(guest post) The sovereign Lakota people declare their monetary freedom, institute silver-based currency

The sovereign Lakota people declare their monetary freedom, institute silver-based currency

By Sean Jobst, 12 December 2010

The U.S. Dollar is declining at an astonishing rate. The debt continues to rise and so do prices. It’s simply becoming more expensive to live, yet goods are actually becoming qualitatively less valuable. The cruel reality of a monetary system based literally on creating something of no value out of thin air and calling it money, has become obvious to an increasing number of people.

To finance their operations, governments have been borrowing money from the bankers. It can be said with complete accuracy the financial elites possess real power, for they have control over the circulation of money.  Governments are in debt to the bankers, but the bill is passed down to the real producers of a society, who are the citizens. It is the common people who suffer through rising prices, paying more taxes, and losing their jobs and homes.

So it should come as no surprise that an increasing number of people are rejecting this orthodoxy of paper money, and are recognizing in contrast to the inherent pitfalls of paper money, the innumerable advantages of gold and silver. For those are resources existing naturally and have inherent value.

Even while more Americans are becoming awake to this reality, while the bi-metallic currency is actually being instituted in many places throughout the world. Yet the most significant change here is not to be found in its larger cities, but rather in the Plains. This is the phenomenon of a Lakota indigenous tribe that is reclaiming their sovereignty – and instituting a silver-based monetary system.

Who are the Lakota?

The Lakota are one divisions of the Sioux nation, the others being the Nakota and Dakota. The Lakota are a confederation of seven sub-tribes. The largest are the Oglala, who inhabit the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation of southwest South Dakota.

This current writer visited the Pine Ridge reservation and saw a society that has been impoverished by a continued colonial enforcement against them, as well as a federal government that continues to violate its own treaties and a local government who’s corruption knows no shame.

Yet this is unlike many other colonized peoples, for the Lakota were never defeated militarily. In all actuality, they successfully resisted all efforts by the U.S. to subjugate them. After the Lakota, along with the Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho, defeated the U.S. Army at Little Big Horn in 1876, the government then resorted to other means to subjugate the Lakota.

These included massacres such as the slaughter of over 150 Lakota at Wounded Knee in 1890; chemical warfare such as alcoholism, drug abuse and contaminating the water through uranium mining in the sacred Black Hills; and repeatedly violating its treaties with the Lakota, such as the Treaty of Ft. Laramie that was signed in 1868.

A sovereign people declare monetary freedom

Tired of this colonial enforcement and the U.S. government’s blatant violation of its own treaties, on December 17, 2007, a Lakota delegation went to Washington, D.C. and declared the treaties to be null and void, and due to this reasserted the freedom and sovereignty of the Lakota Oyate (people).

It gradually became more and more clear the key to actual freedom, in our society based so much on power and wealth talking, was to institute a monetary system of inherent value. On November 24, 2008, Lakota freedom activists announced the introduction of the world’s first non-reserve, non-fractional bank that would accept only silver and gold currency for deposit (http://www.freelakotabank.com/).

“Today is a great day for us, a day that we begin to exercise our rights as a sovereign people with strength and pride,” said Canupa Gluha Mani (Duane Martin, Sr.), Tetuwan Council Judicial Member of the 2500-member Cante Tenza (Strong Heart) Civil Rights Movement.

“We invite people of any creed, faith or heritage to unite in an effort to reclaim control of wealth. It is our hope that other tribal nations and American citizens recognize the importance of silver and gold as currency and decide to mirror our system of honest trade.”

Structure of the Bank of Lakota

The Bank of Lakota is part of the American Open Currency System(http://www.opencurrency.com/) of Dallas-based Rob Gray. The pure-silver Lakota Dollar is available through currency officers or “bulk orders.” This is designed to avoid their receiving worthless paper money in exchange for selling real wealth. A bulk order means 20 ounces (566.99 grams) of silver plus $5.25 is either to be physically delivered to the purchaser or left in deposit in their account with the Bank.

All deposits at the Bank of Lakota are liquid, which means it can be withdrawn at any time in minted rounds. The whole process is anonymous, as the Bank doesn’t track the names of its clients or the movements of their money. Duane Martin Sr. has rejected Social Security numbers as “prisoner numbers” and hence the Bank is committed to respecting the privacy of its clients unlike what occurs in the current financial structure. “Since we deal only in real money, we do not participate in any central bank looting schemes,” says the Bank’s website.

There is a two-tiered security. First a SSL Online username using a strong keystroke encryption program, and second an automatic phone call for the user to enter a PIN number. There is a preliminary period where the Federal Reserve notes are converted into metal. There is an inexpensive monthly fee for account maintenance, a 0.00005 service fee or 5 cents per thousand. Furthermore, there is a General Investment Fund that allows a waiver of investors’ maintenance fees and earns a current annual rate of return for the Fund of 7.24%.

Microloans and the “American Dream”

Although firmly rooted among the sovereign Lakota people, who have a living attachment to their land and their ancestors through language, the Bank of Lakota nevertheless exemplifies a worldwide trend towards micro-loans and separation from the fractional reserve banking system, which merely dwindles wealth through inflation and has meant giving away power to a small super-wealthy financial elite.

Microcredit is the extension of small microloans to poor people in order to spur an independent source of income through entrepreneurship and start-up businesses. It is a revolutionary idea perhaps first proposed by the American individualist anarchist Lysander Spooner for poor people to escape the clutches of the State and those financial interests that use it to exercise their money monopoly. In recent years the most well-known – and successful – microloan program is the Grameen Bank that was founded by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh.

The Bank of Lakota is a model designed to empower people into exercising their inherent power as free beings, by rejecting this paper that is merely a mortgage on wealth which doesn’t even exist and is then backed by the combined weight of State power and the monopoly of what American founding fathers and successive thinkers called “the moneyed interests.”

“We hope that someday the rest of the world will awaken from the American Dream: the dream that a person can sustain life by consuming more than producing,” the website continues.

“We call it the American Dream because you must be asleep to believe it. Well, that dream now has a silver lining; as people discover the dream is really a nightmare, the only solution is a return to value; value that comes from production and honest trade.”

A history of Indigenous money and trade

On July 2, 2010, the current writer had a lengthy conversation with Duane Martin, Sr. with the history and various facets of trade and money when it comes to the Indigenous nations of Turtle Island, the land now called by the colonial-derived term “North America.”

From the beginning, the European colonists relied on the knowledge of Native people to survive on this land. This included everything from their knowledge of plants and herbs for medicinal purposes to the use of Native forms of trade. The most well known was wampum, a clam shell money that due to being found within nature was not susceptible to inflation.

Both because it could be found locally and to avoid the costs of importing from Europe, many colonists adopted Indigenous trading practices. The Dutch colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant paid his workers in wampum. And indeed Manhattan was purchased with wampum.

The most widespread medium of exchange on Turtle Island was wampum, however it was not the only one. The Lakota primarily used their food-stuffs for exchange. It was something of a barter economy, in which commerce was a trade enterprise and not a value system.

However, the colonists became ever more greedy in their search for gold, including in the lands of the Lakota Oyate. This became a justification to further exploit their fellow human beings, to exterminate nations and destroy the land. This was a way that only knew exploitation and not charity, as was noted in a speech by Maquinna, chief of the Nuu-chah-nulth (later Mowachalit) people of Nootka Sound near modern-day Vancouver, in the late 1700s:

“Once I was in Victoria, and I saw a very large house. They told me it was a bank and that the white men place their money there to be taken care of, and that by and by they got it back with interest. We are Indians and we have no such bank; but when we have plenty of money or blankets, we give them away to other chiefs and people, and by and by they return them with interest, and our hearts feel good. Our way of giving is our bank.”

Currently the Lakota Dollar is not merely put away and store as a savings for future generation. Rather, it is being used to pay for necessities such as utilities. And the Lakota have a historical basis for modern entrepreneurship, through crafts that are then exchanged. In fact, Cante Tenza has even helped finance its struggle for freedom partially through manufacturing its own lotion from local plants and herbs.

Conclusion

The exploitation wraught by colonial enforcement has continued even as wealth has gone from tangible gold and silver, to worthless paper, and finally nowadays to mere numbers on a screen that nevertheless are used to impoverish entire nations.

This is the Age of the Financiers. The State borrows from the Big Bankers to finance its own operations, as the distinction between government and corporation continues to be blurred daily. Yet more people are awakening to the cruel reality that we are like cogs in a machine, and that everything is part of this Technique of the Bankers. Yet we can escape their clutches by reasserting our sovereignty, like a brave number of Lakota freedom activists have done despite the odds.

Any change must come from within ourselves, from a consciousness within, that sees how value rests not with money but that money is merely a means of exchange – and it shouldn’t define us. Maybe only then can we avert the crisis described in the prophecy of the Cree people of Canada:

“Only after the last tree has been cut down; only after the last fish has been caught; only after the last river has been poisoned; only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten.”