Lakota Nation Launches “MazaCoin” Digital Currency to Decolonize Reservation Economy

The Lakota Nation, an indigenous group in the northern Plains of the United States, is poised to become the first American Indian group in the modern era to introduce its own currency.  But it will not be a paper or metal currency; instead, “MazaCoin,” as it will be called, is a virtual electronic currency, like Bitcoin, regulated not by a central bank but by its users.  (See the MazaCoin website here.)

Payu Harris, at the New York Stock Exchange to launch MazaCoin earlier this year

MazaCoin was developed in February by Payu Harris, a “web designer and digital currency trader” who is of both Lakota and Northern Cheyenne ancestry.  Proponents envision that MazaCoin could become the main, or even sole, currency in Lakota communities, as part of taking sovereign control over their economy back from the U.S. government.

There are about 100,000 Lakota (a.k.a. Sioux) in the U.S., about half of whom live on the Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and other reservations, mostly in North and South Dakota.  MazaCoin, however, is not being implemented by the official administering bodies of these reservations, which are regulated under the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (B.I.A.), but by the “Traditional Lakota Nation,” a sovereigntist group of the Oglala “band” or subgroup of the Lakota, who are based mostly on Pine Ridge, in South Dakota. 

Harris has said, “We’re on sovereign soil so we have the right to have Bitcoin, Litecoin, MazaCoin.”  But while Chase Iron Eyes, a legal counsel for the Lakota, agrees in principle, tempers that perspective with some pessimism.  “There hasn’t been a tribal nation that has declared its own currency and has mandated that that currency is used within its borders,” he says.  “But it’s because of this pervasive, ever-present asserted dominion of the United States.  They’ll try to shut us down, try to cite us with law violations.”  However, Iron Eyes is ready for the battle, adding, “We’ve gone through 100 years of imposed poverty.  That’s the fight we’re having.  What we’re trying to do with MazaCoin is just spark something to get us out of this cycle of victimhood.”  The Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations are among the most poverty-battered communities in the U.S., with sky-high rates of unemployment, substance abuse, and suicide.

The Lakota flag

A more quotidian challenge is developing a paper medium for the digital currency, in a community where few have computers, cell phones, or other devices that currencies like Bitcoin rely on.

At the moment, the status of MazaCoin is unclear.  Digital currencies are still mostly uncharted legal territory.  But it seems sure to prove controversial.  Nor is MazaCoin by any means the first foray into innovative approaches to sovereignty by the Oglala.  In the late 19th century, in response to the federal government’s unilateral slashing back of Lakota territories promised by treaty, followed by a deliberate economic blockade that threatened the community with starvation, Oglala and other Lakota adapted a Paiute religious ritual from Nevada called the Ghost Dance that purported to have the power to resurrect deceased warriors, render Lakota people bulletproof, and cleanse their land of the white invaders.  This prompted the U.S. military’s massacre of 300 unarmed Lakota, including women and children, in the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890.  In the early 1970s, during the height of the “Red Power” movement, an uprising on Pine Ridge against a corrupt reservation leadership in league with the feds spawned a protest encampment at the site of Wounded Knee that declared an Independent Oglala Nation.  In response, President Richard M. Nixon dispatched military snipers, tanks, and even a warplane to keep order, in the first deployment of U.S. troops against U.S. citizens on U.S. territory since the Civil War.  Three people were killed before the standoff ended.

In 1973 on Pine Ridge, shit got real.

Lakota people have continually refused to accept cash compensation for their lost lands, which include the sacred Black Hills.  There have been several declarations of independence, including a 1974 “Declaration of Continuing Independence of the Sovereign Native American Indian Nations,” signed at Standing Rock, and another by the Confederacy of the Black Hills in 1991, which also included Northern Cheyenne and Arapahoe communities.  In 2007, the former Libertarian presidential candidate Russell Means and three other Wounded Knee veteran activists declared an independent Lakota Sioux Nation of Indians, which today, after Means’s death, persists as a provisional government for a Republic of Lakotah covering vast, unceded territory.

The federal government has a very low tolerance for anything that seems like a competing currency.  In 2011, a self-described “ex-surfer guy” named Bernard von NotHaus, founder of the Free Marijuana Church of Honolulu, was convicted of counterfeiting for issuing something called the Liberty Dollar out of his self-described Royal Hawaiian Mint Company.  Just for good measure, the feds slathered on some “domestic terrorism” charges.  He currently awaits sentencing.

If this surfer dude’s play money brought charges of terrorism,
who knows how the feds will react to MazaCoin.

But the Lakota are not just a bunch of ex-surfer dudes.  They have never backed down from a fight.  We’ll be hearing more about MazaCoin.

Your tax dollars at work, 1890

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in mid 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Related articles from this blog:
“Florida Con Man Busted in New Guinea Ferrying ‘Funny Money’ to Self-Styled Bougainville ‘King’” (Feb. 2014)
“Shots Fired as French Authorities Arrest Tahitian ‘King’ Issuing His Own Currency” (Feb. 2014)
“EPA Extends Jurisdiction of Wind River Indian Reservation, Swallowing 3 Wyoming Towns” (Jan. 2014)
“Which Part of ‘Wet’suwet’en Territory’ Don’t They Understand?” (Nov. 2012)
“Obituary: Russell Charles Means (1939-2012)” (Oct. 2012)

North Dakota Neo-Nazi Separatist, Outed as 14% Black, Now on Hunger Strike

Let’s check in, shall we, on Paul Craig Cobb—he goes by Craig Cobb—the 62-year-old neo-Nazi white separatist from Canada who was eventually hounded by criminal charges to the minuscule hamlet of Leith, North Dakota, where, as reported in this blog a couple months ago, he intended to establish a racially pure enclave.  His idea was to make Leith into an autonomous whites-only town, and perhaps eventually to make all of North Dakota into a “white bastion” of the sort that has been dreamed of by white supremacists in places like the Pacific Northwest.  As Dr. Phil would say: how’s that been working out for you?  Not so well, as it turns out.

Craig Cobb (right)

First, Cobb made the mistake of assuming that Leith’s 24 residents were as bigoted as he was.  When he called Sherrill Harper, the wife of the town’s one African-American resident, Bobby Harper, “a filthy race-mixing white woman” and tried to intimidate Bobby into moving out, the community closed ranks against Cobb.  (The Harpers are both on the town council.)  Leith residents told Bobby Harper they “have his back” and formed a united front against Cobb, letting him know he was not welcome there.  Although Leith is isolated and in one of the most socially and politically conservative and demographically whitest parts of the country, its citizens have managed to make their town a byword for tolerance.

Location of Leith, in Grant County, North Dakota

Last year, when Cobb first moved to Leith, in southwestern North Dakota, it was via Montana from Canada, where he is wanted on charges of promoting racial hatred.  Cobb is a member of the Church of the Creator, which the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), an Alabama-based organization which monitors hate groups, classifies as neo-Nazi.  But it is not a typical white-supremacist organization.  Drawing on paganism and on the occult, Theosophy-based “Ariosophy” doctrines to which Adolf Hitler and his inner circle subscribed, Creativity, as the church’s ideology is known, also uses the jargon of American self-help and New Age movements and is more interested in home-grown American notions of a coming black-vs.-white “race war” than in traditional bugaboos of the Nazis such as Jews.

A sign on Cobb’s property refers to one of the 73 “credos” (chapters)
of the Church of the Creator’s 1981 holy text, The White Man’s Bible.

He bought a dilapidated off-grid house (no running water) for a song and also started buying up 13 other houses in a town so full of ancient derelict properties that some tourist guides put it on a list of “ghost towns.”  But Muriel Ulrich, Grant County’s property-tax assessor, thought something was fishy when he started selling the properties at a loss.  He sold houses for a dollar each to Tom Metzger, head of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), and to Alex Linder, a neo-Nazi who runs the white-supremacist Vanguard News Network (V.N.N.) website.  Cobb outright gave the cemetery next to his house to Jeff Schoep, who heads the fascist National Socialist Movement (N.S.M.).  Leith’s list of landowners was turning into a Who’s Who of modern American neo-Nazism.

Then the white-supremacist settlers started arriving, including April Gaede, a fellow “Creator” (as followers of the Church of Creator, oddly enough, call themselves) and Holocaust-denier who used to bring her pre-teen twin daughters Lynx and Lamb Gaede around to White Power rallies and music fests as a white-nationalist pop singing duo called Prussian Blue.  Gaede and her husband are vocal proponents of setting up an archipelago of all-white communes across the country under the name “Little Europe,” which quickly became a tentative name for the proposed racially-purified Leith.  (She is also a former B-movie actress who appeared in the 2003 straight-to-video horror flick Darkwalker.  Lynx and Lamb had cameos in that one, too, and are listed in the cast as playing “Creepy Twin” nos. 1 and 2.  This is where I need to interject that I am not making any of this up.  But keep reading.  It doesn’t even let up.)

Patience and Prudence they ain’t:
Lynx and Lamb Gaede of the white-supremacist pop due Prussian Blue

Leith banded together to find some way to eject him.  He was cited for the dereliction of his properties. He was fired from his construction job.  Things came to a head in mid-September when 350 people from North Dakota, Minnesota, and elsewhere held a rally in Leith to urge him to go.  Prominent among the organizers were American Indians from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.  Cobb and members of the N.S.M., including Schoep himself, held a counter-protest.  Cobb taunted one of the Sioux activists, James Testemary, saying, “You’re stumbling, and obviously drunk.  Have you been drinking?” and adding, “You have your sovereign land and your own nation.  Why is it wrong for us to have our sovereign land?”  A not incorrect, but irrelevant point, to be sure, but his logic broke down even further as he riffed, “How come we go all over the world with B-52s and B-1s in the name of democracy and call it world-building?  I’m doing village-building, except I’m not using violence.  Here’s this white guy trying to get 17 people together in a democracy who think like he does and they just go bananas, while there’s 50 million Mexicans running around.”  But I will spare you more of his ranting; you get the idea.

American Indians came out in force to stand up for tolerance in Leith.

Even apart from being a racist asshole, Cobb made some tactical public-relations errors.  He groundlessly accused one Leith resident of murdering his daughter; the young woman had actually been killed by her abusive husband.  That is hardly a way to make friends in a tight-knit community.  But Cobb’s biggest error was agreeing to appear on The Trisha Show, an N.B.C. talk show hosted by Trisha Goddard, a British T.V. personality of Caribbean ancestry who was raised in Tanzania.  The Harpers were brought onto the stage to confront Cobb, who referred to Bobby Harper as “her pet”; he also calls African Americans “orks” and, mysteriously, “strolling biological early warning devices.”  As part of the show’s “Race in America” segment, Cobb underwent genetic testing that revealed that he was only 86% “European” and 14% “sub-Saharan African.”  When Goddard moved in for a fist bump, saying, “You got a little black in you, bro,” he recoiled—either in fear of her cooties or because he believed Fox News (which he surely watches), which called Barack and Michelle Obama’s use of the gesture at a campaign stop in 2008 a “terrorist fist jab.”

Cobb called the test results “statistical noise” and “short science” (sic)—and is probably not likely to be convinced of it anyway, since understanding the data might involve accepting evolution ... plus the idea that all human beings are 100% African insofar as that is where humanity emerged.  Etc. etc.  But he seems to have taken the genomic results rather hard.  Though there are no legal grounds for forcing someone out of a town just because of his personal views (and nor should there be, to be sure), he and his fellow “Little Europeans” (which I’m sure is not what members of the Leith commune call themselves) were more and more isolated and more and more reviled.  On November 16th, Cobb sort of snapped.  He sent text messages to the local newspaper warning, “Because of the many violences [sic] and harassments against we [sic] and the children, we have commenced armed patrols of Leith”—and then he and a fellow white supremacist approached the home of another town councilman with rifles cocked.  911 was dialed, and the “patrolmen” were arrested and slapped with three counts, including terrorism.

This “neighborhood patrol” eventually segued into a perp walk.

The 62-year-old Cobb is now sitting in a jail cell in Stanton, in nearby Mercer County, awaiting trial on charges that could give him up to 35 years in prison.  At last report, he was refusing food.  By telephone, Cobb told an Associated Press reporter that, in A.P.’s words, “he is not on a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment—though he does feel he is wrongly accused—but is instead practicing mahasamadhi, a form of spiritual enlightenment in which the physical body is permanently left behind.  Cobb said that will happen for him at yuletide, another term for Christmas.”  The reporter may have mangled this; Creativity, which is anti-Christian, does not recognize Christmas in any form and instead celebrates “Festum Album” (not to be confused with “Festivus,” presumably), a week-long celebration of White Pride which begins December 26th.  Having stopped taking food on November 21st, he may not make it even until his preliminary hearing scheduled for December 9th.  As even Cobb’s own court-appointed attorney said, “To a certain degree, if he wants to starve himself, he can.”  I’m sure none of Leith’s long-standing residents will argue with that.

In happier times: Cobb, posing with some Estonian skinhead friends,
with the Church of the Creator flag

[You can read more about Cobbsville and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Obituary: Russell Charles Means (1939-2012)

Russell Means, the Lakota Sioux political activist, separatist leader, actor, author, and even United States presidential aspirant, died October 22nd at his home on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, at the age of 72.

Russell Means is on the far left.

Born on Pine Ridge in 1939, he grew up in California and in the late 1960s and early ’70s gained prominence as an early member and leader of the American Indian Movement (A.I.M.), the premier voice of the “Red Power” movement.  He was a central figure, along with Leonard Peltier and Dennis Banks, in actions such as the Trail of Broken Treaties, the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (B.I.A.) offices in Washington, D.C., and, in 1973, the months-long occupation of wounded Knee, South Dakota, which riveted the nation and became the most important act of American Indian resistance in the 20th century.  In it, an Independent Oglala Nation was declared and protesters demanded that the U.S. adhere to treaties which, if adhered to, would create a gigantic autonomous region for Sioux people in the northern Plains.  Two people were killed, and President Richard Nixon suppressed the uprising with the military, the only time since the Civil War that the U.S. military has used violence against U.S. citizens on U.S. territory.

Means confounded categories of political left and right.  Though he railed against American imperialism, he also cooperated with Ronald Reagan’s administration in documenting atrocities against Miskito Indians to demonize the Communist dictatorship in Nicaragua, and in 1987 he ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket, losing the nomination to Ron Paul, then an unknown.    He saw parallels between the libertarian cause and the Indian one, saying at one point, “So Indian policy has become institutionalized and the result has been that American people have become more dependent on government and that the American people have become more dependent on corporations.”

Politics makes strange bedfellows.

In 1992 he played Chingachgook opposite Daniel Day-Lewis’s Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans, and he also appeared in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers and in numerous other roles in film and television.  His 1995 autobiography Where White Men Fear to Tread was a best-seller.  

Means as Chingachgook, third from left

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]