[LINK] The Lakota have declared independence (?)

zarq's informative roundup post on the recent declaration of independence made by some representatives of the Lakota people of the Great Plains certainly caught my attention when I saw it. More from the Rapid City Journal below.

A group represents the Lakota Sioux Indian representatives from various reservations and states said Wednesday that it is declaring sovereign nation status and withdrawing from all treaties with the U.S. government.

"This is an historic day for our Lakota people," said Native American action and activist Russell Means. "United States colonial rule is at its end!"

Means was part of a four member Lakota delegation that traveled to Washington, culminating years of internal discussion among treaty representatives of the various Lakota communities. Other delegation members included Women of All Red Nations founder Phyllis Young, Oglala Lakota Strong Heart Society leader Duane Martin Sr., and Garry Rowland, Leader Chief Big Foot Riders. Means, Rowland, Martin were all members of the 1973 Wounded Knee takeover.

The move to form an independent nation will focus on property rights in a five-state area where the treaties in question were drawn up. The states include South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana – areas that the group say have been illegally homesteaded for years despite knowledge of Lakota as the historic owners.

If the U.S. government does not immediately enter into diplomatic negotiations, the group said in a news release, liens will be filed on real-estate transactions across the region -- an action it says could cloud title issues over thousands of square miles of land and property.

"In order to stop the continuous taking of our resources – people, land, water and children- we have no choice but to claim our own destiny," said Phyllis Young, a former Indigenous representative to the United Nations and representative from Standing Rock.

Young added, "The actions of Lakota are not intended to embarrass the United States but to simply save the lives of our people.”

The group has been meeting all week with foreign leaders in an effort to gain political support for sovereign nation status, including Bolivia Indigenous President Evo Morales. Morales said his country is “very, very interested in the Lakota case.”

I doubt this will come to much in the end. It's not at all clear what relationship these activists have with the elected Lakota government and the Lakota electorate, but more importantly it's also quite clear that the United States wouldn't tolerate allow a single state or a part of a state to make a a unilateral declaration of independence within the United States. In the end, I suspect that the Lakota sovereignty movement might come to resemble still more closely the Iroquois sovereignty movement. This second movement hasn't managed to secure internationally recognized independence for the Iroquois, but it has managed to carve out interesting niches within the Canada-United States border region where the Iroquois make their home. What sort of market for demi-sovereign enclaves exists in the United States, I wonder?

[LINK] The three Torontos

The front page of today's The Globe and Mail prominently featured a map derived from the latest report of the University of Toronto's Centre for Urban and Community Studies, J.D. Hulchanski's research paper "The Three Cities Within Toronto: Income polarization, 1970-2000." The report's conclusions, described at News@UofT, are alarming insofar as Toronto's social cohesion is concerned.

The City of Toronto is becoming increasingly divided by income and socio-economic status, says a new report issued today by the Centre for Urban and Community Studies (CUCS) at the University of Toronto. No longer a "city of neighbourhoods," the study calls modern-day Toronto a "city of disparities."

In fact, Toronto is now so polarized it could be described as three geographically distinct cities made up of 20 percent affluent neighbourhoods, 36 percent poor neighbourhoods, and 43 percent middle-income earner neighbourhoods--and that 43 percent is in decline.

The CUCS study analyzed income and other data from the 1971 and 2001 censuses, and grouped the city’s neighbourhoods based on whether average income in each one had increased, decreased, or stayed the same over that 30-year period. It found that the city’s neighbourhoods have become polarized by income and other ethno-cultural characteristics and that wealth and poverty are concentrated in distinct areas.

The CUCS report describes three distinct geographical "cities" within the City of Toronto in 2001:

· City#1 (high-income) is clustered around the two subway lines, much of the area south of Bloor/Danforth, some of the waterfront, and central Etobicoke. It includes about 17 per cent of Toronto’s residents. In this "city," incomes have increased by 71per cent over the 30-year study period. The ethnic origins of residents are mostly white (84 per cent), a small minority are immigrants (12 per cent), and their occupations are mostly white-collar (60 per cent).

· City#2 (middle-income) sits between the other two cities, with some neighbourhoods in the core and south of Bloor-Danforth, and others in the former North York. Forty-two per cent of Toronto’s residents live City #2. Average incomes have changed little over the study period (a slight decrease of 4 per cent). The ethnic makeup of City#2 is 67 per cent white and 21 per cent black, Chinese or South Asian; 48 per cent are immigrants, and their work is 39 per cent white collar and 18 per cent blue collar.

· City#3 (low-income) comprises much of northern Toronto, outside the Yonge Street subway corridor, plus large parts of Scarborough. It comprises 40 per cent of the city’s population. Incomes in City#3 have decreased by 34 per cent between 1970 and 2000; its residents are 43 per cent black, Chinese or South Asian in origin (40 per cent are white); 62 per cent were born outside of Canada; and 32 per cent work in white-collar and 25 per cent in blue-collar jobs.

So the term "inner city" (in the sense of urban poverty) no longer means south of Bloor-Danforth or clustered around the downtown core. Gentrification has changed the southern neighbourhoods. The new "inner city" has moved north, mostly north of the 401, and east to Scarborough.

Income disparities also grew over the thirty-year study period, with numbers of very high income and (especially) low-income Torontonians growing sharply even as the percentage of middle-income earners dropped.

[LINK] "Indigenous well-being in four countries"

Below, via BioMedCentral, is the abstract for the recent study "Indigenous well-being in four countries: An application of the UNDP'S Human Development Index to Indigenous Peoples in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States" (Cooke et al.).

Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand consistently place near the top of the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Index (HDI) rankings, yet all have minority Indigenous populations with much poorer health and social conditions than non-Indigenous peoples. It is unclear just how the socioeconomic and health status of Indigenous peoples in these countries has changed in recent decades, and it remains generally unknown whether the overall conditions of Indigenous peoples are improving and whether the gaps between Indigenous peoples and other citizens have indeed narrowed. There is unsettling evidence that they may not have. It was the purpose of this study to determine how these gaps have narrowed or widened during the decade 1990 to 2000.

Census data and life expectancy estimates from government sources were used to adapt the Human Development Index (HDI) to examine how the broad social, economic, and health status of Indigenous populations in these countries have changed since 1990. Three indices - life expectancy, educational attainment, and income - were combined into a single HDI measure.

Between 1990 and 2000, the HDI scores of Indigenous peoples in North America and New Zealand improved at a faster rate than the general populations, closing the gap in human development. In Australia, the HDI scores of Indigenous peoples decreased while the general populations improved, widening the gap in human development. While these countries are considered to have high human development according to the UNDP, the Indigenous populations that reside within them have only medium levels of human development.

BioMedCentral links to the full paper, in PDF format, through the first link above.