In 1988 Texas Congressman Ron Paul ran for President on the Libertarian Party Ticket. The man he narrowly defeated for the nomination, Russell Means, was a Lakota Native American rights activist who had been involved in the symbolic occupation of Alcatraz island in 1969 as a protest against the treatment of Native Americans in the US. Russell was also one of the leaders of an independence movement for his tribe, which was declared in 2007 as a sovereign republic outside of the United States. Today we will tell the story of the Lakota and their struggle for autonomy against imperialism.

The Lakota tribe were a large and thriving community of horseback buffalo hunters who had settled in the Black Hills of what is now North and South Dakota in the late 18th century. Their conflicts with neighboring tribes had given them a strong position on the Great Plains by the time the United States started to expand westward, blocking the American Explorers Lewis and Clark during their transcontinental journey. Western expansion had increased friction between the two civilizations and the 1851 Fort Laramie treaty was drawn up to avert open conflict. However, the Lakota attacked illegal settlements on their lands, and between 1854 and 1855 a series of bloody massacres occurred between the US Army and the Lakota, the American forces killing many native women and children with artillery. This continued into the 1860s and morphed into Red Cloud’s War which ended in a rare American defeat, with the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie recognizing the lands of the Lakota and their allies the Cheyenne and Arapaho as their sovereign soil and promising not to allow settlers to encroach on them. You can probably guess that this did not last too long, and the main cause was the discovery of Gold in the Black Hills, the sacred homeland of the Lakota. President Ulysses S. Grant refused to maintain the treaty stipulations as gold prospectors flooded into the territory to make their fortunes and so in 1876 the Great Sioux War began. This was the war of the Battle of Little Bighorn, a major defeat for the American imperial army, but it was followed by too many more costly defeats for the united Great Plains tribes, and their leaders surrendered in 1877 and the United States formally annexed the Black Hills. Part of the American strategy against the Natives was the eradication of the buffalo herds they depended on for survival.

Thus began the life of the Lakota under American subjugation. Even the reservations promised by the United States Government dwindled in size against the onslaught of American settlers to the Black Hills. Old chief Sitting Bull, the leader of the Sioux War, was killed by American police in 1890 for resisting arrest over government fears he was inciting a rebellion through his religious advocacy. This killing set off the infamous Wounded Knee Massacre which saw hundreds of Native men, women and children killed by the US government forces. The Lakota suffered not only under Government neglect, creating a dependent society where the traditional food source of the buffalo was replaced by government deliveries, but also by American tinkering with Indian society. The Roosevelt administration was especially interested in reconstituting the reservation as an experiment in central planning, as progressives at the time saw the native social structure as a primordial form of socialism. John Collier, FDR’s head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, abolished private property within reservations, passing all decisions on the economy of the reservation to the elders councils. Most tribes organized in this way (some are lucky enough to at least have casinos), have suffered unrelenting poverty and terrible social conditions, alcoholism, single parent households, the whole 9 yards. As a reaction to the injustice of reservation life and the whole sordid history of American-Native relations, a protest group calling itself Indians of All Tribes came to the former prison island of Alcatraz in 1969. Their goal was to occupy and claim the territory, recently unoccupied, as sovereign native land. While unsuccessful, this was followed by other high profile activism such as taking over the Mayflower II commemorative reproduction in 1970, and the 1973 Wounded Knee standoff. The US again violently dispersed the armed natives in Wounded Knee, although this time with less (“only” two) deaths. Russell Means was involved in all of these actions, taking a leading role in Mayflower II and Wounded Knee. Unlike many native activists, he saw libertarianism, with its conception of unbridled individual rights and decentralization as a preferable alternative to the leftism of many national liberation movements. His involvement with libertarian politics did not end in 1988, as he would endorse his old rival Ron Paul in the 2012 Republican primaries before his death in October of that Year.

The displacement of the Native American is one of the most widespread and tragic chapters in modern history. Libertarians do not have to believe that Natives had the right to every square inch of North America to decry the methods of removing them from large swaths of the continent. The life of Russell Means was dedicated to the idea that Natives, like all people, deserve the right to self determination. The 2007 Declaration of independence by a handful of Lakota leaders like him is a defiant call to action for all those who believe in the freedom of all peoples. Long live the Republic of Lakota and may a thousand flowers bloom!