Opinion

Native Sun News Editorial: 'Free land' was taken from our ancestors

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Despite being promised to the Sioux Nation by treaty, the Black Hills in South Dakota were taken by the United States. Photo by Jerry and Pat Donaho

We saw the Statue of Liberty through the eyes of our ancestors
By Native Sun News Editorial Board
nsweekly.com

One often sees cartoons about American Indians sitting on a hill overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and watching a ship unloading the Pilgrims at Jamestown. The caption usually says something about how we (Indians) ought to tighten up our immigration laws.

The print at the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor reads:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses, yearning to breath free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

The text of the poem was taken from a longer poem called “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, a Jewish immigrant from Germany. She argued for a Jewish Homeland 13 years before Theodore Herzl started to use the term “Zionism.”

The statue was a gift from France to the United States and was dedicated on October 28, 1886.

As immigrants from around the world began to converge on the United States the first thing they saw as they landed at Ellis Island was the Statue of Liberty. And as immigrants they were offered what the United States called “free land” out West. The land was granted under the Homestead Acts which were several United States federal laws that gave an applicant ownership of land, typically called a "homestead,” at little or no cost. In all, more than 270 million acres of public land, or nearly 10% of the total area of the U.S., was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders; most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River.

The land may have been free land to the immigrants, but to American Indians, it was a massive theft of Indians lands now claimed by the United States government. South and North Dakota were settled mostly by Scandinavian and German immigrants on lands that once belonged to the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people.

As always, the USA meant well, at least it meant well for the immigrants, but again, as always little care or concern went out to the American Indians.

The ensuing conflicts occurred because the new settlers were infringing upon the sacred lands of a people. What Indian lands not handed to the immigrants was confiscated by further acts of Congress and by outright theft.

When some of us (Indians) had the opportunity to see the Statue of Liberty for the first time, we saw it through far different eyes than the immigrants that landed at Ellis Island. Those were not tears of joy that ran down our cheeks, but tears of immense sorrow. We saw the statue through the eyes of our ancestors.