Immediate action against ethnocide is needed this week on Saturday, September 30, in the Oceti Sakowin Oyate homelands!
This week at The Great Plains History Conference in Sioux Falls, SD, conference organizers knowingly centered ethnic fraud Dr. Kent Blansett as keynote speaker and headliner.
His topic? Wounded Knee.
The panel of actual Native elders and scholars will be held Saturday, the last day of the conference. While these Native elders and experts may get the final word on the same subject as the keynote speaker, the occupation of Wounded Knee, they are forced to follow the ramblings of someone who claims many Native nations (but has yet to be claimed back by any of them).
The Northern Great Plains History Conference cannot claim ignorance in setting up this toxic, intellectual violence against Native survivors and scholars of the Wounded Knee siege.
This week, Lakota scholar and professor Dr. Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe) wrote to the Oceti Sakowin Writers Society listserv to alert participants of our annual writers retreat to the issue. He included the letter he wrote to inform and challenge the conference organizers to rethink their choice of keynote speaker.
These are not theoretical or abstract matters. While we are familiar with government schemes to take and seize Native land, there is less of a focus on how the destruction and disparaging of our tribal belonging and citizenship are part of elimination policies. Despite implacable tinkering of the laws to undermine tribal citizenship, tribes have never renounced their right to determine their own. And yet, the continued denial of tribal citizenship and belonging has done immeasurable harm. —Dr. Nick Estes, Letter to the Northern Great Plains Conference organizers and board. September 20, 2023.
Dr. Nick Estes, member of the Oceti Sakowin Writers Society, is the moderator of the panel on Saturday that features elders involved in the occupation: Dorothy Ninham (Oneida Nation), Madonna Thunder Hawk (Oohenumpa Lakota), William Means (Oglala Sioux Tribe).
As Estes went on to remind us in his email, no matter your personal feelings around the Wounded Knee occupation, it is still an important event in history that should primarily be told and studied among our own Native nations and peoples.
We are living in a moment of reckoning regarding the prolific nature of American Indian identity fraud. Academic associations and institutions are being forced to confront this widespread problem. NGPHC is hosted in Oceti Sakowin territory, and what is currently South Dakota is home to nine sovereign tribal nations. As a member of one of those nations, I am deeply concerned about the message it sends to our communities to have such a controversial and discredited keynote speaker speaking as an “expert” about our history. —Dr. Nick Estes, Letter to the Northern Great Plains Conference organizers and board. September 20, 2023.
The annual writers’ retreat hosted by the Oceti Sakowin Writers Society formed as a refuge amidst the exhausting Indigenous identity theft and ethnic fraud affecting our founders and members in the academy and writing circles.
Obviously, non-Natives feel they are not the gatekeepers of such refuges, however, they are the quintessential gatekeepers and proliferators of dominant cultural narratives regarding Native peoples. The author that is being disputed has had several tribes speak out about his claims to belong to them.
If the organizers and funders of the Northern Great Plains History Conference cannot trust and take action on the word of the very tribal government officials who serve these Native nations, what else should we question about their supposed authoritative authenticity as historians?
Since July, there have been at least three separate news articles detailing the objections by Native organizations and tribal officials to Kent Blansett’s disputed affiliations with at least five American Indian nations. Many colleagues and Native community members have expressed concern about Blansett’s participation as a keynote in the NGPHC’s conference next week. —Dr. Nick Estes, Letter to the Northern Great Plains Conference organizers and board. September 20, 2023.
How dare they thus decenter authentic Native voices in matters of our own historical events? We often hear the claim that WE are the biased ones in studying our own history. Well, then let us ask, what about the bias of these conference organizers when faced with the facts? Are they scholars or shills of assimilation?
Members and allies of the Oceti Sakowin Writers Society plan to attend the Legacy of Wounded Knee panel that is free and open to the public on Saturday, September 30.
Toksa ake,
Tasiyagnunpa Barondeau