Street Art Dispatches: Honor the Treaties Campaign to Reclaim Sioux Lands
by D. J. Pangburn (Writer/Editor at Death + Taxes Magazine)
As far back as I can remember my father, mother and grandparents on my father’s side have held a great reverence for the Native Americans. As a boy, if the subject of Native Americans came up in conversation, in a b
ook or on television, there was a deep sense of sadness and injustice etched on my parents’ and grandparents’ faces. Children are perceptive and I picked up on these changes in emotions when the subject arose.
More than that, however, my father transferred to me the recognition that Native Americans had been supremely wronged by broken treaties, massacres and petty wars carried out by the US government. Indeed, my current sense of existing wrongs in the world and the desire to right them has its origins in my early awareness of Native American tragedies.
As I grew older, I learned that my dad’s father had Native blood on his grandmother’s side (the French Canadian territories), and my dad’s mother had Native blood on her great grandmother’s side (a New York State tribe). This is not unique to my family, though—many millions of Americans carry Native American blood in their veins like living arcs, making the tragedy all the more surreal in that it’s a form of simultaneous self-immolation against family history and a sort of sad psychological avoidance. The tragedy is out of sight, so therefore it is out of mind since it’s in the blood and not visible in the mirror.
Growing up, I never held the idea that Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was somehow wrongly killed in battle—the man was trespassing on the Black Hills land of the Sioux Reservation in search of gold. Custer was the worst kind of man: an individual hellbent on acquiring for himself a fortune. In short, he was the prototypical capitalist. And not unlike a Roman General out on campaign for riches, Custer used his military uniform to legitimize his plundering. (Not much has changed, has it?)
And though I think often about the former glory of Native American culture and the systematic war waged on them from 1492 onward, admittedly it was a Shepherd Fairey poster for the “Honor the Treaties” campaign that opened my eyes to current conditions of the Sioux people.
Fairey does not always get my approval—particularly his Obama “Hope” poster or all his merchandise—but I do approve of his contribution to the “Honor the Treaties” campaign.
So, what is “Honor the Treaties”?
It is a Sioux effort to raise awareness about the US government’s systematic breaking of treaties with the Native American peoples, which has led to great poverty, illness and cultural degradation for not only the Sioux, but all Native Americans.
Read the rest of the article over at Death + Taxes Magazine.
