TEDNA

From Indianz.com here. An excerpt:

All this brings me, us as a people, back to the realities our wakanyeja face on our reservations. In order to begin to solve these problems that the smallest of our oyate face, we must learn from the enemy.

 The “Carlisle’s” they established, we can establish in our communities, where we can reeducate our children in our Lakota ways. We, as communities need to establish home-based schools where we can teach our language and our culture while providing refuge for wakanyeja from prekindergarten to twelfth grade.

 In order to be effective, they cannot be affiliated with a system that does not represent the people’s needs; from all indications, the current governance system is weak, placing enormous power in the hands of a few. Telling us that maybe we need to disband a centralized system that is foreign to our oyate and return to a more traditional decentralized, band to band system that represents our needs, community by community. In the case of our wakanyeja that is what is needed; our communities need to be involved at the local level and not through an agency in Pine Ridge.