Why an honor tax?

You’ve heard the land acknowledgements.

You are on Dakota land. And that’s important. For centuries, the United States worked to exterminate and erase native people and identity. Many of us drive Wabasha Road or travel to Minnehaha Falls or Isanti County without knowing or considering the Dakota origin of these names. Land acknowledgements help center that the past is still present. They are an important start. But they are not the end.

Learn more about the history.

U.S. land theft—even when rooted in legal treaties—created an enormous wealth transfer from tribes and indigenous people to the United States and to the settler colonizers who manifested its destiny. The story, though, did not end there. Today’s inhabitants of Mni Sota Makoce can begin to return this ill-gotten gain. Your contribution to this Honor Tax, makes tangible your:

• Respect for the Lower Sioux Indian Community’s historic, cultural, and economic relationships to their homelands, which have provided them physical and spiritual sustenance since time immemorial;

• Affirmation that these relationships have supported the tribe’s cultural, philosophical, and intellectual evolution as a distinct people for countless generations; and

• Recognition that federal law prevents most tribal taxation to raise governmental revenues and at the same time funnels most tax revenue from tribal lands to state governments; and

• Understanding that the United States secured this land for its own benefit through swindle, fraud, and theft. For example:

  • In 1805, when Lt. Zebulon Pike negotiated for 100,000 acres surrounding B’dote, he left the payment term of the treaty blank. Although Pike estimated the value of the land at $200,000, the United States Senate decided that the U.S. should only pay $2,000. The eventual treaty payment was an even smaller equivalent value of goods.

  • In 1825, the United States insisted on a “peace treaty” that placed paper boundaries on the overlapping territories of several different tribes. Although Dakota people had occupied land as far north as Mille Lacs for centuries, the U.S. assigned that land area to Anishinaabe bands and blocked the Dakota from ever again governing—or being compensated for the loss of—that homeland. 

  • In an 1837 treaty, the United States promised to pay Dakota bands the equivalent value of $16,000 for their land cession. By the same treaty, the United States paid $200,000 to other individuals—principally European traders and their children.

  • In an 1851 treaty, the United States promised the Dakota bands a permanent 3,000-square-mile (1,920,000 acre) reservation homeland in exchange for an almost-50,000-square-mile (over 31,000,000 acre) cession. When the Senate approved the treaty, it struck through the promised reservation. Three years later, the President agreed to implement a temporary reservation at the negotiated site, but settler colonists had already claimed for themselves reservation land that had been promised to the Dakota.

  • By treaty, the United States promised to pay the Dakota $0.12 per acre for the 1851 cessions. The U.S. sold the ceded land at $1.25 acre (a nearly tenfold profit), gifted it to land-grant universities to sell for their endowments, and used it to pay its own debts to soldiers.

  • The United States broke even its meager treaty promises, delaying and missing treaty payments. These broken promises created starvation conditions that led to the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. In 1863, the United States passed a federal law that revoked all treaties between the U.S. and the Dakota and exiled all Dakota from Mni Sota Makoce.

  • Over time, Dakota families moved back to their ancestral homeland and began rebuilding their land base with private purchases. By 1884, less than 10 Mdewakanton families lived on 160 adjoining acres within the 1851 reservation that they repurchased from private sellers. By 1936, the settlement grew to 20 Mdewakanton families. That year, after a federal policy change, the United States recognized the Lower Sioux Indian Community—a name that the Mdewakanton had never called themselves—as a tribe, and designated the privately purchased parcels as the tribe’s reservation.

  • Today, the Lower Sioux Indian Community governs its people from a 1,923-acre reservation. Under federal statute and case law, the United States will never fulfill its 1851 Treaty 1,920,000-acre reservation promise. But even though the United States broke its promises, the Lower Sioux Indian Community cannot revoke its side of the treaty bargain. Instead, the Community is working with Minnesota and private property owners to continue to rebuild the land base that the United States stole.

  • The United States never repealed the 1863 Sioux Removal Act. It remains federal law.