The biggest advocates of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin are peoples who have felt stepped on their whole lives by the instruments of power; parents who beat, teachers who scold, psychiatrists who medicate, bosses who demand, police who arrest, priests who condemn and governments that control.

There are no greater victims of these instruments than indigenous peoples, and the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation are the first to invent a digital currency of their very own: MazaCoin, named after “mazaska,” the Lakota word for money.

Simply put, cryptocurrencies like MazaCoin are digital currencies generated by mathematical algorithms to control inflation instead of a mint. The MazaCoin project began last year under a team led by Native activist and developer Payu Harris in conjunction with the Oglala Sioux Tribe Office of Economic Development. MazaCoin is more centralized than other cryptocurrencies. It has a national reserve and planned tribal trust to combat speculation. It exists to benefit the three counties of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, some of the absolute poorest parts of the country.

Cryptocurrency has traditionally been seen as a means for individuals to trade across borders without interference from host governments. For a government like the Oglala Lakota Nation to mobilize cryptocurrency to trade within their borders against an outside government is unprecedented. Cryptocurrencies like MazaCoin threaten to undermine the imposed Western-dominated capitalist structure that has long trapped indigenous peoples in a cycle of poverty and exploitative violence.