All Episodes
Previous Next
July 20, 2024 - RFK Jr. The Defender
54:49
Native American Rights Panel with Chase Iron Eyes

Chase Iron Eyes, David Harper, and Jacob Keyes discuss issues impacting Native Americans with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in this episode.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, I have a great show today.
I have a panel of Native American leaders and the organizer of this event was Chase Iron Eyes and Chase is the native outreach director for the Kennedy campaign.
He was Raised on Standing Rock Indian Reservation until the age of 19.
He earned his undergraduate degree at University of North Dakota studying political science.
He then graduated the University of Denver Law School Chase was charged with felony inciting a riot, a five-year prison term maximum, as a result of participating in the Standing Rock protests against the DAPL pipeline.
And we crossed paths at that point, and he helped lead the efforts to reclaim sacred lands in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
He raised over a million dollars to launch the land back He was with me for 10 years
fighting in the successful battle against The James Bay project, which was a proposal to build the biggest construction project in the history of the world, 625 dams and dykes to dam 11 major rivers that go into the eastern side of James Bay and Hudson's Bay.
They were going to create a lake the size of Lake Erie and destroy an area larger than France.
And it was all Cree-Indian lands.
The Cree were never consulted.
They never lost a war.
They never signed a treaty.
And they had no place at the table.
And they came to New York.
The Cree Grand Chief, Matthew Coon, came.
And I asked my help, and we ended up fighting.
This is about 1993.
For many, many years, and we spent a lot of time up in the Mistasini and Chisasibe, these communities, 800 miles up in the North Country, 800 miles from the nearest paved road.
And we ended up winning that battle and Everett was a Sioux leader who came to help us and I spent a lot of time sleeping in teepees with him and catching fish and hunting caribou and eating a lot of wild game and became very close and he did Naming ceremonies for a lot of my children out on Standing Rock back in the mid-90s.
I feel like Chase is a member of my family or others, as are David Harper.
And David is the current leading tribal outreach efforts for utility-scale solar and energy storage projects with more than 30 tribes throughout the Western United States.
He previously directed tribal engagement The Alliance of Tribal Clean Energy, a non-profit that served as the development tribal liaison for the Navajo Power.
He represented the Colorado Indian tribes.
His name is on a dozen different major power projects throughout the western states.
And then my final guest is Chairman Jacob Keys, who is a chairman of the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma, and he is the founder of Oklahoma City's first Native American-owned craft brewery, Skydance Brewing Company, and I've visited him at that incredible establishment.
He is a leading entrepreneur, business leader, and he has a podcast on business leadership.
He is Native Business Magazine, named him Top 50 Native Entrepreneurs, and his brewery won the Best New Brewery in 2021 for Pop Culture Magazine.
Anyway, this is a wonderful group.
I want to begin just by talking about some of my work on these issues.
I spent about 20% of my time over the 40 years as an environmental advocate working on Native issues.
I had a long background in this.
My father and my uncle saw what had happened to Native Americans in our country They recognize the genocide of Native Americans as the original sin of American democracy.
They believe strongly in our country and American democracy, but they believe that we could never live up to our potential as the world's exemplary democracy if we didn't go back and make amends and reconcile in one way or another with the people who had made the ultimate sacrifice and laid the groundwork Or the rise of our culture, our political culture in this country.
And my uncle, during his presidency, entertained a long line of tribal leaders.
They often came to my house.
And my father, when we were growing up, whenever we went on a vacation together, a wilderness vacation or Whether we went skiing or whitewater kayaking or mountain climbing, which my father wanted us to see the whole country, the first thing we would do when we landed at the airport is to go look at the native, go visit on native reservations.
And I visited Choctaw, I visited Cherokee, I visited Hopi, Apache reservations, of course, all the Sioux reservations, the Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, Rosebud.
And the Navajo Reservations, I went many times down to Red Rock and Comanche, or many, many of the big reservations in the western states I went to when I was a kid on the Mohawk Reservation in upstate New York, which was a very important group for my father.
My father, two weeks before he died, he spent a day at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
Which is the poorest county in America, year after year.
And my father saw a Sioux family living in the burned-out hulk of an automobile, and he cried.
And it was one of the only times that people had actually seen him cry.
And the word spread throughout the Sioux Reservation.
He spent about six, seven hours there.
I don't know exactly how long, but he was keeping a group of white people, 20,000 white people, who were waiting for him at Rapid City.
He kept them waiting all day, and his aides were panicking and saying, we've got to leave here.
Indians don't vote anyway.
And he said, you don't know your candidate if you think that's a good argument.
And But the last day of his life, he won South Dakota, which nobody had expected.
And he won it because the suit came out and voted in unprecedented numbers.
And he got almost 100% of the vote.
I think there were two votes against him on the entire reservation.
And every time I go back there, people say to me, we're still looking for those guys.
And I became friends at that point.
I was only 14 years old.
With Tim Gallego, and I later on served with him in founding Lakota Times, which is now called Indian Country Today.
I was a founding editor of that publication, which is the biggest newspaper in Indian Country.
And then around 1993, Matthew Cooncum came down to New York as my help with that I ended up blocking that project.
I played a key role in there by talking Mario Cuomo, who was then my sister's father-in-law, into canceling a $16 billion contract with Hydro Quebec, and that killed the project.
And we had brought up legislatures, about 20 legislatures, from the New York State Legislature to go camping and We do a whitewater trip with the Cree way up on one of these rivers that was going to be dammed, the Great Whale River, which is called Wat Magushtui.
And they fell in love with it, and they fell in love with the Cree people.
And in the end, we were able to block that project.
After I did that, I was asked by five tribes on Vancouver Island The New Chalnooth, Hesquit, and several other tribes to come out there and represent them in the litigation against McMillan Bloedel, the biggest logging company in Canada that was fighting to log Clackwood Sound.
Those tribes owned Clackwood Sound.
They had never again signed a treaty or fought a war.
The treaty negotiations have been going on for a century, and meanwhile, McMillan Blodell is logging, that was basically robbing all their wealth.
Some of the trees, these are 2,000-year-old cedars, Sitka spruce.
Some of them have a value on the stump of $20,000, and McMillan Blodell is strip-mining them.
And then sending them over to Osaka with the bark still on them, too.
It was insane.
And making hundreds of millions of dollars.
All the people who own those trees sat by and watched, and we were able to Win that litigation, and then I assisted in the treaty negotiations that ultimately gave the right to that tribe to the timber that was on their land.
And it put McMillan Bladel out of business.
And then I ended up doing a lot of work on treaties and dam projects.
The Puente Indians in Chile represented five tribes in Ecuador, or seven tribes, a group called Confederation of Amazon tribes, and litigating against Texaco and Chevron and Petro-Ecuador about pollution in the Eastern Oriente, that part of the Amazon.
And I went to war at that point with the environmental movement because The Indians wanted to have some development on their lands, and the environmentalists said, no, we don't want anything.
We need to keep it forever wild.
And I ended up feeling like the people who lived on that land had a right to economic development, and they were very conscientious about the environment.
But the environmentalists took the position that there should be no development whatsoever.
And I ended up becoming, you know, in a kind of fist fight with a lot of my friends in the environmental movement because I was representing the Indians groups in their interests.
Oh, I represented Pequots up in Manitoba and fighting tar sands and, you know, many, many.
I represented the Ramapo Indians in New Jersey.
We won a landmark case against pollution by Ford Motor Company, and I don't want to make this podcast all about my record, and I've already talked too long, but I just want to, you know, I want to welcome my guests, and I've spent some time with you, Chairman Keyes, and, you know, David, I'd like to start with you because I don't know you at all.
But, you know, I've worked on some of the energy development issues, stopping traditional extractive industries on Indian land and figuring out how we can do sustainable development on the land.
So tell us a little bit about your story, because that's what you do.
Sure.
Sure.
My name is Dave Harper.
I'm a member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes located in Parker, Arizona.
I am a Mojave Indian.
I've worked in the utility environment for the past 10 years.
And actually, you know, one of the issues that we have is that, is exactly what you're talking about, is how do we maintain our traditional footprint of traditional cultural values while looking for economic development and looking for betterment of our people?
And how do we do that?
And so, you know, a lot of the tribes, they see this as grandma needs her utility bill reduced.
She's spending too much money.
But what we don't realize is that when utilities scale a solar or energy comes into the tribe, It isn't just impacting the small elderly people.
It affects the region.
It affects the state.
It affects the utility.
And it affects even the region of the Western world.
Because we're taking from the utility.
And there's a lot of animosity between the tribe and the utilities.
I work across the country.
On the utility scale, on microgrids for tribes.
And we're finding that nobody told the utility that the tribes are wanting to develop their own energy.
And that a lot of it has to do with the tariff tax that are being imposed by FERC. Even though the transmission lines are on tribal land, the tribes are still being taxed tariff to be in the queue On their own land while they're waiting to develop their utility-scale facilities.
And so there's a lot of inconsistency.
And even though there's a lot of money in the last administration gave billions of dollars for tribes, It's like dangling a carrot in front of them because the feasibility studies to get to the next area aren't covered.
So tribes having to pay $200,000, $300,000 for feasibility studies to get to the huge amount of money that are being allocated for tribes is impossible.
So the tribes aren't able to move their projects that they're proposing.
And so a lot of them are just stopping.
And a lot of them just aren't completing the process.
And that's one of the things that we've been seeing in Indian country is that the lack of two things.
The lack of the tribes' ability to be engineers.
There's no, you know, tribes don't have electrical engineers that That look at these huge projects.
And the second one is the inability of them to find the finances to get the feasibility studies to go to the next level.
It's like you can have all this money, but the road or the map says that you have to have X amount of money as you move along in the feasibility studies that the tribes don't have.
That really stymies the tribe.
But yet, the tribe still is looking for economic dependence to create a better economic, social outcome for their people.
So how do we do that?
How do we move?
How do we understand that the administration needs to help the tribe even more so than where we're at today?
Well, it doesn't make any sense to dangle that money at the tribes without providing them the little tiny bit of money that they need to do a feasibility study.
To make sure that all the questions you have to ask when you develop these alternative energy, wind, how often does the wind blow?
Are you going to be able to justify the investment in the turbine?
Wind turbines can bring in huge amounts of money, an acre of corn in the western states.
We'll yield a couple hundred dollars a year, an acre of corn with a wind turbine on it.
It's worth about $8,000 in revenue a year.
They can produce huge amounts of revenue and allow these tribes And solar energy, many of the tribes are in areas that are perfect for solar energy.
They're high altitude.
They have 300, 320, 330 days of sunlight a year.
And many of them are near enough utility lines that they can hook into existing utility lines.
But then there's all these other questions about, can the line transport the electrons efficiently?
Is there room in the line?
Is the utility going to let you on the line?
What price is the utility going to pay you for that power?
Is there net metering?
Are they going to give you the same deal that they give the other utilities?
And all of these are questions.
because I need to be answered before you can get financing.
And if you can't answer those basic questions, then it's all an illusion.
That big money that the Biden administration gave to the tribe, supposedly, is illusory if you can't answer the basic questions.
You can't draw up a business plan, essentially.
David, I'm grateful for you working on that, and I know that you have been successful with a lot of these projects.
Jacob, Chairman Keyes, can you talk a little bit about your experience as an entrepreneur?
Yeah, so, you know, we did.
We started Skydance Brewing Company here in Oklahoma City back in 2018, and I left a long career running casinos from my tribe here in Oklahoma to go start my own business, but really also to kind of be an example for Other Native entrepreneurs,
people in our community who always wanted to start a business, but they didn't necessarily see themselves as being capable or able to do that because, like me, growing up poor, where do I come up with a million dollars to start a business?
I never thought that was even possible.
And so I want to be somebody that our Native youth and other people can see and say, oh, somebody like me I've lived their dream and started a business.
And so through that journey of creating my business, that's really where a lot of our people in our tribe thought that we could use somebody like that in leadership.
And so they asked me to serve as vice chairman first in a temporary status when we had a vacancy.
And so I stepped in.
And then, of course, that sucks you in.
And they talked me into running for chairman.
And so I won.
And here we are, and I'm glad you're talking about the energy stuff, because when we met a couple weeks ago or whatever, we didn't really get to talk about one of our issues, and you brought up the wind turbines.
And so, you know, that's an interesting topic for us, for our tribe, because we have what's called the Gray Snow Eagle House.
So our tribe, we're the Bako Jay people, which is Gray Snow people.
And so we named the Eagle Aviary.
It's called the Gray Snow Eagle House.
We rescue these eagles.
Some of them will live there forever.
Some of them will be rehabbed there and set free.
But we go out and we get a call and there's an eagle hurt somewhere and the number of these birds Which to our people and to most of the tribes, eagles are sacred.
And they're extremely important to us, which is the whole reason we started the aviary.
But these turbines, a lot of times, they kill a lot of eagles.
And so we're currently in a battle in our area.
We're fighting a couple companies who are trying to come in and put turbines all around our tribal land.
And unfortunately for us, that means if they're successful and they put those in, then we won't be able to release our eagles in that area anymore, which would be detrimental because we try to put them back where they came from.
We try to put them back in the area where they were injured and where we picked them up at.
And so we're trying to lead other stuff, you know, solar projects and other green energy projects.
But then, again, our U.S. government kind of gets in our way because they think they have to tell us how to handle our own money, our own grant money and stuff.
We were awarded a grid resiliency grant and the initial wording in the grant said that we could partner with a utility and put the grant to work.
And then after we got the grant money, they changed the wording to say we shall partner with a utility.
And so basically we end up, they want us to hand over the money to one of these utilities, we pay the match, and we pay for the feasibility, we do all the stuff, and it really benefits that utility company.
So I testified in front of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and we thought that went great.
And then we got word back, you know, two weeks ago that they're not going to change that wording.
And so we have this grant money sitting there that we may not be able to use because it's not enough to do a big project with the utility.
So, again, like David was talking about, now you have money that doesn't get utilized or, you know, we don't have the capability.
We don't have our own utility company, so we don't have the ability to utilize these millions of dollars.
And so we're hoping that We have a president that can come in and be an ally to the tribes and help to change some of that stuff.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I've watched this for my whole life.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which, you know, from the outset was supposed to be helping economic development, nutrition, all of these issues, and they've become a captured agency.
They were captured from the beginning by You know, by really literally a long line of crooks that was even the ones, the few, the tiny handful that were well-intentioned did nothing good on an Indian country.
Many of them just use the BIA to strip wealth and equity away from the Indians, to poison them with bad food, to steal their wealth.
The BIA has never in its history functioned properly.
Really, it's a disgrace to our country.
It's been a thorn in my side for my entire life.
When I get in the White House, I'm going to change the whole culture at BIA and turn it back to what it was supposed to do, which is to do economic development and good care in Indian country.
Let me jump in.
You guys are bringing up amazing points.
Just from the start, to talk about Indian country is so complex, so varied.
There's more than 550 tribes.
And each of them is trying to develop their own potentials.
You know, we don't like the idea that Indians receive handouts or that tribal nations receive handouts or that we don't pay taxes.
You know, there's some basic perceptions in America about tribal nations, but tribal nations have always stepped up to the plate, signed treaties with the United States and said, look it, we want to protect each other.
We want to Be friends with the United States and throughout all of the history of activism and the end of treaty making, the Indian Citizenship Act, it gets convoluted.
And then in 1934, that is the last time that the federal apparatus took a very hard look at whether or not the policies of Indian country were working.
And in 1934, They passed the Indian Reorganization Act, which created the tribal councils as we know them today, the modern tribal councils.
But it ended the Indian allotment era, which resulted in a lot of land theft, 90 million acres.
And it ended what is euphemistically called the boarding school era, where languages, cultures were completely erased.
And you see that even now with the violations of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
There's just There's so much facing us.
And to hear Mr.
Harper speak about renewable energy, sometimes these tribes like Bobby came up to Standing Rock and witnessed the Army Corps of Engineers, which they had flooded us out under the Flood Control Act of 1944.
In 1958, my mom and my grandmother, they would be called an ethnic cleansing today.
They were removed from the most fertile grounds on the Missouri River.
This happened to like seven different tribes.
In some cases, look at all the tribes in the Northwest.
All the dams that Bonneville Power built, you know, not just the Army Corps, but the salmon runs that were impacted and ended.
And you see some of it being healed today.
Sometimes there's preferential access for tribes that there's a case to be made there.
Bobby, you talk a lot about...
One thing I find amazing is that you see us.
We don't have to convince you that, hey, we're human beings, we're your friends, and we want to build.
Yeah, are we going to agree on everything?
Obviously not.
But one of the items that you speak on and that you have experiences with Is the state of health in Indian Country, the diabetes challenges, the nutrition challenges, and the need for healing.
We've been subjected to a colonial process that has damaged us.
And some of us, you know, find different ways to cope, but we need recovery farms.
I know you talked about recovery farms.
There's a lot that Indian Country needs, but first, we just need a friend.
We need somebody who's been with us, somebody who's seized us, somebody that we don't have to convince that we should be partners.
But I just wanted to say those remarks and kick it back to you.
Yeah, and you know, you and I have talked a lot about this, about the health of the Indian country.
During COVID, the American Indians were the number one group in the world in COVID deaths, and more COVID deaths per population than any group in the world, and they were...
You know, they were incentivized greater than any population in the world to take the vaccine.
And some of the tribes, they were given $1,000 bonuses to take the vaccine.
Many of the tribes, many of the reservations, it was 100% compliance with vaccine.
And so why did we have the highest vaccination rate in the world and the highest death rate in the world in Indian country?
And, you know, clearly one of the reasons for that is that the people who are dying from COVID and from the vaccine were people who had chronic disease.
And the chronic disease rate on their reservations is the highest in the world.
Some of these reservations have 70% diabetes rate, obesity rates, asthma rates.
All of these, you know, these chronic...
CDC said...
The average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases.
It's hard to find an Indian today who doesn't have 3.8 chronic diseases because the chronic disease epidemic has wiped out the tribes, and a lot of that is because they're being mass poisoned by bad food.
What we call white death on the Indian Reservations called white death, white sugar, white flour, white grease, grisco.
And those things are like arsenic to Native Americans.
And yet, you know, I was with, I went, I represented, we have a lot of river keepers, a group that I founded who are Natives.
And one of them runs Black Mesa Waterkeeper, which is down, we're fighting Peabody Mine down in the Navajo and Ohopie Reservations.
And Ohopie buddy of mine, and I'm not going to tell his name is Howard, but he helps run that organization.
He was up on there.
We ran the Yampa River together, and I was with Mark Hyman, who's one of the world's greatest experts on alternative medicine and human health.
He was an advisor to President Clinton, etc.
We went on a long hike one day up to look at some of the petroglyphs, the ancient petroglyphs.
And on the way down, Howard was vomiting the whole way down.
And we got back to the raft, and Mark said, you know, why are you vomiting?
And he said, because when I exert myself because of my diabetes, it caused me to vomit.
Mark said, well, you know, you can cure diabetes with food.
Just by changing your diet, you can cure it.
And Howard was very interested.
He said, how do I do that?
And he said, well, you've got to eliminate flour.
You've got to eliminate white flour, white sugar, and white grease.
And Howard said, I can't do that.
And Mark said, why?
And he said, because those are all your sacred foods.
And Mark said to him, what are your sacred foods?
And he said, they're cookies and biscuits and cakes.
That's what we eat when we have a ceremony.
And Mark said to him, that's not your sacred foods.
These are foods that were imposed upon the tribes.
And that, you know, it's an illusion to think that it is death.
There's a reservation, a Pima reservation, Arizona, New Mexico.
It is the sickest group of people in our country.
They have a, among the US Pimas, the average lifespan, the average lifespan of 47 years, 80 years ago, these were the healthiest people in our country.
They had an 80-year lifespan.
They were slim.
There was zero diabetes.
There was zero asthma.
There was no chronic disease.
And they were among the most long-lived Americans.
If you go across the border into Mexico, that's how they look today.
The Pimas in Mexico lived to 70 or 80 years old.
They have no diabetes.
They have no obesity.
They have no asthma.
Right across that little fake line, the Mexican border, the Pimas on the north of that border are the sickest people in the world.
And it's because in Mexico, they're eating their traditional foods.
In our country, they're being mass poisoned by white death.
And so, you know, this is a genocide.
This is the final act of the Indian genocide, which is you take the people who are now the poorest, the highest unemployment, alcoholism rates, suicide rates, you take those people who are already besieged by all of these other, you know, social attacks and cultural attacks and, you know, poverty.
And you then besiege them with poisoned food.
That is going to kill them.
Everybody is going to die from it.
Nobody, you know, and that's what's happening on the reservation.
And I would say, beyond any other priority, you know, one of the things I'm going to do as president, I'm going to end that.
I'm going to tell people you can't be eating, you know, the food stamps.
10% of food stamps are used for sugar drinks or sodas, which is just pure poison.
We shouldn't allow that.
We're poisoning not just natives, but the entire country.
And it's feeding this obesity epidemic.
It's feeding all the chronic disease.
And I'm going to end that, but I'm going to start on the reservations by, you know, by making sure we know how to, these kids, teaching these kids how to be healthy and, you know, make it so that the companies that provide this poison food to them, that they can be held accountable in court, are poisoning people, because they know it's poison.
Definitely want to leave room for David or Chairman Keyes, if you guys have any questions.
You know, it's a broad discussion about Native policy in general, and it's so big.
This is a semester's minimum worth of kind of digging into what are some concerns, and we've heard about extraction and infrastructure.
You know, the building of dams, the building of a cobalt refinery down by Lawton, Oklahoma, same thing is happening at Thacker Pass.
There's a renewable culture being propagated and that's good.
We certainly need to address the fossil fuel incentives over the last, you know, since the industrial age.
But we have to be truthful about this because tribal nations...
We sit on maybe 1% of our former land holdings, but we're more than 20% of all the critical resource minerals that are underneath America.
So when we talk about mining and extraction and development, some tribes are okay with that.
Others want to be consulted.
They want consent.
Some, like the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the reason why almost a thousand people got arrested during the Dakota Access Pipeline fight is because the corporation was trying to run roughshod over indigenous rights, over indigenous treaty rights, clean water rights, were facing times of drought, climate crisis.
The list...
Is long.
And tribal sovereignty presents a peculiar kind of vehicle to, I feel, I've been trying to do this my whole career, is link tribal sovereignty with constitutional rights.
Natural rights, birth rights, human rights of American people.
Because we are fighting the same corporation.
One of the reasons why I jumped to Bobby's side is because Bobby's a fighter already.
Who's attacking Bobby?
Big Pharma.
Big agriculture, big extraction.
The war complex is attacking Bobby.
I mean, Native people sign up at highly disproportionate numbers to serve our great country.
That's how we gain citizenship in 1924.
After World War I, America saw that we volunteered the highest among any demographic.
Same in World War II. Same in every single conflict that we've been in, we've been fighting on the side of the United States of America.
And even before that, we were fighting, you know what I mean?
Like for the colonial wars and so forth.
So it is so broad.
But one thing I want to draw attention to is recently the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was instituted in 1978 as a result of the Native Renaissance.
And, you know, on the spring, on the back of The anti-war movement, the civil rights movement.
Native nations have always been seen as tribal nations, as distinct political entities.
Now, the law currently states that tribal nations are domestic-dependent nations, which is an oxymoron, but the lawsuit that challenged the Indian Child Welfare Act, which allows Federal courts, state courts, it dictates to them that they should be returning jurisdiction to tribal nations so the native family unit can survive.
This law was being violated by states like South Dakota.
Everywhere there's native people.
And Brackeen It was a suit that tried to extinguish this distinct political designation for tribal nations and say that Indians are only a race of citizenry who only have civil rights, which is just, it's not true.
It's not consistent with a couple of centuries of United States law.
And it's something that we need to be aware of in terms of the challenges that we're facing as Native people because we want to strengthen Tribal sovereignty.
We don't want to weaken tribal sovereignty.
But there's so many flashpoints.
Sometimes you have confrontational state governors and so forth.
So I want to provide those comments and leave the tribal leaders an opportunity to comment on those.
Yeah, I would say is that a couple things.
One is regarding tribal sovereignty and regarding who we are as Indian people in consultation and all the gamuts that happen at the federal level is that our elders always had said is that we are a religious people.
We have a religious base and we believe in our Creator.
And when the U.S. government finally understands that and gives us that respect and dignity of the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church, all the other churches, Native people have to have that same respect.
If you went into our grave and you dug up our people, you'd go to jail.
Or we'd go to jail if we did that to your graveyard, but you do that to ours, there is no respect.
There's no understanding that that is a religious perspective of our people and how we put away our dead and how we put away our ceremonies for those people.
And so when industry or anybody else comes to our land and they do exactly what happened in North Dakota is it's disrespectful because we're a religious base and that religion is not being honored and it's not being respected and we're less than.
But when we get to that point where we are recognized in the same religious perspective as all the other religions Then we can talk.
Then we have a foothold of where we're at together.
Then we're looked at as human beings that have a spirit, mind, and body that is religiously looked at as people.
And so, you know, that's how I look at things when I see things that...
When industry or the government comes, treat us like human beings that are spiritually based as anybody else because we are equal and that we have ties and meaningfulness to the land.
And we've been here since time immemorial.
We've died here.
Every inch of our reservation in our traditional homeland is where we put away our people and we go home.
We go home to our land.
And so That's how I see it.
It is so complicated, but yet so simple in our mind as Indian people.
I always think how the elders would simplify life, and that's all it is.
It's just simple living our life and who we are.
Yeah, you know, I agree with a lot of what David's saying.
You know, one of the things is when the sovereignty, when that idea of sovereignty is not understood by our legislators, by our politicians, you know, especially even more so like on a state level here.
So we battle with the governor here who's constantly attacking our sovereignty.
We have state legislators.
They don't understand what sovereignty is.
And like Chase was saying, they think of us as a race and not not so much as sovereign nations, as people who have treaties signed with the U.S. government.
And so some of that education, educating people and legislators around how the sovereignty works and why that exists would really help our cause a lot.
But when we talk about the health issues earlier, too, so when our lands are being taken away, that kind of stuff keeps us from being able to do the economic development that we want to do.
And when you have a lack of economic development that creates poverty, Those are the things that lead to a poor diet.
Many of our people, they're not eating food as a medicine or a way to treat their body.
They're eating food just to have something to eat, just to put something in their bellies.
We've got to figure out how we can switch that mindset, that poverty mindset to a success mindset and allow our people to live the way we used to live.
When we met before, Bobby, you mentioned that I think you might have said earlier, too, is that before colonization, we didn't have diabetes.
We didn't have...
These health effects that our tribes are dealing with right now.
It wasn't until we got introduced to all these things that you're talking about, the white death.
And so I think we just got to really focus on the federal government, state governments, and helping us continue to hold on to that sovereignty.
Let us develop economic power within our tribes and our reservations so that we can start to educate and teach our people the healthy way to live.
And so I really appreciate, Bobby, you pushing that message and changing that You know, idea of what food is and what health looks like.
You know what's interesting to me, talking about sovereignty, my family was part of the Civil Rights Movement, or African Americans, and my uncle and father partnered with Dr.
King and played a critical role in making this country a true constitutional democracy for the first time in its history.
Prior to them, there was a whole race of citizens who were not allowed to participate in American democracy, who were prevented from exercising their vote through official corruption and unofficial intimidation designed to deprive them of their right to vote.
And as a result of not being able to vote, they also couldn't use public transportation or Public parks or water fountains.
They were put in segregated prisons and mental hospitals.
Every aspect of their lives was segregated, just second-class citizens.
My parents were also conscious that there had been a genocide of the American Indian.
And that they were the poorest people in our country, and that their rights, the sovereign rights that they had agreed to, that we had not kept our word.
America had not kept its word with its treaties.
My mother, after my father's death, My mother went and spent a week out at Alcatraz when the American Indian Movement took over Alcatraz Island and it was sort of the launch of this renaissance to reclaim rights of sovereignty for Native American tribes.
But my father also, my father during The three months he announced as president in March of 1968.
And then he died three months later in June, June 6th of 1968.
During that three months period, he made 70 different stops on his campaign.
Of those 70, 10 of them were on Indian reservations.
Well, this was a huge priority of his.
And when he visited The Pine Ridge Reservation, he came back and told us he met a woman on that reservation who was present at Custer's Last Stand.
Imagine that, you know, a 20th century politician in the latter half of this 20th century meets a woman who was present at Little Bighorn when Custer was killed.
Because the whole Sioux Nation was gathered there.
And she was a little girl in a teepee at that point.
But that was 1876.
And so my father was campaigning, you know, 92 years later.
And this woman had been maybe a four-year-old girl at that point.
Or a six-year-old girl.
But it's really kind of extraordinary to me, even when I was a kid.
Oh, you met somebody who was at Custer's Last Stand.
Well, Custer's Last Stand happened because the U.S. government violated the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which was signed exactly 100 years before my father was killed in 1868.
And that was the treaty with the Sioux tribe, which is one of the biggest tribes in our country.
I think the second biggest after the Navajo.
But that That was a treaty that said that the Black Hills and a lot of other land will be owned by the Sioux, that nobody else can use it.
As long as the grass is green, as long as the rain drops from the clouds, as long as there is water in the streams, that land, nobody can take it from you.
Eight years after that, gold was discovered in the Black Hills.
And Custer was sent to take the Black Hills away from the zoo in violation of the Treaty of Fort Laramie.
So this is what happened to all the treaties.
And I love the point that Chase made about the Indians were forced onto 1% of their former lands.
And they were the worst lands.
They were the lands that everybody thought, okay, this land has no value to anybody.
We don't want it, so we're going to let the Indians keep it.
As it turns out, 100 years later, that land, by dumb luck, is the land where all the rare earth minerals are, all the cobalt and, you know, the lithium and all of these, and the gold and the silver.
And so now the corporations want that land, and they're doing the same thing.
That happened when they found gold in the Black Hills and they had to violate all the treaties and say, oh, sovereignty doesn't exist anymore.
Our nation, if it's going to live up to its ideals, has to show that it can be trusted with full faith and credit.
When it gives its word, it's going to keep it.
And its word was that these are sovereign nations That they have to be dealt with as sovereign nations, that they have rights, and that the United States, even when it's convenient to our big corporations, that those rights have to be recognized, and that the Indians have to be not just consultants, but they have the ultimate decision about what's going to happen on their land.
That's never happened.
So my presidency is going to be the first presidency where that actually happens.
And I want to thank all of you for being here.
Chase, thanks for putting this together.
Chairman Jacob Keys, thank you for joining us.
And David Harper, thanks for bringing us up to date on green energy development on native lands.
Thank you to all of you.
Thank you, guys.
Thank you very much.
Are there ways to support you guys?
Are there websites?
Can I ask you to talk about your website, about how listeners can support you or find you?
Yeah, we have a website.
It's called 7Skyline.
We put stuff on there.
We also put stuff on 7Skyline on LinkedIn.
We have a pretty good following.
So hopefully we can get a copy of this and put it on.
We've been linked with Department of Energy and Indian Energy Programs.
And then we serve actually 80 tribes across from Alaska, Hawaii, out to Maine, to Florida.
So we've been working on reservations and we got a pretty good following from them.
Good for you and German geese.
IowaNation.org.
That's our tribe's website.
And from there, you can find a link to our Gray Snow Eagle House.
So that's, you know, the more awareness we can bring to our eagle aviary, the better.
And hopefully people can start to see, you know, the reasons why we would fight against these turbines is to try to protect these birds.
Thank you very much.
And Chase, they can find you at Chase at teamkennedy.com.
Chase at teamkennedy.com or Chase Iron Eyes on the social channels.
And if I could take a couple minutes, I want to make a brief statement.
That hearing you guys speak, what comes to my mind is that treaty rights are constitutional rights.
Article 6 says treaties are the supreme law of the land.
Well, I've seen Mr.
Kennedy fight time and again to protect the constitutional rights of all Americans.
Our right to free speech.
Our right to be free from illegal searches and seizures.
Our property rights and all the businesses that were shut down.
And everybody who's still...
We're suffering and reeling from those times.
So we are set to defend ourselves against corporate aggression.
I see it happening.
I see the immunity of President Trump being discussed and permitted at the Supreme Court.
Now, there's more to discuss there.
I see the Chevron deference rule being gutted in opening up America's National parks and sacred waters.
That's one thing that we're connecting on, is 325 million Americans visit national parks.
Well, national parks are the places of our worship.
You know, these hold sacred sites, and we want to share the depth and the substance of who we are with America.
Now, Bobby and I, Mr.
Kennedy and I have, with the help of my uncle and other tribal leaders, are developing a Native New Deal.
To completely overhaul and reconstruct the trust relationship.
You know, it comes from a place of respect.
Like I said before, we don't have to convince Bobby that we're his partners.
He's already there.
And we just want to join you on that front line, Bobby.
And I wanted to say that for the benefit of the record here.
Thank you very much, Chase.
Thank you all for joining us, Chairman Keyes, David Harper.
Chase Iron Eyes, and thank you to all of you for your leadership and entrepreneurship and green energy and in justice.
Very grateful to all of you.
▲
Export Selection