Native grievances and Standing Rock

It has all the ingredients of a Great Cause. Native Americans versus corporate greed with jackbooted company thugs and sinister militarized police forces.

Wasn’t there a Steven Seagal movie with this plot a few years ago?

But say it softly… there’s something that isn’t adding up about this story.

We heard the evil corporate greedsters were running Dakota Access Pipeline though sacred Indian land and across the Missouri River where it would promptly poison the water and despoil Mother Earth.

But it turns out the builders did in fact jump through all the regulatory hoops and the Standing Rock Sioux tribe made no protests at the time the public hearings were held.

For those who care about hearing both sides I refer you to Rob Port of North Dakota and the Say Anything blog. Port is looking at the other side of this contentious issue and taking the heat for it so I don’t have to.

Instead I’m going to tell you about something that happened in Oklahoma long ago. The following account was dredged from my memories of the news reports at the time, which differ significantly from what you can find about the case today on various political websites.

On September 19, 1979, a Native woman Rita Silk Nauni got off a plane at Will Rogers World Airport with her 10-year-old son. She was reportedly fleeing an abusive relationship and bound for Lawton, Oklahoma, a few hours’ drive away.

Nauni and her son began walking down the airport road. She was reportedly whacked out of her mind on airplane booze and possibly pills.

After discarding several items of clothing from their baggage along the road two airport rent-a-cops, one elderly man and his female partner contacted them about a littering complaint.

Remember in these pre-9/11 days airport police were pretty much night watchmen not real cops.

They arrested Nauni, who started to struggle with them, possibly after her young son attacked one of them. In the struggle the female officer’s firearm retaining strap broke, Nauni seized the gun and killed the old guy and wounded the female officer.

She was taken into custody soon after, and that’s when the circus began.

Native activists brought a medicine man to the jail as her spiritual councilor, and the county sheriff got stupid enough or angry enough to deny access. Round one for the activists.

Understand, there was nothing in this case that was remotely political or a civil rights issue. Nauni just happened to be Native and local activists seized on the opportunity.

Feminists quickly jumped on the bandwagon.

“Self-defense is a woman’s absolute right!” they proclaimed.

Nauni’s case went to trial, but the defense had no case. At literally the last minute they changed their plea to not guilty by reason of insanity, a defense that has a long history of not working in Oklahoma.

I ran into a feminist friend soon after, who confided she felt betrayed.

The only possible effective defense would have been a “Let’s have some mercy for a screwed up human being please.” But her legal team sacrificed her to make it a political issue.

Ordinarily she’d have been out in time for her son’s high school graduation. Instead a ticked-off judge threw the book at her and for Manslaughter One she got 150 years. An appeal was denied.
According to Oklahoma DOC records she was released in 1998.

What you can find about Rita Silk Nauni these days is mostly on left-wing websites where she is called a “political prisoner” who was imprisoned, you know, because racism.

My observation: nobody has more legitimate grievances against the United States than the First Nations. They are a conquered people who first lived on sufferance, and then on charity – which turned out to be far more destructive of their native culture.

The problem has always been that at a time the dominant culture is inclined to listen and address them, they are not very good at articulating their grievances. Perhaps because there are so many it’s difficult to focus.

The consequences have been terrible for them and well-meaning attempts to help often have the opposite effect. Especially when white activists jump on board to attach their own agendas to theirs, because Indians!