the last offer of $900 million could have put a big dent in rural poverty. The last deal endorsed by the majority of Lakota would allow all private white landowners to keep their private property, allow federal employees in the National Park Service to keep their jobs, and give the Lakota the Black Hills. The land is described as “sacred,” but to traditional Indians, all land is sacred, though the Lakota recognize several holy places in the Black Hills. Let’s see what happens in September. The second story, as Edward R. Murrow said about the Nazi bombing of London, has only one side. A year ago, a baby white buffalo who was not an albino was born on an Indian-owned ranch in north Texas. Indians all over North America proclaimed that the rare white buffalo calf was a symbol of coming peace and harmony. Nicholas Black Elk, a Lakota holy man, described the legend of the white buffalo in 1930 in “Black Elk Speaks.” He said that two hunters saw a beautiful young woman. One approached her with lustful thoughts. He was struck dead on the spot and eaten by worms. The second hunter was respectful and the beautiful woman gave him a sacred pipe, the emblem of traditional Lakota worship. “Behold,” she said. “With this you shall multiply and be a good nation. Nothing but good shall come from it. Only the hands of the good shall take care of it and the bad shall not even see it.” “…And as the people watched her going, suddenly it was a white bison galloping away and snorting, and soon it was gone.” Oliver La Farge, a 20th century artistic scholar and admirer of Indian culture, did some calculating and discovered that White Buffalo Calf Woman first appeared on “winter counts” – Indian pictorial calendars – in 1540, the year Francisco de Coronado first ventured onto the Great Plains, and suggested that the legend was inspired by veneration of the Virgin Mary. Whatever the inspiration, the idea of peace, brotherhood, and harmony is a worthy one. People who follow the news will know, however, that a few weeks ago somebody slipped into the corral unseen and butchered and skinned the white buffalo calf and left the body to rot. The next day, the white calf’s mother was also killed and skinned. Whether the killing was motivated by simple greed or by an attack on Indian tradition, it was a vile action by a person beneath contempt. The good news may be that the world now knows this. The Black Hills give-back split the difference in public opinion, but the brutal slaughter of the white buffalo calf aroused universal indignation. People from all over the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia donated money for a reward to find and prosecute the killer. A woman in Oregon donated a full-grown white buffalo bull to the Indian ranchers. The expanding profile of kindly, decent people and the dwindling number of racist thugs and would-be Indian killers is good news not just for America, but for the world. Self-styled patriots may attempt to justify what other Americans did to the Indians from the safety of their saloons, but the rest of the world has long ceased to listen to them. Curing our problems with a changing world could start at home. Two stories that loomed on the western horizon earlier this month may not be complementary to one another, but are somewhat complimentary to the American people. The first to flash prairie lightning was a suggestion from the United Nations that the United States return the Black Hills – not just Mount Rushmore, but the entire Black Hills region – to the Lakota Nation, the American Indians known in Hollywood Westerns as “the Sioux.” The second story concerned the brutal killing and skinning of a rare white buffalo calf named Lightning Medicine Cloud just before his first birthday. This act horrified not just the American Indians of many tribes, but a considerable part of the world’s civilized population. The Black Hills story is more complicated, and perhaps more convoluted. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of the Indigenous James Anaya recently recommended that the Black Hills of South Dakota be given back to the seven “Sioux” tribes who laid claim to the region in a series of court cases. “In all my consultations with indigenous peoples in the places I visited, it was impressed upon me that the sense of loss, alienation, and indignity is pervasive throughout Indian country,” said Anaya, a Harvard Law School graduate and a professor at the University of Arizona. Anaya’s full report is expected in September. The return of the Black Hills is not expected any time soon. The Black Hills region was deeded to the Sioux in the Sioux Treaty of 1868, after the tribes and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies defeated the U.S. Army in a series of engagements on the Bozeman Trail. They were later defeated, but proved to the government that the extermination of the Sioux Nation down to the last man, woman, and child, as recommended by General William Tecumseh Sherman, would be extremely expensive. Each dead Lakota, without regard to age or gender, was said to have cost the United States $1 million. In those days, $1 million was real money. Building on a previous plan by Thomas Twiss, first agent to the Oglala Sioux, Washington offered the Indians the western half of what is now South Dakota with a sliver of North Dakota, and annuities until they learned farming, ranching, and skilled trades and could become self-supporters. After a few years, graft took over. The promised food was generally awful – coffee mixed with dirt, sand mixed with sugar, rotten meat – and some of the Indians skipped the reservations and went back to hunting buffalo. In 1873, a depression hit America based on the fact that the railroad system had been over-built. In 1874, George Armstrong Custer led an expedition that discovered gold in the Black Hills. The Indians were offered $6 million. Most of them refused to take it, and Custer was sent out not so much to exterminate them – eastern Americans and Europeans still loved Hiawatha and Minnehaha and Old Nokomis – as to bring them back to the agencies where the Indian “menace” gave the U.S. Army an excuse to keep sucking up taxpayer money. Guess what happened next. With Custer dead, the Army took off after the Lakota, A changing world could start at home Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: On Memorial Day 2001, I gave a speech in Midland Park at the request of the veteran’s from the American Legion #130. As I was looking over this speech to send to my greatgranddaughter in Pennsylvania, I realized since then our vets have been in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s time to remember them on Memorial Day as well as those from past wars. It’s time to remember those who are still there and also those who have given their lives and others who are at home now or in veterans’ hospitals recuperating from loss of limbs, burns, and post traumatic stress syndrome. On June 14, we will also be remembering that it is Flag Day and the importance of respecting our country and its flag. Veterans, men and women, never thought of defacing our flag or misusing it. It was held high with respect and honor because they knew firsthand what that flag stood for, and freedom had a deeper and more honorable meaning. Before treading on that flag, burning it, or dishonoring it, take time to remember why that flag is here and who helped keep it here. The flag of this United States of America is the flag of the highest calling and to the greatest nation under God in the world. Let’s hold it high and fly it with pride. On this Memorial Day, let us remember those whose lives were ended and are now lying beneath white crosses here and abroad. How about thanking veterans for a job well done! I think my prayer at the end of that long-ago Memorial Day speech is worth repeating. It goes like this: “Dear Veterans: We pray for your healing, not only physical but spiritual, mental, and emotional. May your remembrances of yesterday, when you walked hand in hand A Memorial Day wish with pain, fear, bloodshed, and death be lessened. May you be in peace where ever you may be, whether you live out your days residing at home or in nursing homes or veterans’ hospitals. As Americans, we do remember all of you and your sacrifices that we may enjoy the many freedoms we have in this nation and we are grateful and thankful. “And now, we as citizens of this country -- may we work together to reconcile our differences and strive to make this an even greater and more wholesome America where we can live in peace and harmony not only for now but for future generations.” Charlotte Spencer Midland Park Dear Editor: Everyone to the polling booth! We have a super Wyckoff Township Committee candidate in Eileen Avia. A faithful member of the ambulance corps, a committed teacher and worker on Team Up to Tidy Up day in April, we know her best as a team worker for 20 years in Partners in Pride, Wyckoff’s volunteer beautification committee. A former president and now co-chair of the group that plants the 55 concrete tub gardens throughout the center of town, she takes on responsibility willingly. As a member of the township committee, she will keep the town’s best interests in her heart. Tom and Mary Bugel Wyckoff Dear Editor: We have lived in Wyckoff for 51 years and have watched our pretty rural town transform into a high-traffic suburb (continued on page 25) Urges voters’ participation Will supermarket be a good neighbor?