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‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Elon Musk Says Teachers Should Be ‘Imprisoned’ for Accurate Lessons on US History
The world’s richest man believes it is “treason” to teach students the plain fact that the United States was built on stolen Native American land.
Jan 15, 2026
Self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" Elon Musk believes schoolteachers should be "imprisoned" for educating students on topics that portray America negatively—including the nation's history of racism and the displacement of Native Americans.
The world's richest man, who was a prolific donor to President Donald Trump and a member of his administration, expressed this desire in a post on his social media app X on Thursday in response to a survey of high school students from 2022 conducted by the right-wing Manhattan Institute, about whether they had been taught concepts labeled as part of "critical social justice."
The post Musk replied to specifically emphasized that, according to the poll, 45% of students said they had been taught that "America was built on stolen land," while another 22% said they'd heard it from an adult at school.
Any even cursory retelling of US history makes such a statement beyond dispute. Since the arrival of European settlers in what would become the United States, Native Americans have been subject to over 300 years of well-documented forced migration policies, wars of extermination, and coercive treaties codifying their dispossession from lands they lived on for centuries.
In 2021, a year before the survey was conducted, researchers examined the first comprehensive dataset quantifying the forced removal of Native Americans and found that Indigenous people had lost approximately 99% of the lands they historically occupied.
The poll showed that students had also been taught other ideas about America that, while politically contentious, are also well-founded by US history and ongoing realities of legal and economic inequality—including that "America is a systemically racist country," that "white people have white privilege," and that "America is a patriarchal society."
With state-level bans on what it calls "critical race theory," "gender ideology," and other supposedly "divisive concepts" in public education, the right has in recent years been systematically chipping away at classroom discussions related to the uglier parts of US history and resulting ongoing inequality. Meanwhile, the second Trump administration has sought to use federal funds to coerce public schools into adopting his standards for "patriotic education."
But Musk, who donated an unprecedented $290 million to Trump to help him reclaim the presidency in 2024, thinks merely banning students from learning negative things about the country is not enough.
"Teaching people to hate America fundamentally destroys patriotism and the desire to defend our country," he wrote. "Such teachings should be viewed as treason and those who do it imprisoned."
The irony was immediately apparent to many. Musk's call comes just days after he claimed that by pushing to ban his platform X over its proliferation of nonconsensual artificially generated pornography, including of children, the United Kingdom “want[s] to suppress free speech.”
Musk has on numerous previous occasions emphasized the importance of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees the right to free expression.
"You can't claim to care about the First Amendment if you believe this," responded Billy Binion, a reporter for the libertarian news outlet Reason." Treason is a capital offense. Imprisoning or executing people for their words is impossible to reconcile with any understanding of free speech. Incoherent and un-American."
The billionaire has long claimed to be one of free speech's foremost defenders, but often only in cases involving his ideological allies.
Since he took over the social media platform formerly known as Twitter in 2022, those who have criticized him, reported negative news stories about him, or promoted causes he disagrees with—particularly Palestinian or LGBTQ+ rights—have often had their accounts suspended or their content’s reach limited.
In recent weeks, echoing rhetoric from the Trump administration about deporting tens of millions of nonwhite American citizens, Musk has spiraled further into explicit calls for the ethnic cleansing of the United States, endorsing posts stating that white people must “reclaim our nations” or “be conquered, enslaved, raped, and genocided” and that “if white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered,” necessitating “white solidarity.”
"Obviously, the whole Elon-is-a-free-speech-absolutist thing is long dead," wrote Alex Griswold, a spokesperson for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, commonly known as FIRE. "But it goes beyond that to the point that he is significantly more censorial than the median American."
Pam Fessler, a former news correspondent for NPR wrote that "People who call for the imprisonment of those who teach facts are the ones who 'hate' America."
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Trump Seeks 90% Cut for Already Underfunded Tribal Colleges
"This would basically be a knife in the chest," said the president of one tribal college, "and I don't know how we can survive these types of cuts."
Jun 04, 2025
The Trump administration is proposing a nearly 90% reduction in federal funding for tribal colleges and universities, a move that would likely force many of the nation's 37 Indigenous institutions of higher learning—which are already severely underfunded—to close, according to a ProPublica report published Wednesday.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of the Interior released its 2026 budget request, which seeks $22.1 million for tribal colleges and universities for the next fiscal year. That's down from $122.4 million allocated for the current fiscal year.
"The numbers that are being proposed would close the tribal colleges," American Indian Higher Education Consortium president and CEO Ahniwake Rose told ProPublica. "They would not be able to sustain."
Matt Krupnick, who authored the ProPublica report, previously revaled that Congress was already underfunding tribal institutions of higher learning by around a quarter-billion dollars per year, based on legislation passed in 1978 under which the government promised inflation-adjusted appropriations for Indigenous colleges and universities based on the number of students enrolled in federally recognized tribes.
Big news: The Trump administration has essentially proposed shutting down tribal colleges and universities, displacing more than 20,000 students. My latest for ProPublica:
[image or embed]
— Matt Krupnick (@mattkrupnick.bsky.social) June 3, 2025 at 12:33 PM
As Krupnick noted:
The colleges have managed, despite the meager funds, to preserve Indigenous languages, conduct high-level research, and train local residents in nursing, meat processing, and other professions and trades. But with virtually no money available for infrastructure or construction, the schools have been forced to navigate broken water pipes, sewage leaks, crumbling roofs, and other problems that have compounded the financial shortcomings.
"I'm shivering in my boots," Manoj Patil, president of Little Priest Tribal College in Nebraska, told ProPublica. "This would basically be a knife in the chest. It's a dagger, and I don't know how we can survive these types of cuts."
The Interior Department's budget proposal comes amid the Trump administration's gutting of federal agencies, which is being spearheaded by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. It is also the latest in a series of administration actions targeting education for Native Americans, who suffered centuries of extermination, land theft, forced displacement, imprisonment in reservations and concentration camps, family separation, and other genocidal policies and practices of Euro-American colonizers.
Since taking office for the second time, President Donald Trump has suspended scholarship and research grants for Native Americans and rescinded a key White House initiative promoting Indigenous educational success.
However, as they always have, Indigenous people are fighting back. In March, Native students and tribal leaders sued the Bureau of Indian Affairs in a bid to stop the Trump administration's gutting of Indigenous education.
While some Indigenous leaders said they are counting on members of Congress to protect Native education, others expressed skepticism rooted in centuries of broken U.S. promises.
"It is a bit disheartening to feel like our voice is not being heard," Chris Caldwell, president of College of Menominee Nation in Wisconsin, told
ProPublica. "They don't hear our message."
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What We Can Learn From Leonard Peltier: ‘I Rise Only When I Help You Rise’
The release of Leonard Peltier after nearly half a century in prison offers a chance for a reflection on the nature of justice and how we treat each other.
Feb 20, 2025
“...I write today from a position rare for a former prosecutor: to beseech you to commute the sentence of a man I helped put behind bars.”
Thus begins one of the most stunning letters I have ever read, written almost four years ago by former U.S. Attorney James H. Reynolds to then-President Joe Biden, pleading with him to exonerate former American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Leonard Peltier, who had been convicted of murdering two FBI agents at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975.
In one of his last acts before leaving office, Biden did so: freeing Peltier, now 80 years old and beset with health problems, after nearly half a century in federal prison, allowing him to serve the rest of his sentence—lifetime imprisonment—from the Chippewa reservation in North Dakota that is his home. Peltier was released from prison on February 18.
Hey, big news—kind of. Much of the mainstream coverage has been careful to present it as simply a kind-hearted act by the U.S. Department of Justice, allowing an elderly, convicted murderer to spend his final years under home incarceration. It has downplayed not only the serious flaws in the case against Peltier and the worldwide demands for his release—from Amnesty International, from Pope Francis, from Nelson Mandela, and so many others—it has avoided any mention of the larger context: that white America has long been at war with the continent’s Native population, taking their land and attempting to obliterate their culture, essentially declaring them to be subhuman.
For that reason, the fact that Reynolds’ letter is now poking itself into the present news cycle is utterly mind-boggling.
The Pine Ridge shootings occurred on June 26, 1975, when two FBI agents entered the reservation to arrest a resident for stealing a pair of cowboy boots. According to Peltier-supporters’ account, the agents entered private property without identifying themselves. Many AIM members happened to be present at the time. A shootout took place—the reason uncertain—and the two agents, along with a Pine Ridge resident, were killed. The reservation was soon surrounded by about 150 police and FBI officers. Peltier, a Native rights activist, was among those arrested and eventually became the focal point of the government’s case.
Reynolds’ letter to Biden continues: “Leonard Peltier’s conviction and continued incarceration is a testament to a time and a system of justice that no longer has a place in our society. I have been fortunate enough to see this country and its prevailing attitudes about Native Americans, progress dramatically over the last 46 years.”
He then goes into detail about the case itself, explaining: “We were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation. As a result, we shifted our stance on the theories of guilt throughout the prosecution and appeal.”
Ultimately, the entirety of the case against Peltier, he writes, was that he was present at the reservation and was in possession of a weapon. There was no evidence that he shot the agents—or evidence against anyone else at the reservation. Indeed, The Guardian, writing about the case, notes that a witness who testified that she saw Peltier shoot the agents “later said she had been coerced into testifying and recanted her testimony.”
All of which sets the context for the largest point Reynolds makes to Biden, transcending the case itself and looking directly at the country’s evolving social consciousness:
“I believe,” he writes, “that a grant of executive clemency would serve the best interests of justice and the best interests of our country. In my opinion, to continue to imprison Mr. Peltier any longer, knowing what we know now, would serve to continue the broken relationship between Native Americans and the government.”
“I urge you to chart a different path in the history of the government’s relationship with its Native people through a show of mercy rather than continued indifference. I urge you to take a step toward healing a wound that I had a part in making. I urge you to commute Leonard Peltier’s sentence and grant him executive clemency.”
All I can do is let these words sit there for a moment. My God, this is a larger look at the nature of justice than I would expect from at actual member of the Department of Justice. Mr. President, let us take action now to begin healing our broken relationship with Native Americans. Let us look at ourselves!
It took Biden several years to take action on Peltier’s incarceration, and it’s not as though Biden’s commutation was also an exoneration—a declaration of his innocence... nor was it an apology for the nation’s, or for Europe’s, five centuries of land theft and cultural dehumanization of Indigenous people of the Americas.
But let me dig for a moment into the words of Peltier himself, who has written an account of how, as a nine-year-old boy, he (along with his sister and a cousin) were taken from their homes and sent off to... uh, boarding school, perhaps more accurately called dehumanization school, the point of which was to take away their language, their culture, their humanity. Upon arrival, the children were stripped naked, forced into hot showers, then “they put DDT all over us. The poison even got in our eyes and mouths.”
The children were told it was to kill lice and other insects—but in reality it was no doubt to eliminate the “Indian” in them. “They made it clear we were hated,” he wrote. “With every look, with every cruel word, they continued a war our ancestors had fought since their ancestors landed here back in 1492.” Some of the kids wound up committing suicide; they were buried in unmarked graves on the school grounds.
Peltier also noted: “We spoke our language. We sang our songs. And we prayed in our languages, all in secret.”
Proof of his guilt—he broke the rules!
He concluded his boarding school memories by writing: “You don’t treat people badly like that. I rise only when I help you rise. Despite all those beatings, I still believe it. It’s a law, like physics, and it’s true. You get nowhere being mean and disrespecting the feelings of others, especially the most vulnerable. I have seen both kinds of people and more than my share of evil ones, and I know I’m right. I rise only when I help you rise.”
This isn’t what the boarding school taught, but apparently this is what he learned. And now, his intention is to teach it to the world.
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Montana Supreme Court Strikes Down 4 'Unconstitutional' Voting Laws Passed by GOP
The laws disproportionately impacted the ability of Native people to participate in voting, the court noted.
Mar 28, 2024
Native rights groups were among those applauding a decision by the Montana Supreme Court late Wednesday as four voting restrictions, passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature in the wake of former President Donald Trump's 2020 election loss, were struck down as "unconstitutional."
The sweeping 2021 laws had ended same-day voter registration, eliminated the use of student ID cards as a form of identification for voters, banned the distribution of absentee ballots to teenagers who would turn 18 by Election Day, and prohibited third parties from collecting ballots and returning them on behalf of voters.
Indigenous rights groups and tribes including Native Voice, Montana Native Vote, the Blackfeet Nation, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, the Fort Belknap Indian Community, and the Northern Cheyenne Tribe filed a lawsuit in 2021 to challenge H.B. 176 and H.B. 530, the two laws pertaining to same-day registration and ballot collection.
Chief Justice Mike McGrath noted that Native people were disproportionately affected by the two laws, writing that it is "much more difficult on average for people living on reservations to either get to a polling place on or before Election Day, or to mail an absentee ballot prior to election day."
The summary of the majority opinion said the laws "violate the fundamental right to vote provided to all citizens by the Montana Constitution."
The court upheld a district court ruling from 2022.
"Today's Montana Supreme Court decision is a great victory for our clients and all Native Americans in Montana, who have asked for nothing more than the ability to exercise their fundamental right to vote," said Jonathan Topaz, staff attorney at the ACLU's Voting Rights Project. "Once again, courts have struck down the Montana Legislature's attempts to unconstitutionally burden the constitutional rights of Native Americans across the state. We will continue to fight for Native American voters in Montana and across the country to preserve their fundamental, constitutional right to vote."
Jacqueline De León, staff attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, called the 4-3 ruling "a resounding win for tribes in Montana."
"Despite repeated attacks on their voting rights, tribes and Native voters in Montana stood strong, and today the Montana Supreme Court affirmed that the state's legislative actions were unconstitutional," said De León. "Native voices deserve to be heard and this decision helps ensure that happens."
Josh Douglas, a law professor at University of Kentucky, wrote at Election Law Blog that the state Supreme Court "put real teeth into [the] state constitutional protection for voters," recognizing that the Montana Constitution goes further than federal law in protecting voting rights.
As the state constitution reads, "All elections shall be free and open, and no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage."
"The court refused to follow federal precedent, noting that '[t]his court can diverge from the minimal protections offered by the United States Constitution when the Montana Constitution clearly affords greater protection—or even where the provision is nearly identical,'" wrote Douglas. "State courts have various tools within state constitutions to robustly protect voters. The Montana Supreme Court's decision offers a solid roadmap for how to use state constitutional language on the right to vote. Other state supreme courts should follow the Montana Supreme Court's lead."
The ruling comes as Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) faces a competitive race for reelection.
Ronnie Jo Horse, executive director of Western Native Voice, said the ruling "reinforces the principle of equitable access to voting services and the protection of the rights for all voters."
"We are very pleased with today's landmark ruling," said Horse. "It stands as a testament to justice prevailing in defense of the rights of Montanans, especially those of Native American communities."
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Healing From the Horrors of Wounded Knee 133 Years Later
But how do we heal? That’s a question still worth asking.
Jan 21, 2024
On December 29, the Lakota held a ceremony at the Wounded Knee gravesite and read the names of those who were killed, and identified—aloud—women, children and entire families wiped out by the howitzers. There were many who were not named but remembered in the wind and in the moment.
It was somber. And, for the second year, clothing, moccasins and pipes that belonged to the murdered were there at Wounded Knee, returned from a museum in the east, where a ghoulish collection had rested for over a century. On that cold December morning, we prayed, listening to songs, as we looked upon the dresses, shirts of the Ghost Dancers and baby moccasins, all stripped from those slain at Wounded Knee. Now, all sat in open boxes covering the gravesite where their people had been buried. We mourned together.
It was l890 and the great leader Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake) was incarcerated at Fort Yates with his people. More than a decade had passed since the U.S. government illegally seized the Black Hills, forcing the people off sacred land. The buffalo had been decimated. Incarcerated at prisoner-of-war camps, the Lakota’s rations had been cut in half. The people were starving.
On December 15, Maj. James McLaughlin ordered the assassination of Sitting Bull by the Indian Police. Sitting Bull’s ally, the Minneconjou Lakota leader Spotted Elk (dubbed “Big Foot” by the cavalry for the size of his shoes), fled south to the Pine Ridge Agency along with about 350 Lakota, mostly women and children.
They traveled under the cover of night, in the depths of winter. They rode over 200 hundred miles through canyons, Badlands and brutal conditions. Chased by Col. Forsyth and the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry, they arrived at the village of Wounded Knee, where they sought safety and a chance to live. That chance was not given.
The next morning, Chief Spotted Elk (Uŋpȟáŋ Glešká) and his people, camped just north of Wounded Knee, were surrounded by the 7th Cavalry. Spotted Elk was among the first to fall. Thirty minutes later as many as 300 Lakota lay dead—adults, children and infants.
Forsyth commended his soldiers for their “gallant conduct… in an engagement with a band of Indians in desperate condition and crazed by religion.” The Army awarded 23 Medals of Honor to soldiers who participated in the massacre. U.S. Cpl. Paul Weinert was cited for “firing his howitzer at several Indians in the ravine.”
There’s no way to whitewash this story, although many have tried. This is simply history, and, despite decades of erasure, the story is here to stay. The people remember; they work to heal.
How do you heal? That’s a question still worth asking 133 years later. First, we must acknowledge what happened. Starting there, we grieve and begin to heal spiritually.
In the early 1980s, Alex White Plume’s uncle told him that because the Army had not allowed survivors and family members to perform grieving ceremonies at Wounded Knee, the spirits of the victims were unable to leave the “Land of the Breathing.” In 1986, White Plume, his brother Percy and 17 other Lakota, calling themselves the Si Tanka Wokiksuye Okolakiciye—the “Big Foot Remembrance Group”—embarked on the first annual Big Foot Memorial Ride from the Sitting Bull homestead in Standing Rock to Pine Ridge.
It was an emotional experience, a time to remember the past and reflect on the future. “As men, we cried,” said White Plume. “We used to try to be like the white man—don’t show any pain and just be tough. But after you go through that ride, it’s okay to cry. It heals your wounds.”
The White Plume family has continued this ride for almost 40 years. Each year new young riders come. Stories and prayers recited; men and women suffer in honor of their ancestors. We all come to heal.
During the ride this year, I stood next to Andrea Eastman, a Dakota woman friend from Sisseton reservation, as she looked over the medical notes of her ancestor, Dr. Charles Eastman. Eastman was among the first Native Americans to be certified as a European-style doctor. After graduating from the University of Boston medical school in 1890, he became a physician at Pine Ridge. Eastman saved all the survivors from Wounded Knee that he could. Only seven died in his care. Sickened by the carnage, he was forced out of his position because his medical notes countered Forsyth’s narrative.
Coming Home
At some point, collecting the heads, body parts and sacred items of Native people became a national pastime. Museums in the United States (and Europe) filled themselves with such curiosities; private collectors did the same. One of the largest collections of goods and clothing associated with persons killed at Wounded Knee came to be housed in the Woods Memorial Library Museum (now called the Founders Museum) in Barre, Massachusetts, a small town in western Massachusetts. Prior to their burial, the bodies had been stripped, and their items were donated to the town’s museum by Frank Root, a collector of such grisly remains.
In January 1993, more than a century after the day Root brought the collection to Barre, Nellie Two Bulls, Alex White Plume and Edgar Fire Thunder traveled from Pine Ridge to see the belongings. White Plume described his visit as “one of my saddest expeditions I had ever had.” He said, “We didn’t know what to expect but it was really sad. The reason was all the children’s clothing and the cegpognaka, the amulets for the umbilical cords. Everything had bullet holes in it, blood and Big Foot’s hair.” “The spirits still linger in the museum, I hear their voices and cries,” Nellie Two Bulls said. These Lakota wanted to bring their ancestors’ belongings home.
“These were trophies of war,” says Wendell W. Yellow Bull. His great-grandfather survived the massacre. It took 20 years for the museum to consider returning the clothes, the dolls and the hair.
Museums want to keep their hoards of looted goods, until forced to give them up, either by law or because they recognized it was the right thing to do. Shortly after White Plume’s visit to Barre, I spoke with Audrey Stevens, the Barre Museum curator, who gave me the whitewashed narrative of how the collection came to be.
Stevens told me that Root purchased the collection from its finders, two civilians in charge of putting the dead at Wounded Knee in a mass grave. “They had these wagons and mules which the bodies were on” says Stevens. “One of the mules stepped in a hole. They looked in and found all of these clothes. Big Foot’s Band had buried them there on the way to Wounded Knee.”
For a century, the Barre museum told people this story, that the Lakota had taken off their clothes before they went to Wounded Knee. The suggestion is absurd: What sort of people take off their clothes in the middle of winter?
Upon finding their ancestors’ clothing, considered cultural patrimony, the Lakota sought to bring them home. In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to address the widescale plunder of Native America by museums—the bodies, heads and other artifacts collected as booty of war by scientists and the military.
At the time, the Barre Museum said it was exempt from the law, because their collection received no federal funding. The Lakota, however, had allies. One was Mia Feroleto, editor and publisher of New Observations, who helped lead the movement to repatriate the museum’s more than 150 pieces of stolen artifacts. “You can be an inspiration to others or you can be the next generation of perpetrators,” Feroleto recalled telling the museum, Feroleto told the New York Times.Elizabeth Almen Martin, a museum board member, said it became clear that the collection held more significance to the Lakota people than it did to Barre residents. “We decided that anything they wanted to have, they can have,” Martin said.
And so it was that in 2022, the shirts, bullet hole-ridden children’s dresses and baby moccasins returned to Wounded Knee.
The complexity of historic trauma is compounded in the healing process. Native people are asked to bury their ancestors again, and again.
As I stood looking over the grave site with the baby moccasins, I cried. We all did. But in our grieving, something else begins. A new chapter, a time to heal from the brutality of history. The time for massacres is long over. The time for healing is now. That’s true, whether you live in North America, South America or Palestine.
As I witnessed those horse riders, I saw the coming of a new generation. They are the ones already here. It is time to wipe away the tears.
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Sioux Tribes Want US to Come Clean on Treaty Deceit
"For centuries, the U.S. government has broken every promise it's made to Native tribes," says Standing Rock Sioux Chair Janet Alkire. "It's time for that to stop."
Nov 22, 2023
Leaders of the Standing Rock and Oglala Sioux said Wednesday that the two Native American tribes are joining forces in an effort to pressure the Biden administration into a reckoning over a dubious 19th-century treaty that—like just about every other one signed between the U.S. and Indigenous peoples—was broken by Washington.
The two tribes are seeking nation-to-nation consultations between U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Assistant Indian Affairs Secretary Bryan Newland—both Native Americans—and the remaining signatory tribes to the Fort Laramie Treaty.
"This is about correcting an injustice," Standing Rock Chair Janet Alkire said. "For centuries, the U.S. government has broken every promise it's made to Native tribes. It's time for that to stop."
"Furthermore," she added, "we're calling on the Biden-Harris administration to take active steps to correct the record."
Treaty rights remain a critical point of contention for the Sioux, who in recent years have fought against violations of their land, water, and sovereignty, including the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines—the latter of which was canceled by President Joe Biden.
"We'd like the current government to take an honest look at what happened."
In the 1860s, fierce Indigenous resistance to Euro-American encroachment on the Great Plains and an Army already weakened by the Civil War resulted in a series of U.S. defeats, including a December 1866 ambush led by Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors that killed all 81 soldiers under the command of Capt. William Fetterman during the Powder River War. It was the worst defeat of U.S. forces on the Great Plains until Little Bighorn a decade later.
In 1868, the U.S. signed the Fort Laramie Treaty with the Arapaho and the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota Sioux. The treaty established the Great Sioux Reservation and designated the Black Hills as "unceded Indian territory" to be "set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation" of Indigenous peoples.
However, the tribes claim U.S. officials subsequently—and surreptitiously—added language to the treaty stating that the Indians "relinquish all claims or rights" to lands outside the designated reservation. The U.S. then blatantly abrogated the treaty following the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota and, when Indians fought back, unleashed a fresh wave of genocidal violence against them.
"U.S. treaty negotiators snuck the relinquishment language into Article II of the treaty after it was signed by the Sioux chiefs to end the Powder River War," said Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out. "We'd like the current government to take an honest look at what happened."
The Indian Claims Commission, a judicial relations arbiter between the U.S. government and Indigenous tribes, concluded in 1976 that the treaty "effectuated a vast cession of land contrary to the understanding and intent of the Sioux."
In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the United States had illegally taken the Black Hills and awarded over $100 million in reparations to the Sioux Nation, which refused the money—now worth over $1 billion—on the grounds that the tribe never wanted to part with its lands in the first place.
"The Black Hills are not for sale," Alkire said Wednesday, "and they never were."
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'Horrid and Typical': WaPo Investigation Reveals Smithsonian Still Has 'Racial Brain Collection'
"How could they hold a child’s brain for 70 years, and know who he is?" a descendant of one victim asked. "It was my grandma's pain, and now that she's gone, it's my pain."
Aug 15, 2023
A Washington Post investigation published Monday revealed that the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. continues to hold hundreds of brains poached mostly from Black and Indigenous people in scores of countries by a white supremacist curator in the early 20th century without consent, and that the venerable institution has been slow to return the remains to the families of those affected.
According to Post reporters Nicole Dungca and Claire Healy, there are more than 250 brains in the Smithsonian's collection, the vast majority of them from people of color. The report states that the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History has more than 30,000 human bones and other body parts in storage.
Nearly all of the brains in the Smithsonian's possession were taken without the consent of the deceased persons or their relatives for the collection of Aleš Hrdlička—a eugenicist who served as curator of the Smithsonian's physical anthropology division—who sought to prove that white people are superior to people of other races.
As Dungca and Healy noted:
Most of the brains were removed upon death from Black and Indigenous people and other people of color. They are part of a collection of at least 30,700 human bones and other body parts still held by the Natural History Museum, the most-visited museum within the Smithsonian. The collection, one of the largest in the world, includes mummies, skulls, teeth, and other body parts, representing an unknown number of people.
The remains are the unreconciled legacy of a grisly practice in which bodies and organs were taken from graveyards, battlefields, morgues, and hospitals in more than 80 countries. The decadeslong effort was financed and encouraged by the taxpayer-subsidized institution. The collection, which was mostly amassed by the early 1940s, has long been hidden from view.
The Post located the descendants of Mary Sara, an Indigenous Sami woman whose brain was removed and sent to the Smithsonian after she died of tuberculosis in Seattle in 1933. Her preserved brain remains in the institute's collection. Mary Sara's relatives had no idea that her brain had been taken.
"It's a violation against our family and against our people," said Fred Jack, who is married to one of Sara's cousins. "It's kind of like an open wound... We want to have peace and we'll have no peace because we know this exists, until it's corrected."
During the course of the Post investigation, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III issued a statement announcing the formation of a task force "to develop a policy that addresses the future of human remains held within its museums' collections."
The Smithsonian also hired two researchers to study and implement the ethical return of the brains and other remains.
"At the Smithsonian, we recognize certain collection practices of our past were unethical," wrote Bunch. "What was once standard in the museum field is no longer acceptable. We acknowledge and apologize for the pain our historical practices have caused people, their families, and their communities, and I look forward to the conversations this initiative will generate in helping us perform our cutting-edge research in a manner that is ripe with scholarship and conforms to the highest ethical standard."
In an interview with the Post, Bunch said that "I know that so much of this has been based on racist attitudes, that these brains were really people of color to demonstrate the superiority of white brains, so I understand that is just really unconscionable."
"And I think it's important for me as a historian to say that all the remains, all the brains, need to be returned if possible, [and] treated in the best possible way," he added.
However, the Post report claims the Smithsonian has "lagged in its efforts to return the vast majority of the remains" to their rightful recipients, with the institute so far having repatriated just four of the 268 brains in its possession.
Some of the brains in Hrdlicka's collection came from Filipinos who died after they were brought to the United States—which had recently conquered the Philippines from Spain—to be put on display in what critics have called a "human zoo" during the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.
The National Museum of the Philippines responded to the Post report in a statement welcoming the Smithsonian's repatriation efforts.
Some of the Filipino victims' brains were incinerated after their deaths. Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, who is Kankanaey Igorot Filipino and a former U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, explained the importance of keeping the remains of deceased people whole.
"For Indigenous people, it's not just an issue, of course, of a violation of their rights," she told the Post. "It's also an issue of spiritual consideration."
This has long been an issue. The decapitated and preserved heads of Native Americans killed during the genocidal U.S. conquest of North America were labeled "specimens of natural history" and shipped off to the Smithsonian as far back as the 1870s, when the pseudoscience of phrenology—the study of human skulls to discern or predict mental traits of different races—was still in vogue.
Some people said they will remain troubled by the harm done to their ancestors even after their remains are returned. Lena Lauth, the granddaughter of 10-year-old Tlingit boy from Alaska whose brain was taken, asked, "How could they hold a child's brain for 70 years, and know who he is?"
"It was my grandma's pain," Lauth told the Post, "and now that she's gone, it's my pain."
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Tribes to EPA: Ban Fish-Killing Tire Chemical 6PPD
"If EPA truly cares about protecting the environment and the tribe's treaty rights, not just industry's pocketbooks, it will act now," said one tribe's environmental scientist.
Aug 01, 2023
Three Western Indigenous tribes on Tuesday petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency seeking a ban on a toxic chemical used in the manufacture of tires that poses a deadly risk to fish—including species listed as endangered or threatened—when it breaks down.
Acting on behalf of the Yurok Tribe of northern California and the Port Gamble S'Klallam and Puyallup tribes from the Puget Sound region of Washington state, the legal advocacy group Earthjustice filed a petition asking Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Michael Regan to invoke Section 21 of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) "to establish regulations prohibiting the manufacturing, processing, use, and distribution of N-(1,3-Dimethylbutyl)-N'-phenyl-p-phenylenediamine (6PPD) for and in tires."
"Exposure to 6PPD-q can kill a coho salmon within hours, and the chemical... kills up to 100% of coho returning to spawn in urban streams."
Present in most if not all tires, 6PPD has been in use for over half a century. The highly reactive chemical breaks down into 6PPD-quinone (6PPD-q), which, according to Earthjustice, "is the second-most toxic chemical to aquatic species ever evaluated by EPA," behind the chemical warfare agent parathion.
"Exposure to 6PPD-q can kill a coho salmon within hours, and the chemical is responsible for 'urban runoff mortality syndrome,' which kills up to 100% of coho returning to spawn in urban streams," the petition notes. Numerous populations of coho salmon, steelhead trout, and Chinook salmon are listed as endangered or threatened with extinction under the Endangered Species Act.
The petition warns that the chemical byproduct "is present not only in stormwater runoff and urban watersheds at levels that can kill salmon, steelhead trout, and other aquatic organisms, but also in sediments and soils, road and household dust, and the urine of pregnant women, with emerging science pointing to toxicity in mammals and therefore potential risk to human health as well."
"There is no known safe level of 6PPD in tires, and no warning or label requirements will eliminate the unreasonable risk from the use of tires containing 6PPD because the formation and release of 6PPD-q is an intended, inherent, and foreseeable result of using 6PPD in tires," the petition stresses.
Josh Carter, the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe's environmental scientist, said in a statement that "to see 6PPD-q kill the salmon that are reared in the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe's own streams and from its own hatchery is an unconscionable slap in the face to a people who rely on salmon for their well-being, in addition to being a gross violation of the tribe's rights as enshrined in the 1855 Treaty of Point No Point."
"If EPA truly cares about protecting the environment and the tribe's treaty rights, not just industry's pocketbooks, it will act now," Carter added.
The Puyallup Tribal Council asserted:
Since time immemorial the Puyallup Tribe has fished and protected the water that flows through our homelands. We have witnessed first-hand the devastation to the salmon species we have always relied upon to nourish our people. We have watched as the species have declined to the point of almost certain extinction if nothing is done to protect them.
We have suffered years of reduced fishing, now only seeing hours of fishing where there used to be months of fishing. The discovery that 6PPD is killing the fish in these waters could be exactly what saves salmon for us and all of the country. That is why we have joined this petition to act upon the knowledge we now have, to save and protect our fish and other species impacted by this toxic chemical. We will always act to protect the fish, the water, and our lands.
Elizabeth Forsyth, the senior attorney at Earthjustice's Biodiversity Defense Program, noted that "tire companies have known for years that they need to move beyond 6PPD to find viable alternatives."
"EPA action is urgently needed to spur that change," she continued. "The extreme toxicity of this little-known chemical should be alarming to anyone who cares about our planet's biodiversity and waterways. It is time for the EPA to phase out this highly toxic chemical that is killing salmon."
As the Yurok Tribe prepares to hold its annual Salmon Festival later this month, the famed fair's namesake fish won't be on the menu this year. That's because tribal leaders say the Klamath River's salmon run is forecast to be one of the lowest ever recorded.
"In addition to not catching fish for the festival, we will not harvest any Klamath salmon this year to protect the fish population," Yurok Tribal Chair Joseph James said in a statement.
"During all but one of the last eight years, the tribe's extremely limited subsistence harvests also did not come close to satisfying the needs of the Yurok people," he added. "In many years, the subsistence quotas amounted to less than one fish per member of the tribe."
On a positive note, construction crews are hard at work dismantling four dams on the Klamath River in what the Yurok Tribe is calling "the largest salmon restoration project in world history."
"By the end of 2024, the Klamath will flow free for the first time in more than a century, and salmon will have access to approximately 400 miles of previously blocked salmon-spawning habitat," the tribe said.
The theme of this year's Salmon Festival—the 59th annual gathering—is "Celebrating Dam Removal and the Healing of the Klamath River."
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'Shameful': Right-Wing Supreme Court Rules Against Navajo in Colorado River Case
Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren called the decision "disappointing" but also expressed confidence that "we will be able to achieve a settlement promptly and ensure the health and safety of my people."
Jun 22, 2023
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ruled against the Navajo Nation "over claims that the federal government has failed to assert its desperate need for water access," as the Lakota People's Law Project put it.
While calling the decision "disappointing," Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said in a statement that "I am encouraged that the ruling was 5-4. It is reassuring that four justices understood our case and our arguments."
Justice Brett Kavanaugh authored the majority opinion for Arizona v. Navajo Nation, backed by all but one of the other right-wing members. That Justice Neil Gorsuch penned a dissent—joined by the three liberals—did not shock court watchers, given his positions in previous cases involving Native American rights, including a "huge win for tribes" earlier this month.
Established by an 1868 treaty, Diné Bikéyah or Navajoland stretches across more than 17 million acres of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah and is home to roughly 170,000 people, thousands of whom lack access to running water in their homes. The shrinking and overused Colorado River runs along the northwestern border of the tribe's reservation.
"My job as the president of the Navajo Nation is to represent and protect the Navajo people, our land, and our future," Nygren said Thursday. "The only way to do that is with secure, quantified water rights to the Lower Basin of the Colorado River. I am confident that we will be able to achieve a settlement promptly and ensure the health and safety of my people. And in addition, the health and productivity of the entire Colorado River Basin, which serves up to 30 tribes and tens of millions of people who have come to rely on the Colorado River."
Thursday's decision came two decades after the Navajo Nation sued the federal government regarding water rights to the lower portion of the Colorado River. The new ruling relates to two consolidated appeals: one brought by the Biden administration and another filed by multiple California water districts along with the states of Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada.
Those two challenges stem from a 2021 decision in the tribe's favor from the San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which reversed a 2019 ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow in Arizona.
The high court heard arguments for the case in March. Kavanaugh wrote for the majority that "the question in this suit concerns 'reserved water rights'—a shorthand for the water rights implicitly reserved to accomplish the purpose of the reservation."
"The Navajos' claim is not that the United States has interfered with their water access," he continued. "Instead, the Navajos contend that the treaty requires the United States to take affirmative steps to secure water for the Navajos—for example, by assessing the tribe's water needs, developing a plan to secure the needed water, and potentially building pipelines, pumps, wells, or other water infrastructure—either to facilitate better access to water on the reservation or to transport off-reservation water onto the reservation."
"In light of the treaty's text and history, we conclude that the treaty does not require the United States to take those affirmative steps," Kavanaugh added. "And it is not the judiciary's role to rewrite and update this 155-year-old treaty. Rather, Congress and the president may enact—and often have enacted—laws to assist the citizens of the Western United States, including the Navajos, with their water needs."
Meanwhile, Gorsuch contended that the court's majority "rejects a request the Navajo Nation never made. This case is not about compelling the federal government to take 'affirmative steps to secure water for the Navajos.'"
"Respectfully, the relief the tribe seeks is far more modest," he asserted. "Everyone agrees the Navajo received enforceable water rights by treaty. Everyone agrees the United States holds some of those water rights in trust on the tribe's behalf. And everyone agrees the extent of those rights has never been assessed."
"Adding that pieces together, the Navajo have a simple ask: They want the United States to identify the water rights it holds for them. And if the United States has misappropriated the Navajo's water rights, the tribe asks it to formulate a plan to stop doing so prospectively," he wrote. "Because there is nothing remarkable about any of this, I would affirm the 9th Circuit's judgment and allow the Navajo's case to proceed."
As The Associated Press reported Thursday:
The Biden administration had said that if the court were to come down in favor of the Navajo Nation, the federal government could face lawsuits from many other tribes.
[...]
The government argued that it has helped the tribe secure water from the Colorado River's tributaries and provided money for infrastructure, including pipelines, pumping plants, and water treatment facilities. But it said no law or treaty required the government to assess and address the tribe's general water needs. The states involved in the case argued that the Navajo Nation was attempting to make an end run around a Supreme Court decree that divvied up water in the Colorado River's Lower Basin.
Reporting from the reservation in March, just before the high court heard arguments in the case, NBC News' Lawrence Hurley joined Marilyn Help-Hood on a four-mile drive to her local well. The schoolteacher in her 60s "has no running water at her small one-story home," the journalist explained, "and needs to regularly replenish her supplies for drinking, cooking, washing dishes and feeding her small collection of sheep, horses, and dogs."
"As Help-Hood and others see it, the tribe has been relegated to secondary status in the fight over water rights in the Southwest, where states have long fought for their own pieces of the pie through complex negotiations and litigation," according to Hurley. "The scramble for water is only becoming more intense, with a decadeslong drought leading to depleted supplies in the major reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin, with the growing threat of climate change looming in the future."
Along with stressing the importance of appreciating the scarcity of water—a value Help-Hood said she passed on to her grown children—the mother of five put the U.S. government's position in the case into the broader context of centuries of mistreatment.
"We were here first, but we are still put on the back burner," she said. "In reality, we are not really being treated fairly."
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'Huge Win for Tribes' as US Supreme Court Preserves Indian Child Welfare Act
"By ruling on the side of children's health and safety, the U.S. Constitution, and centuries of precedent, the justices have landed on the right side of history," said one Cherokee chief.
Jun 15, 2023
In what one chief called "a major victory" for Native American tribes, the United States Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a federal law enacted to protect Indian children from being separated from their families.
The justices' 7-2 decision in Haaland v. Brackeen leaves intact the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a 1978 law passed in response to over a century of Native American children being taken from their relatives and often placed in state or religious institutions or with white families.
"Today, the Supreme Court once again ruled that ICWA, heralded as the gold standard in child welfare for over 40 years, is constitutional," Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said in a statement. "Today's decision is a major victory for Native tribes, children, and the future of our culture and heritage. It is also a broad affirmation of the rule of law, and of the basic constitutional principles surrounding relationships between Congress and tribal nations."
"We hope this decision will lay to rest the political attacks aimed at diminishing tribal sovereignty and creating instability throughout Indian law that have persisted for too long," Hoskin added. "By ruling on the side of children's health and safety, the U.S. Constitution, and centuries of precedent, the justices have landed on the right side of history."
The ICWA gives preference to Native American families in adoption and foster care proceedings, a policy challenged by a white couple, the state of Texas, and others, who claimed the law is race-based and therefore violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Chad and Jennifer Brackeen, a Texas couple, had already adopted a Navajo boy and are also trying to adopt his half-sister, who is 4 years old and has lived with them since she was an infant. The Navajo Nation opposes the adoption.
"Before us, a birth mother, foster and adoptive parents, and the state of Texas challenge the act on multiple constitutional grounds. They argue that it exceeds federal authority, infringes state sovereignty, and discriminates on the basis of race," Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority. "The United States, joined by several Indian tribes, defends the law."
In addition to the Navajo, the Cherokee, White Earth Band of Ojibwe, and Ysleta del Sur Pueblo tribes were defendants in the case.
"The issues are complicated," Barrett added. "But the bottom line is that we reject all of petitioners' challenges to the statute, some on the merits and others for lack of standing."
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, with the latter writing that "the Constitution confers enumerated powers on the federal government. Not one of them supports ICWA."
Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred with the majority but wrote that the ICWA's race-based nature—specifically a hypothetical scenario in which "a prospective foster or adoptive parent may in some cases be denied the opportunity to foster or adopt a child because of the prospective parent's race"—raises "significant questions under bedrock equal protection principles and this court's precedents."
"Courts, including ultimately this court, will be able to address the equal protection issue when it is properly raised by a plaintiff with standing—for example, by a prospective foster or adoptive parent or child in a case arising out of a state-court foster care or adoption proceeding," Kavanaugh added.
Before passage of the ICWA, between 25% and 35% of Native American children were being taken from their homes and placed with other families for adoption, in foster care, or in church- or state-run institutions.
During and after the peak decades of the U.S. genocide against the Western Indians, vanquished tribes were forced to send their children to boarding schools to be "civilized." Under the mantra "kill the Indian, save the man," hundreds of thousands of Native children suffered this cultural genocide. Many never returned home again, as diseases claimed many lives. Parents who resisted giving up their children were often imprisoned, sometimes on California's foreboding Alcatraz Island.
The 2021 discovery of hundreds of Indigenous children buried in unmarked graves at a Canadian boarding school prompted U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to write about how her Laguna Pueblo grandparents were stolen from their families when they were 8 years old in "an effort to eradicate our culture and erase us as a people."
Responding to Thursday's Supreme Court ruling, Haaland said that "for nearly two centuries, federal policies promoted the forced removal of Indian children from their families and communities through boarding schools, foster care, and adoption."
"Those policies were a targeted attack on the existence of tribes, and they inflicted trauma on children, families, and communities that people continue to feel today," she added. "Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 to put an end to those policies."
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