Two Native American Indian tribes are defying
orders by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem
to remove COVID-19 checkpoints from their
territories. The Cheyenne River Sioux and
Oglala Sioux tribes say the checkpoints are
the best way to protect against the coronavirus
entering their communities, which are not
equipped to handle an outbreak.
The people who elected me to this position,
they’re the ones that are, I guess, so-called
my boss. The governor is not my boss, or the
federal government. It’s the people that
live here. That’s who I work for, and that’s
who I take directives from and such.
But they haven’t — you know, we stepped
up to do this. We feel that we have every
right to do this. We have a treaty, the 1868
Fort Laramie Treaty, Article 16. In that article,
it says that, you know, before any White man
can travel or reside on our lands, they must
get consent from the Indians first. In addition
to our treaties, there’s case law. There’s
even our Constitution, that we swore to uphold
against all enemies foreign and domestic,
that they give us all the legal right to do
what we’re doing.
You know, a lot of times — and we’ve been
studying the laws of this country for quite
a while. How can somebody own something without
paying for it? And that’s the way we look
at it, that these lands, these roads, they
are ours, because we were never paid for it.
So we have every legal right to do that. And
it doesn’t matter, you know, what comes
today, tomorrow. We’re still going to be here.
We’re still going to have and maintain our checkpoints.
We have eight hospital beds. We don’t have
no ICU. There are six ventilators. We have
one respiratory therapist. And I’m being
told by our medical people that generally
they monitor two to three ventilators, and
they could do four, but that’s pushing it.
The nearest facility for critical care is
in Rapid City, and it’s about a three-hour
drive just to get to Rapid. And that has always
been the practice of the Indian Health Service,
is to get the care that some of our people
need, they generally get referred out.
But when we started this, we started looking
at numbers and the number of residents. And
when we broke it down, that maybe 50% would
possibly get the virus. And when we — they
were saying that 80% can be handled at home,
and that left 20%. And we looked at the numbers,
and we realized that there is a potential
that we may need 1,200 beds. And when we only
have eight, I mean, that really woke up a
lot of people.
