It is never anachronistic. I saw a beautiful example of it recently on Black Amazon’s blog – she had been attacked, was really wounded and in tears, and was still blogging and carrying on. That was the warrior spirit, more than resignation and survival; she was still fighting.

In this context, a lot of Lakota men have continued in that same spirit – dealing with the present with as much dignity and stoicism as they can muster. Quite a percentage are literally warriors; they are disproprotionately veterans.

One of the very best explanations of the warrior spirit is in the Bhagavad Gita, which BTW has become the new trendy thing in the Army’s officer corps I hear, now that most people have the art of War under their belt.

Robert, I think almost every part of Mongolia is beautiful. It’s just a real hard place to make a living. The same is true of the Great Plains. Without bison there is basically nothing there. Wheat farming is not a real sustainable option. And I agree

The warrior spirit, whether possessed by white man or red, is a permanent inheritance of the human race. And thank God for it, because without it, we’d all be buffalo fodder. That may suit you; peace be unto you. It does not suit me.

The starkness of the landscape in the Dakotas was striking when I visited as a boy. Even now it wouldn’t be much to take possession of. And your comment on the humiliating collapse of the warrior spirit might be a bit uncharitable, considering what an anachronism that way of life is in the modern world.

The Lakota’s ancestral lands are in Minnesota, not out on the plains. The Ojibwa kicked them out when they got French firearms and became a powerful militarily back in the 1700’s. The lands you are speaking of belonged ancestrally in the east to the Plains Apache, who are extinct now at the hands of the Lakota, and in the west the land belonged to the Absaroka. The Lakota occupied these lands for perhaps 150 years before the whites defeated them.

At the time the Lakota were pushing west into Absaroka territory and south into Pawnee territory, which is why those two nations allied with the US. Now they are crying that someone succeeded at doing what they were attempting, pushing people off the Great Plains and replacing them with new people. So now there are Germans on land the Lakota tried to take away from the Absaroka and did take away from the Plains Apache.

Windtalon has a point about the legitmacy of this attempt to repudiate the treaties, even if his description of the censorship – I don’t exactly what he means, but it may be a reference to someone taking the site down – is a little flambouyant. What would an actual war against the Lakota look like?

The point is that if this group can talk around the others, that is democracy in action. What next? The lands the Lakota hold at present are disjunct, but that is a matter of jusrisdiction, not ownership, and if jusrisdiction is what is being re-negotiated, they coul concievably draw some kind of boundaries that made sense. It’s not as if whites are not leaving the Plains in droves and have been for decades; after all the palce has all the charm of Mongolia. No wonder the Lakota are so impoverished.

On the other hand, what would their bargaining position be. It’s not as if they have much leverage for a bargain. Are they just going to say what they think justice would be? What a humiliation, that what used to be a nation of warriors should be in a position to beg for justice with nothing to back it up.