by Eva van Loon

Last month, Lakota Indians visited Washington to inform the powers that be, politely, that they are seceding from the USA.

Seceding. As in leaving. No longer a part of.

The Lakota, it appears, want to be themselves. Their aboriginal selves.

Imagine Sliammon telling Ottawa politely that they are withdrawing from Confederation?

It gives a legally trained mind the willies.

In Canada, more so than in the US, many laws and regulations have been specifically designed to address First Nations’ concerns, affecting everything from wills to tax to custody. Would all that be swept away for a First Nation that opted out? If several First Nations opted out, would that defeat the SPP (Security and Prosperity Partnership) with the US?

The legal mind boggles.

The Lakota are famous resistors. The last Sioux to surrender, they were victims of the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890, and involved in the 71-day stand-off there in the seventies. Courted by Marxists during their fight against uranium mining on their lands in 1980, their best known spokesman, Russell Means, himself a lawyer, analysed Marxism, capitalism, leftism, and all the other isms as but verses of the same cultural song, whose essence is this: “that same old European conflict between being and gaining…. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is ‘proof that the system works’ to Europeans…. You cannot judge the real nature of a European revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposes to make within the European power structure and society. You can only judge it by the effects it will have on non-European peoples. This is because every revolution in European history has served to reinforce Europe’s tendencies and abilities to export destruction to other peoples, other cultures and the environment itself.”

Non-European peoples do not, and should not want to, take over European powers, Means said. To do so would perpetuate a system headed for inevitable disaster. The numbers of industrialisation can’t work, whatever ism we follow. Industrialisation means extinction.

Check the date on this speech—28 years ago. (Read it in full on our website.) Some hippies were then still back on the land, reading tattered copies of The Last Whole Earth Catalog in their outhouses, as the world seemed to have second thoughts about nuclear power, plastics, bras, ties, pantyhose, and the whole upwardly mobile rat race.

The Lakota apparently agree with the pundits that the good ship US Dollar is likely to sink soon to the bottom of the very sea it polluted. Huge crews of the middle class, chained to the ship by their impossible mortgages, McJobs, and their gas-guzzling commutes, can do little but hold their breath as long as possible as the economy founders.

True to their philosophy of resistance, the Lakota have chosen the Year of the Rat to leave the self-destructing ship of the economy behind. Will others follow?

What was that Chinese curse again? May you live in interesting times. Rats! We got ‘em.