Horses and the Unity Ride for Peace

The Dakota Nation is one of the most active and productive First Nations in North America. Not only do the North Dakota bands woirk with other indigenous groups to produce a large amount of oil for American consumption, but the Canadian band offers the Unity Riders to encourage people of all origins to cooperate in spreading peace.

In America and Canada, we are all North Americans united by common languages, ancestries, and even participation in wars. We also have much to share across differing cultures and customs. We import and export billions of dollars worth of goods between the two nations. Medical patients from both nations travel to the other for treatments and medicines. Dakota Nation would like us to share more and end war and conflict for all time. Dakota people would like North America to be an example to the world.

In 1996, Chief Arvol Looking Horse led horsemen in a Unity Ride and Day of Prayer. The Bigfoot Riders from the Wahpeton Dakota Reservation rode with him from Saskatchewan Province in Canada to Grey Horn Butte, Wyoming (called Devils Tower on today's maps).

Since that time, a Unity Ride prayer has been hosted in other countries, including Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and Japan. The chief was spiritual led to pray to the Creator to heal the Earth and to the relationships between her people.

As Chief of the Lakota/Dakota,/Nakota Nation of Sioux, Looking Horse knows that this healing is important for remedy of the long past of centuries-old woundedness among Native North Americans and Euorpean-Americans.

The 2013 Unity Ride began at Albany, New York on July 27 in order to join with Eastern US Native American groups and will make several stops, including a major visit at the United Nations site in NYC.

The Haudenousaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) and non-Indian friends launched two long lines of canoes in Troy NY on the day following the horse riders' start, in order to accompany the riders down the Hudson River Valley.

Both men and women paddle the canoes in memory of the Two Row Wampum Treaty. Canoes and horses will meet along the way several times at events hosted by communities along the route to NYC.

The International Code for Sacred Sites was scheduled for reading and presentation at the United Nations on August 9, 2013.

At least two pow wow-type festivals will be visited on the journey, aling with a World Walk for Peace, and the Unity Riders would like to travel on to Washington DC.

For the full agenda of the combined Unity Ride and Day of Prayer, see the schedule.

The Two Row Wampum belt is the symbolic recording made by the Haudenosaunee people. Traditionally, wampum is a currency for trade. It is also a means of recording important events.

The Two row Wampum belt records the first agreement made between European explorers and Native North American Indian Nations on Turtle Island (North America).

The year 2013 is the 400th anniversary of this first covenant treaty made between Indigenous Peoples and European explorer-settlers in 1613.

Far more Dakota people live in two Canadian Provinces than in the small groups in the USA. The Indian Removal Acts of the 1800s and the Dakota War of 1862 made this so.

The Dakota War of 1862 was a headache and a heartache for Abraham Lincoln, a man already run into the ground by the war, politics, and family tragedies.

No matter what he decided as punishment or not punishment for the Dakotas, Lincoln would have been hated more than he already was hated by factions and special interests. As it was, the President was expected to execute hudnreds of Native Amerians attempting to defend their land ven after being starved out and unpaid for it by the Minnesota government.

The Santee Sioux (Dakota) in Minnesota sold 24+ million acres to the US Federal Government and were not paid for most of it.

Settlers arrived and the Dakota were pushed off their lands by the State. Their remaining agricultural crops along thir new home the Minnesota River failed and federal Indian agents held back food, because under President Lincoln, they could have no more kickbacks.

Many Dakotas died of starvation, including children. The remaining men, with little else to lose, began a war against the state and national givernments.

After an all out Indian war, Lincoln chose to hang 38 instead of 303 Dakotas. Descendants of the remiander of the 303 that were shipped around three or four states after serving prison terms live today in South Dakota. There, they are blocking roads needed to transport parts for the Keystone pipeline that will transport polluting coal tar sands. The blockade is in protest most of all for illegal transportation activities and next, pollution.

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In remembrance and tribute to the execution of 38 Dakotas, the Sacred Dakota Unity Riders complete a yearly pilgrimage on horseback in winter to the execution site at Fort Snelling in Menkato, Minnesota.

Th journey is long enough for the men on horseback - 300+ miles - but women also walk the Trail of Tears road to Menkato. When they arrive, they cry what they feel are Sacred Tears for the executed men.