Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights

June 5, 2010

Lakotah Republic Ambassador: Gaza and Lakota share history of occupation and concentration camps

By David Sugar
Official statement of the ambassador of the provisional government of the Republic of Lakotah on the Gaza flotilla
Photo Massacre at Wounded Knee

Mitakuye Oyasin (to all my relations),

First, of course my deepest sympathies go out to those who have lost their lives to this act of criminal piracy, and to their families. I use the term piracy because when unarmed merchant vessels are fired upon, boarded, and hijacked in international waters, this most clearly falls under the definition of piracy. Those who choose to stand up and defend themselves in the face of this criminal action should be praised for their courage, not condemned for their legitimate acts of self defense. Furthermore, I would seek those responsible for this criminal act of piracy to be both identified and fully
prosecuted under international law.

I am pleased that so many peace loving and humanitarian nations have expressed their outrage at this crime. Naturally the people of Lakota are deeply concerned, as our nation has over 150 years of experience with what it means to be held in forced captivity under occupation of a hostile and ruthless foreign colonial power in concentration camps called reservations, with experiencing the murder of our people through massacres and extra-judicial killings, with the forced removal and killing of our children in their boarding schools, with our beliefs and practices outlawed, and with the constant seizure of our lands. As a humanitarian nation we are deeply concerned when any of these kinds of things happen elsewhere, and in this shared experience we do find some common understanding of the suffering of the people of Palestine.

I further assert as a fundamental principle of international justice that in fact the duty of an occupying nation to a captive population is actually greater than to it's own people since even in the best of circumstances a captive people do not have the freedom to choose or change the government ruling over them or even to make basic choices about how they would live, something presumably the people occupying them enjoy. The blockade of Gaza, a criminal act of collectively punishing a people as a whole, must be ended.

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