Buried Treaties, Stolen Lands: The Indigenous Cry That Shook Washington in 1972

Buried Treaties, Stolen Lands: The Indigenous Cry That Shook Washington in 1972

In November 1972, a group of people with a different will than the Stars and Stripes stormed the Department of the Interior building in Washington, D.C. They were Native Americans - the people of the land, the descendants of those who once lived in every corner of this country. Hundreds of people occupied the building in unison and raised their voices to break the silence against the mountain of "treaties" that the government had torn up over the years.

This occupation was the end of the Trail of Broken Treaties. Indigenous peoples traveled to the nation's capital from all over the United States to protest the federal government's "termination policy" of taking their land and dissolving their tribal legal status. On the surface, President Nixon shook hands with Mao Zedong and peace negotiations were underway in Vietnam, but behind the scenes, those whose ancestral lands had been taken from them were trying to regain their lost voices.

The anger buried underground was made visible in the form of occupation. Blankets, tomahawks, banners, and petitions. They submitted 20 demands to the government, including "return of land," "renegotiation of treaties," and "autonomy in education and health care. But the replies were ambiguous, and soon the media began calling them "agitators" and "rioters. But what was truly violent was the state, which for more than a century had deprived them of their language, their culture, and their place in the world.

After this event, many of their demands never materialized. But the occupation was not a failure. It was an act of exposing in the open the "original sin" that had been shoved down the throats of America's founding myths. Promises made under the Stars and Stripes were too easily forgotten. That is why they crawled out from underground and occupied, even for a moment, the "center of the robbers," the Ministry of the Interior.

It was a rare moment when the dispossessed named the "nation. Even now, that cry continues to ring faintly in the depths of the earth.