Santee Dakota “Man Without a Country”

Many Indigenous Red "Indian" Nations signed "peace" documents with the u.s. government, agreeing to move onto “reservations”, which enabled the government and their American citizenry to move onto and profit from billions of acres of resource-rich land.

A condition of these agreements was to guarantee the Indigenous Red Peoples forever free, adequate and total health care (this led to the creation of the "Indian Health Service" IHS). These agreements have often been violated by dishonest government agents. Efforts to deny Indigenous peoples their rights and nationhood have been ongoing for many years.

During the early 1990's, the IHS system was almost dissolved by nefarious efforts of Hillary Clinton to deny Indigenous Peoples their just and historic rights by lumping them into "poor white", welfare status totally under the public health service (it was long believed that the “democrats” were somehow more passionate than their counterparts in the republican party).

In Sioux City, Iowa today live four thousand Santee Dakota Indians. The Santee represent the vast majority of Indigenous residents living in Sioux City today (the area is originally Yankton DaNakota "Sioux" homelands). The Santee are a refugee people, originally hailing from the now wealthy and profitable Minneapolis, MN to Bismarck, ND region. The Santee home reservation is located 150 miles from Sioux City in northern Nebraska, with its largest community being "Santee, Nebraska". Today, an overwhelming majority of Santee's live in Sioux City – nearly four thousand - than the mere four hundred souls who live within the reservation boundaries, itself.

Over the past two decades, attempts have been made (and, unfortunately, quite successfully) by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to diminish health care rights to Indigenous citizens through deceptive and vicious means. The BIA is a government bureaucracy within the interior department (formerly department of war) who oversee IHS operations on Indian reservations. The “bureau” is a recent party to a suit filed which demands accounting of billions of dollars in “Indian money” which mysteriously disappeared into Swiss bank accounts of bureaucrats, legislators and presidents alike, making the “enron” deal seem like a gift from god.
Illegal rules were created by the BIA to provide health services to only members of "federally recognized Indian tribes" - and denied to those who were actually "Indian" but not registered on any official government roles, such as the Ponca Nation who were "terminated as a tribe" in the 1960's (the Santee in Nebraska were ordered to a reservation directly upon Ponca Nation homelands in northern Nebraska). The plan caved in when numerous “un-enrolled” Indians entering hospitals demanded service, which created a public relations issue. (Later, the Ponca would be "reinstated" by the u.s. government as a "tribe [not nation] of people").

When these efforts failed, the BIA/IHS started rules which tried to deny inherent rights based upon logistics - if you didn't live on the reservation, you could not get assistance from the HIS facility- more public relations nightmares.

Indians were forced by the thousands to leave behind their nationhood and submit to getting "social security cards" - or be denied access to government jobs and IHS health services (this problem still lingers and plagues Indigenous citizens).

In March of 2003, a well-known Santee Dakota man by the name of Emmett Saul, went into an IHS hospital located in Winnebago NE (20 miles to the south of Sioux City, home of the "Winnebago" Ho Cank Nation people), complaining of abdominal pains. He was immediately referred and transferred to a large, adequate Sioux City private hospital, Mercy Medical Center, for emergency gall bladder surgery. A few days later as he recuperated, he telephoned Santee health clinic to inquire about the billing process. Santee clinic employees stated he was not covered as a Santee because he was living outside a concocted "twenty mile radius" of Santee NE. They informed Emmett to call "Winnebago" or the "Omaha" tribe (they didn't even have the phone numbers) to see if they could cover his medical expenses. Although they knew they couldn't help him, they continued to try to push him off on another bureaucracy and ignore his needs. Emmett was stunned. He was not prepared to incur major hospital expenses. His credit rating would plummet. He cannot buy a car on credit, let alone a home. His children suffer. His marriage may strain. All because of personal policy-making by a worthless bureaucrat in Washington DC.