Lakota

The Lakhota language, like many other Native American languages, faces a decline in young speakers. Can the culture exist independently of a language and can the people have the same feeling of belonging to it even after the language has been lost? The following study analyzes the relation of language and identity in a situation when most members of a tribe are no longer able to speak the language. It is based on interviews with 52 participants carried out on Pine Ridge Reservation. The study compares the opinions of speakers of the language with the non-speakers with the objective to find out what alternative signs of identity people use when they are not able to speak the language. The analysis focuses on the attitude to the language, it is trying to answer the question whether it is necessary to speak the language to be Lakhota and what do the people think about the eventuality that the language might disappear completely.

On ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Prophecy: “These Indians will enlighten the whole world.” By Christopher Buck and Kevin Locke [Lakota], Version #4 (April 26, 2020). • This is a work-in-progress. • “The views expressed in our content reflect individual perspectives and do not represent the official views of the Bahá’í Faith.” • (Photos are linked: Click on each photo to view source.) • Feedback invited.

“Attach great importance to the Indigenous population of America. … Likewise, these Indians, should they be educated and guided, there can be no doubt that they will become so illumined as to enlighten the whole world.” – ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Tablets of the Divine Plan, p. 33.

Tablet to Amir Khan
(English & Persian)

“Undoubtedly in those regions [the Americas] the Call of God must have been raised in ancient times, but it hath been forgotten now.”

https://www.bahai.org/…/additional-tablets-ext…/169212878/1…

Original Persian (transliterated):
al-battih dar án ṣafahát níz dar azmanih-yi-qadímih vaqtí nidá-yi-iláhí buland gashtih va-lákin hál farámush shudih ast.

Description and analysis of a Lakota ritual performance staged in 1991, where heated debate broke out between the dance organizers, who included non-Lakota dancers and critics who advocated more narrow restrictions on participation.  At issue was the capacity of ritual practice to revise social borders and reconstruct established norms, patterns of association, and sentiments of belonging.

"Native Americans and Canadians are largely romanticised or sidelined figures in modern society. Their spirituality has been appropriated on a relatively large scale by Europeans and non-Native Americans, with little concern for the diversity of Native American opinions. Suzanne Owen offers an insight into appropriation that will bring a new understanding and perspective to these debates.

"This important volume collects together these key debates from the last 25 years and sets them in context, analyses Native American objections to appropriations of their spirituality and examines ‘New Age’ practices based on Native American spirituality.

"The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality includes the findings of fieldwork among the Mi’Kmaq of Newfoundland on the sharing of ceremonies between Native Americans and First Nations, which highlights an aspect of the debate that has been under-researched in both anthropology and religious studies: that Native American discourses about the breaking of ‘protocols’, rules on the participation and performance of ceremonies, is at the heart of objections to the appropriation of Native American spirituality."

The file contains chapter one, the introduction.

This paper examines continuity and change in Lakota belief and ritual, focusing on the social organization of contemporary Lakota ceremonial life. For many Lakotas of Pine Ridge Reservation ritual structures life. The contemporary religious landscape consists of a number of ritual groups, which I call ritual thiyóšpayes, after the Lakota word for band or lodge group, the extended family and historical basic unit of kinship. At the center of these groups is a religious practitioner, a symbol of group identity and solidarity. Ritual thiyóšpayes consist of core and sub-core member families that regularly attend rituals and other corporately sponsored social events. The cohesion of a ritual thiyóšpaye is based largely on equality, mutual help, participation, and one-mindedness. The relationship between a practitioner and his ritual thiyóšpaye is dynamic, characterized by reciprocity, mutual influence, and exchange: the practitioner shapes the beliefs, worldview, and identity of his followers, symbolizing the group to both members and nonmem-bers, while simultaneously being shaped by his followers as a representative of their social, psychological, and religious needs, beliefs, and values. Although patterns of social interaction have changed since the dawn of the reservation period, there remains a distinct and undeniable continuity with past traditions. Ontological approaches in anthropology have been hotly debated in recent years (Posthumus 2017). Some unifying themes in this diverse body of research involve the exploration of the composition and character of alter worlds and the assumption that different peoples inhabit different, oftentimes conflicting realities (see Descola 2013; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007; Posthumus 2018; Viveiros de Castro 1998). While there are many trends and foci in anthropology's ontological turn, not all suffer from the methodological problems noted in a number of critical assessments. According to Michael L. Cepek, some recent anthropological investigations of ontology "focus on the bare content of abstract propositions while paying little attention to their pragmatic function, epistemological stance, affective tone, and position in a division of linguistic and conceptual labor" (Cepek 2016, 624). While this may be true of some inflections of ontologically minded anthropology, other studies pay careful attention to history and context, producing accurate ethnographies that are also theoretically engaging. For instance , neither Cepek (2016) nor Graeber (2015) mention the work of Philippe Descola (2013) in their critiques of ontological anthropology. I questioned Graeber about this omission via email, and his response was that he does not think Descola is really entirely an ontologically inclined anthropologist, per se, but rather he is a structuralist describing models that are never purely instantiated as such. In this article, I explore the role of ceremony in the social organization of contemporary Lakota (Western [Teton] Sioux) culture. Although I firmly believe in the importance of describing to the best of our abilities the worldviews of people different from ourselves and seriously engaging with alter belief systems, my attention to religion in this article does not take on the baggage of cosmological concerns. Rather, it demonstrates how ceremonial life or religious belief and ritual is interconnected with other aspects of life, in this case kinship and social organization, and how carefully contextualizing studies of alter worlds in their cultural, historical, and sociopolitical frameworks can hopefully remedy the meth-odological problems plaguing some of the studies in the so-called ontological turn.

This essay offers object biographies of two examples of Lakȟóta beaded regalia that traveled with Wild West performers to France in 1889 and in 1911, respectively, as exemplars of Gerald Vizenor's concept of survivance. By examining the production of the objects by women artists within the Lakȟóta community and visually analyzing their designs, this article highlights the regalia as an opposition to both settler colonial political suppression and enforced attempts of cultural assimilation. The article stresses that the beadwork's materiality bears traces of its intended circulation and public display that are enacted when Lakȟóta individuals wore the regalia in the context of Wild West performance in France. Both when rooted in the Lakȟóta community and when circulating through Wild West shows, the objects evince Lakȟóta survivance. When the regalia was acquired by non-Native individuals in France, who projected new meanings onto the objects, the function of the regalia as a public statement of Lakȟóta survivance subtly continued to operate through generated revenue for the community and through the visibility of Lakȟóta culture through continued circulation.

This article is published in a special issue edited by Sascha Scott and Amy Lonetree on "Native Survivance and Visual Sovereignty: Indigenous Visual and Material Culture in the 19th and 20th Centuries"

In this thesis I contrast historical and contemporary forms of hunting and gathering among Lakota people currently living in village-communities on reservations in the states of North and South Dakota (USA). In particular, the focus and main locus of analysis is laid on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, while examples from other Lakota reservations as well as Plains Cree reserves in Alberta, Canada, are only brought up as a means for making transnational or cross-tribal/cultural comparisons among Plains peoples yet regionally limited to the Northern Great Plains.
I show that although social organization, economic relevance of hunting and type of animals predominantly hunted by the Lakota have changed throughout history in processes of adaption responding to larger infrastructural shifts, specific aspects of a worldview related to hunting, which was strongly shaped by the nomadic way of life of these peoples on the Northern Plains during the 19th century, have persisted and still ideationally permeate many spheres of social life. I argue that shared communal values and emic perceptions about human-nature relationships among Lakota and other Plains peoples are to a great extent ontologically rooted in a cosmology that was an outcome of a historical lifestyle as hunter(-gatherers) of buffalo. Despite socio-economic changes leading to the demise of that very foundational subsistence-based nomadic existence, elements of this lifestyle have nevertheless survived into modern day by their sustained relevance, adaption and application in social, economic, political, healthcare and educational contexts (to serve individuals’ quests for self-discovery and to support political aims for self-determined development of Native nations).
Hunting and gathering are analyzed along two dimensions - as a practice and as a constitutive basis of a worldview and values. While, when looking at historical processes, it can be seen that the practice has changed in many ways due to technological, political and socio-economic shifts, its pursuit remains an economic necessity for some and it is still regarded by many as a continuation of a traditional way of life reflecting certain values, serving also as a source or marker of cultural identity.
Furthermore, I argue that these cultural values, which originally fulfilled particular social functions (and to some extent still do today) in a nomadic hunter-gatherer societal structure and its contemporary remnants (for instance by regulating the distribution of food, encouraging commensality and defining social hierarchies), have been adapted in political contexts by tribal agents; They are either emphasized, silenced or reinterpreted to foster conditions of social, economic and political well-being on reservations or reserves and thus aiding nation-building processes embedded within larger institutional contexts of (inter-)national politics in a global market economy.

Modern and postmodern civilization exhibits a variety o f pathological trends that have not only polluted the environment but have contributed to a spiritual crisis within humanity. Personal and social fragmentation has resulted from us losing touch with our spiritual roots. This paper explores aspects of archaic ontology as a remedy for the fragmented selfthrough an examination of the Native American Sun Dance ceremony. Through personal narrative and a review of the literature on the Sun Dance I explore ways for ethical intercultural exchange that can help us rediscover our spiritual connection with the Earth and how we might begin to embody the wisdom we encounter.

Con mi tesis cuestiono el diseño como práctica moderna universalizada que sustenta exclusiones, mediante una revisión crítica de sus corrientes ontológicas y pluriversales cuya masificación amenaza la diferencia que defienden. Basado en mi experiencia de pasante doctoral en Nueva Zelanda, examino “trabajos de umbral”, en los que el diseño occidental encuentra “sus otros” (maorí, samoano, lakota y maya), y lo hago desde concepciones indígenas (Uywaña, Va, Mitakuye Oyasin, Whakapapa) para exponer prácticas alternas al diseño ocultas por la proyección disciplinar, y presentes en los “todos” (culturas, mundos, sociedades, universos) de diversos grupos humanos. Construyo la diseñorancia como estrategia para reconocer esas prácticas alternas al diseño que condenso en mi propuesta: los DISSOCONS. Como la travesía de un coyote por un sendero de semillas, mi obra es un viaje de huida del diseño único, del cual vuelvo ayudado por la arqueología y la antropología trayendo los aportes que elaboré por el camino: dipremas, equialtervalentes, policardinalidad, etc. Lo dispuse circularmente como un uruboro en cinco recuentos: el primero, justifica la decisión de viajar; en el segundo, con la apertura y el desprendimiento como des-marco teórico, reviso las opciones de viaje contempladas (desde los diseñares: ontológico, decolonial, indígena y autónomo); el tercero, metaforiza mi recorrido hacia la otredad con el ambimétodohilogías como respuesta desclasificada a las metodologías, elaborada con fibras decoloniales, indígenas y sureñas; el cuarto, cuenta mi experiencia en el destino y relata mis hallazgos y el quinto, presenta cómo me devuelvo. Al final propongo reformar la idea de mundificación y sugiero unos diseños relacionales desproyectualizados.

“Indigenous Messengers of God” (2014–2020) by Christopher Buck and Kevin Locke (Lakota Elder). Co-authors: Bitahnii Wayne Wilson; Paula Bidwell; Nosratollah Mohammadhosseini. Edited by David Langness. Compiled by Arjen Bolhuis from essays posted at bahaiteachings.org/series/indigenous-messengers-of-god (2014–2020). “The views expressed in our content reflect individual perspectives and do not represent the official views of the Bahá’í Faith.” This material, along with academic research articles, will form the basis of the forthcoming Wilmette Institute course, “The Great Spirit Speaks: Voices of the Wise Ones,” to be offered beginning in February 2011.

Mediante este artículo cuestiono el diseño industrial como profesión que soporta el patrón civilizatorio moderno-capitalista, cuyas nocivas repercusiones son planetarias a comienzos del siglo XXI. Ante ello, planteo la posible generación de alternativas convivenciales a la civilización industrial orientada al desarrollo, a partir de equivalentes del diseño surgidos de tradiciones diferentes a la versión occidental dominante. Para ilustrarlo, examinp el potencial reparador que entrañan los resurgimientos de formas de interacción con el mundo, siempre presentes, pero ignoradas por proceder de lugares secundarios (sures) en las cartografías geográficas y epistemológicas de quienes en ámbitos hegemónicos clasifican la producción de realidades.
Palabras clave: resurgimientos, diseño, sur, convivencialidad, sumak kawsay, mitakuye oyasin

A number of different languages in outside of the Indo-European family were analyzed based on how difficult it would be for a native English speaker to learn them. They were then rated on a purely impressionistic 1-6 scale of easiest to most difficult. Extensive phonological, morphological, syntactic and even semantic analysis was done for many of these tongues to highlight areas of difficulty for English learners. Very long: 101 pages.

Contrasto en este artículo la idea de un mundo y un diseño únicos con la de varios mundos y diseños interrelacionados, en las siguientes presunciones:
--hay diseños en todos los grupos humanos;
--el diseño profesional-disciplinar es apenas parte de los diseños occidentales;
--los diseños occidentales son apenas parte de todos los diseños.
Sobre tales supuestos, busco expresar la intención en Colombia, y en América Latina, de plantear en clave histórica la pregunta por los diseños otros (vernáculos, del sur o con otros nombres). Escribo el texto sin fragmentaciones, ni apartados, honrando las formas de pensar de esos practicantes de los diseños otros, a quienes me
aproximo aún de modo tangencial.
Gutiérrez, A. (2020). La pregunta por los diseños otros (vernáculos, del sur o con otros nombres) desde Colombia en Name, L &, Moasab A. [Orgs.] Por um ensino insurgente em arquitetura e urbanismo. Foz do Iguaçu: EDUNILA.

While the contemporary world has been heralded as being “post-racial”, we can look all-around to see evidence that this assertion is not only flawed but false. Religion is generally blamed as the key culprit for the escalating conflicts igniting the world over which threatens peace. Yet, rarely is secularism and the void created in its midst carefully analyzed in this context. The historical roots of this problem are more remote than postmodernism and modernism. However, secularism has fractured the way that human identity has been understood throughout time which eclipses the integral relationship between human diversity and religious pluralism.

This article is a reinterpretation of the ethnohistorical literature on the Lakota or Western (Teton) Sioux from a Descolian animist perspective. Applying key insights from what has been called the " ontological turn, " in particular, the dual notions of interiority and physicality and an extended notion of personhood that includes nonhumans as well as humans, this article demonstrates how a new ani-mist framework can connect and articulate otherwise disparate and obscure elements of Lakota ethnography, offering new and exciting insights, along with the potential for a deeper understanding of traditional Lakota culture. Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Every seed is awakened, and all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land. — Sitting Bull (in Eastman 1991: 119) From Wakan Tanka there came a great unifying life force that flowed in and through all things— the flowers of the plains, blowing winds, rocks, trees, birds, animals— and was the same force that had been breathed into the first man. Thus all things were kindred and brought together by the same Great Mystery. Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. —Luther Standing Bear (2006a: 193)

In an attempt to "help" the Lakota and "save" the Lakota language, the European so-called "Lakota Language Consortium" presses a different orthography unto Lakota lerners, thus eliminating Lakota elders from their position as language teachers and authorities. White men intervene into Lakota communities and discourses to tell Lakota what to learn and how to learn. Colonialism revisiting.

Native American men and women are strongly represented in the U.S. armed forces. Indeed, they have more members per capita in the military than any other ethnic group. Explanations for this situation compose the grand narrative of the "warrior-to-soldier" theme that constructively links a specific ethnic background to an alleged natu ral predisposition for military life. Lakota1 men in par tic u lar have been confronted with expectations that arose through the mythical heroization of warriors and war chiefs such as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull that were disseminated through American mass media. As a result, in films, novels, and internet games, con temporary Lakota soldiers are still being depicted as naturally belonging on the battlefield. Scholarly texts also utilize racial categories as the major paradigm through which to conceptualize Indigenous masculinity and military life. In general, Native Americans continue to be represented as "traditional" in an unmoving, static, premodern or antimodern sense. Stuart Hall sees representation-the connection of meaning and language to culture-as having interactive relationships to create a "cir cuit of cul-ture" in which repre sen ta tion and misrepre sen ta tion build identities and reflect ideologies.2 While misrepre sen ta tions are usually viewed negatively for constituting epistemological vio lence, I want to employ them here constructively by analyzing the causes and effects of the warrior-to-soldier grand narrative in order to challenge the often repeated assumption about the "natu ral" nature of Native American ser vice members. Conceptualizing a deeper, anticolonial critique of related military heroism discourses requires being more vigilant about the way we unravel the normative frameworks that help construct, perpetuate, and challenge racial and gender hierarchies. It requires adjusting the critical

This paper represents a “studying-up” of the controversy over federal regulatory processes regarding protection of Lakota and Dakota cultural heritage in permitting the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). To analyze this controversy, I engage with interest-convergence theory, a component of Critical Race Theory, alongside a critique of its arguably simplistic definition of “white interests.” Agreeing that we need a finer-grained understanding of elite interests as multiple, conflicting, and not always based purely in material self-interest, I argue that interests should be understood as nonhuman components of elite assemblages, shaped by both emotions and societal ideologies yet constrained by – and in conflict with – top-down, ideology-driven missions and institutional cultural norms, as well as pressure from other assemblages. I use this framework to examine conflicts within and among various elite assemblages’ interests surrounding Lakota and Dakota cultural heritage. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’s emotion- and ideology-driven interests in demonstrating sensitivity to tribes’ concerns were constrained by their mission-driven interests in accomplishing duties in a timely manner. These interests, in turn, conflicted with concerns (or lack thereof) manifested by other federal entities (Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, D.C. District Court) about DAPL’s impacts on cultural heritage, and with the company’s and federal government’s financial interests in pressuring USACE to enable completion of the pipeline’s construction. I unpack power differentials and dynamics among these various groups, as realized through particular interpretations and implementations of relevant legislation. I suggest that examining such “conflicts of interests” within and between elite assemblages, within the legal production of space, can elucidate controversies over industrial expansion’s socio-environmental threats.

The list is an update from the list created for North Dakota History in 2005.  It is he most complete list of all photographs taken of the famous Hunkpapa leader Sitting Bull.
For legal reasons the photographies are not included in the list, but they can be researched easily with the data in the list.

The list is updated when new information is added.
Last update February 2019

This chapter explores the relations between medical and religious systems in nineteenth-century Lakota (Western [Teton] Sioux) culture, demonstrating the inherent plurality and fluidity of traditional Lakota healing practice. Lakota magico-medico-ritual culture was and is idiosyncratic and anti-dogmatic, often based on visions and revelatory experiences, and hence open to innovation and practical adaptation. That said, there were and continue to be specific types of practitioners who used specific medicines and techniques, conducted specific ceremonies, and/or were affiliated with specific illnesses and spirit persons, illustrating structure within an otherwise varied, personalistic magico-medico-religious system. From the perspective of missionaries, Indian agents, and other (set-tler-)colonial operatives, traditional Lakota healers were often seen as hindrances to assimilation and "civilisation," as resisting (settler-)colonial authority and domination, and as such their practices could be understood as what we might today refer to as decolonising strategies. Lastly, © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hokkanen and K. Kananoja (eds.), Healers and Empires in Global History, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.

In Lakota (Siouan) nouns (N) frequently occur adjacent to stative verbs (SV). Extant descriptions of Lakota grammar treat the <N+1SV> as a syntactic compound in which the SV modifies the N. The present study offers a novel analysis that shows that the N and SV are uncompounded and that postnominal modification occurs only when the <N+SV> sequence is RP-internal, whereas in the clause-final position it functions as a complex predicate. This analysis solves numerous outstanding issues from several areas of Lakota grammar including modification, modifier phrases, noun incorporation, inalienable possession, compounding,
word-formation, stress position, referentiality, and information structure.

Wenn Englischlehrwerke im Landeskundeteil daran gehen,
die indigene Bevölkerung Nordamerikas zu thematisieren,
wird es zumeist verkrampft. Als trauten sich die AutorInnen nicht, den Kindern beizubringen, dass es den Weihnachtsmann nicht gibt, bleiben sie bei der Präsentation der Native Americans beim Klischee des stolzen, doch besiegten Volkes. Dieses Lehrwerk leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag, Native Americans als moderne, lebendige und vielfältige Menschen und Nationen darzustellen.

On ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Prophecy: “These Indians will enlighten the whole world.” By Christopher Buck and Kevin Locke [Lakota], Version #4 (April 26, 2020).

•  This is a work-in-progress.
•  “The views expressed in our content reflect individual perspectives and do not represent the official views of the Bahá’í Faith.”
•  (Photos are linked: Click on each photo to view source.)
•  Feedback invited.

Ogden defines theology as the “the fully reflective understanding of the Christian witness of faith as decisive for human existence.” Krisak states this more concretely, defining theology as the “challenging and thoughtful reflection on God with us.” In this paper, I will reflect on God-with-us in the poverty, oppression, and loss of their children by the Lakota tribes of South Dakota. Neafsey cites the Lakota as an example of people whose dreams are not only crushed but they themselves are obliterated. Black Elk was an Oglala Lakota Wichasha Wakan  (Holy Man) who later converted to Catholicism and became a catechist and prayer leader drawing from both of his religious traditions.

What is happening at Iŋyaŋ Wakháŋagapi Othí (which is located near to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation in so-called North Dakota) has been widely hailed as the largest gathering of Indigenous peoples in a generation, or more. Yet, despite that, settlers continue to prove either unable or unwilling to represent this standoff adequately in our media and popular discourses. In this paper I am interested in parsing the discursive significance that is played by the language of ‘civil disobedience’ as it is applied to the Standing Rock standoff in particular; however, I believe my analysis may also be applicable elsewhere. It is my central contention that while the language of civil disobedience may occasionally be deployed by water protectors themselves for the strategic purposes of harm reduction - establishing an appeal for legal accommodation - I believe that settlers who seek to ally themselves with this cause are responsible for utilizing and propagating the more radical, and consciously anti-colonial, discourses developed both at Standing Rock and over the centuries of resistance struggles. This shift in our discourse is imperative, first and foremost, because it is asked of us by those whose bodies are directly in harm’s way. It is also imperative because the hegemonic language of civil disobedience is at once inadequately equipped for describing this situation in its full complexity and, moreover, such a language carries connotations and implications that reify the settler state’s colonial relationship towards Indigenous peoples generally, and the Sioux in particular. This, I assert, is because the language of civil disobedience sustains a system of signification premised on, and reproduced through, the temporality of the settler state. Unpublished; All Rights Reserved; Do Not Copy, Print or Site without the express permission of the Author

Land remains the most fundamental of issues in Native North America, followed by those of tribal sovereignty and representation. Johnny Depp offered to buy the iconic land at
Wounded Knee and gift it to the Lakota Nation. This article reflects not only upon the limitations, but more importantly upon the political implications of this approach, particularly
when it is deployed as a resource for normative and material claims of Indigenous peoples in a settler-colonial society. Looking at the Wounded Knee ownership case through the
lenses of postcolonial and affect theories, this article examines how the issues of Indigenous land, sovereignty and representation become linked when Oglala Lakota, as recipients of a philanthropic gift and of a happiness that is not their own, acquire a “happiness duty,”as defined by Sara Ahmed. Depp’s declaration of intention can be read as another
text within the colonial archive, given how it justifies intervention with the perceived unhappiness
of Native culture. What, then, would it mean politically to recognize unhappiness?

Examining the chanupa, or ceremonial pipe, from a Lakota perspective reveals it as responding to a particular ontology and extends indigenous rhetorics to consider the ontological dimensions of communication. Distinctions between indigenous rhetorics and new materialist rhetorics brings greater attention to how groups and individuals constellate themselves as beings.

As an outreach tool, this compelling portrait of one family’s struggle for economic self-sufficiency will help viewers examine wide-ranging issues, from the logic behind the U.S.’s “war on drugs” to the rocky, historic relationship between the federal government and indigenous nations.

FILM SYNOPSIS: In April 2000, Alex White Plume and his Lakota family planted industrial hemp on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota after other crops had failed. But when federal agents raided the White Plumes' fields, the Lakota Nation was swept into a Byzantine struggle over tribal sovereignty, economic rights and common sense.