Republic of Lakotah - Politics and Government

Politics and Government

Citizenship is open to people of all races and to any resident of the land Lakotah claims. The group plans to issue its own passports and driving licenses in the name of the proposed nation.

The Republic of Lakotah proposes that the nation be organized as a confederation that would respect the libertarian principles of posse comitatus and caveat emptor, would offer "individual liberty through community rule," and would collect no nationwide taxes. However, individual communities within the proposed nation would be allowed to levy taxes with the consent of the taxed. No currency has yet been proposed but Russell Means has suggested that the proposed nation should not use fiat currency but instead adopt a gold standard. Means has stated that this system of government is derived from the traditional Lakota government system. Means said, "we are going to implement how we lived prior to the Invasion. Each community will be a mini-state unto itself ... They will form the federation known as Lakotah." As of 2008, Russell Means identified himself as "Chief Facilitator" of a provisional government of the Republic of Lakotah. The provisional government is currently being operated out of Treaty School/Ranch in Porcupine, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge reservation.

The four signatories of the Lakota Freedom Delegation's letter to the State Department that announced withdrawal from the US identified themselves by the title of "itacan of Lakota" in a press release. Leaders of communities would be informally chosen by elders of the community.

Read more about this topic:  Republic Of Lakotah

Famous quotes containing the words politics and, politics and/or government:

    The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.
    Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)

    To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches.
    Thomas Paine (1737–1809)