International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine
Just a few months before the opening of the first official World's Fair in the United States (May 10 to November 10, 1876), officially named the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine, on February 8, 1876, General Sheridan had telegraphed Generals Crook and Terry, ordering them to commence their winter campaigns against the Lakota people of The Black Hills of South Dakota, or "hostiles", according to the US military, thus starting The Great Sioux War of 1876–77.
While those visiting the Memorial Hall art exhibition on 25-26 June 1876 may have admired the art of Félix Parra, celebrating the first "Protector of the Indians", they would not have known until reports in the press came through on the 7th July, of the outcome of The Battle of the Little Bighorn.
This military action, known to the Lakota and other Plains Indians as the Battle of the Greasy Grass and also commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was an armed engagement between combined forces of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army.
The battle, which resulted in the defeat of US forces, was the most significant action of the Great Sioux War of 1876, taking place on June 25–26, 1876, along the Little Bighorn River in the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana Territory.
The causes of this Black Hills War included the the desire of the U.S. government to obtain ownership of the Black Hills. Gold had been discovered in the Black Hills, settlers began to encroach onto Native American lands, and the Sioux and Cheyenne refused to cede ownership to the U.S.
As far as the U.S. government was concerned, in the centennial year of the American Revolution, the products of "soil and mine" outweighed the rights of the Lakota people. So it was in Las Casas experience during the original colonisation of the Americas by the Spaniards in the 16th century.
In 1514, Las Casas was studying a passage in the book Ecclesiasticus
for a Pentecost sermon and pondering its meaning:
"If one sacrifices from what has been wrongfully obtained, the offering is blemished; the gifts of the lawless are not acceptable. ... Like one who kills a son before his father's eyes is the man who offers sacrifice from the property of the poor. The bread of the needy is the life of the poor; whoever deprives them of it is a man of blood." 34:18–22
Russell Means (1939-2012), the American-Indian (Oglala Sioux) activist and actor (Chief Chingachgook in "The Last of the Mohicans") is of one of the country's most famous Native Americans.
In this unscripted monologue, delivered June 9, 1993 from a junk site in Gallup, New Mexico, Means (then 54) calls our attention to environmental injustices, telling us that even western science has verified that the earth is a living organism in space (as Dr. James Lovelock, and then Dr. Lynn Margulis, hypothesized in the 1970's about the planet's interacting systems, defining the Gaia Theory).
Means tells us, "Mother Earth is what its all about...She's a live being... She hurts, she feels, like you and I."
The monologue was originally shown at the end of the play, "Wheels Over Indian Trails" based on his life. Coming from a long oral tradition, Means felt information, especially that about the big environmental picture, shared by all life on earth, should be out there, free to be heard. He liked the Internet age for that reason.
