"Lakota warriors: Fighting Illegal Immigration Since 1862

May I have your attention please? Once again, I am proud to share a few words of wisdom from Sam Hurst, of The Rapid City Journal:

"History matters. It is the silent snake in the grass of high ideals and absolute judgments. History is always getting in the way of righteousness.

As a graduate student at Boston University, I studied under Howard Zinn, a radical historian of impeccable credentials, a man of intense convictions. He was a professional historian who never claimed to be objective and never hid from social activism. But one day a student asked him, "What do we do if the facts don't fit our ideology." He calmly responded, "You can't just act like the facts don't matter. You've got to change your analysis."

Easier said than done.

I have quietly watched the national immigration debate boil over these last few months. On the surface, immigration reform just doesn't seem that relevant in western South Dakota. When half a million people filled the streets of Los Angeles last Monday, nine people rallied in Rapid City. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to understand that the history of immigration in the Dakotas does offer us something to think about.

In the 1880s, thousands of illegal aliens invaded the Lakota Nation. They came for a better life. They came to get rich. And they could give a damn about laws or treaties, or meticulously drawn borders. The U.S. Army, which is often depicted as the sword of the conquering nation, in fact operated a lot like the Border Patrol of today. They were under orders to keep the illegal aliens out, but the borders were too long, too porous, too easy to sneak past.

As one generation passed to another, these illegals came to think it was their right to stay. After all, their children were born on the Plains. They had poured their sweat in to the land. They had a moral and economic right to be here. Meanwhile, down on the Rez, the slogan passes word of mouth - "Lakota Warriors: Fighting Illegal Aliens Since 1862."

Like most South Dakotans, I am constantly amazed at how we seem unable to get past the past. Perhaps a good beginning would be to recognize that our great-grandparents, our hard-working, God-fearing, great-grandparents, were illegal aliens.

What are we to make of millions of audacious "illegals" in the streets of Los Angeles and San Diego and Laredo, some of them with the temerity to wave Mexican flags? Conservatives are so enraged about the narrow legal issue ("They have broken the law!") or the narrow cultural issue ("They don't speak English!"), that we miss the historical facts. They were here first. We act like no one was in Texas or California or New Mexico (that should be a hint, right there) when the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo was signed. The blind spot of our national culture is that we are forever thinking that the great American experiment takes place on an empty landscape. No wonder our immigration policies never work. We're the immigrants.

Long before there was a border with Mexico, long before politicians strutted up and down the floor of the House advocating a big concrete wall to keep out people whose families have been in the southwest for centuries, long before Los Angeles was a port to the Pacific Rim, it was a sleepy Tongva Indian village.

When we grasp these old historical facts, we might be able to make an immigration policy that works. And we might be a little more modest about our own settlement of South Dakota."

We may not all agree with Sam on a gut level, but there's no denying the truth stated in his first paragraph, "History is always getting in the way of righteousness."