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Here is a little history lesson about the Sioux.
The Standing Rock Nation is a creation of the Federal Government/Congress. We recognize their sovereignty simply because we do. They were never a land-based-and-bordered nation in their entire history. That is a "white guy" concept. More specifically, the actual ancestral homeland of the Lakota and Dakota is hundreds of miles to the east in Minnesota, not North or South Dakota.

The "Sioux" were driven west by the Anishinabe/AKA Ojibwe/Chippewa in the mid-late 1700's. They arrived with only dogs for pack animals, and were a woodland hunter-gatherer culture. The voyageurs were exploring the Missouri about the same time the “Sioux” were finding their way into the territory. “White Men” have been in those lands roughly as long as those claiming to be the Standing Rock Nation. By those standards “White Eyes” is as “Native” to the Dakotas as the Lakota and Dakota.

Encounters with the Cheyenne (warring and stealing their way into horsemanship) provided the “Sioux” with horses and they absorbed the Cheyenne lifestyle of plains nomads, perpetually following the bison for food and supplies. The Cheyenne and and Lakota in particular became heated enemies and killed each other with atrocious abandon, and both set upon the actual natives of North Dakota, the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and other smaller tribes, drove them north to where they now live as a combined tribe, because they began to build villages close together and unite in self-protection from the Lakota who now have their ancestral lands in Standing Rock. As luck would have it, the MHA Nation as they now call themselves, based in the Fort Berthold reservation, right over the fat spot in the Bakken oil reserves, run their own wells, pump and transport, and own their proprietary production company, are halfway done with a refinery, and produce over 11% of the entire production of oil from the Bakken field.

Eventually, the Lakota became the most fierce and therefore greatest of the plains tribes and drove the once-superior Cheyenne west and the formerly magnificent Kiowa south. The so-called "Sioux" lands preserved by either the treaty of 1851, or the treaty of 1868, or the Congressional actions of 1875 that extended the reservation back up to the Cannonball River were all simply cases of the US validating the “Sioux” claims to stolen lands, from tribes conquered by brutal force by the Lakota and Dakota. The Standing Rock Nation took their so-called “sovereign” or “ancestral” lands from it's rightful "owners," the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and others. And they did it by criminally degenerate force, rape, pillage and torture.

When the "white man" was making those treaties with the “Sioux” in 1851, declaring the whole region the “Great Sioux Reservation,” the Lakota and Dakota had only been on that land a few generations—perhaps a hundred years or so. The Arikara they drove off had been there since AD 1500, followed by the Cheyenne, Crow, Kiowa and Pawnee—all centuries before the “Sioux.” The Arikara claim to that land simply put, preceeds the treaty of 1851 by 300 years. So, you tell me: how is it I should feel sorry for the Standing Rock “Sioux” because of a pipeline they really have nothing to do with and isn't going to hurt them anyway?

How far back do you want to go in this quest for "sovereignty?"

Plus, none of those treaties give the Standing Rock Nation any rights other than to be consulted. And keep in mind, this "tribe" was only chartered in 1959 as a united "tribe."I mean, literally, the whole tribe and reservation itself is just over a hundred years old, and legally speaking, the tribe itself was only federally incorporated as such, one "sovereign nation" under a constitution written in 1959. Frankly, I'm older than this tribe is, again, legally speaking.