A Knight in Dragonland

Alex White Plume, an Oglala Lakota living on the Pine Ridge Reservation, thought he had found a way to help lift his family out of poverty while providing housing for his community. He planted a field of industrial grade hemp containing only trace amounts of the psychoactive component THC.

The crop was intended for use on a demonstration house being built out of “hempcrete“, a mixture of industrial hemp, cement, lime, and sand. Pine Ridge has a housing shortage of as many as 2000 units. In one extreme case, an extended family of 23 shares a single trailer!

White Plume’s crop was to be the first home-grown hemp to be used in the hempcrete housing project. The initial hemp utilized had to be imported from Canada.

None of these circumstances mattered to the feds, though.

White Plume awoke to the sounds of helicopters. He looked out the window and saw a convoy of vehicles heading for his field.

He raced down to investigate, and was met by a slew of black-clad and heavily armed figures — 36 agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the US Marshal’s office.

When White Plume rolled down the window of his pick-up to ask what was going on, he says, one US marshal pointed a gun in his face. Meanwhile, the other agents chopped down each plant near the roots and hauled them away.

This scenario is wrong in so many ways.

First, the federal government is yet again stomping on the tribal sovereignty of the First Nations and violating long-standing treaties. The Pine Ridge tribal government had passed an ordinance allowing White Plume to plant his crop, and defined industrial hemp as hemp containing less than 1% THC (a quite reasonable definition, IMO). Testing proved that White Plume’s hemp easily made that grade. Unfortunately for White Plume, U.S. federal law and the D.E.A. make no such distinction.

If you’ll recall your American history, Pine Ridge was the location of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 as well as the AIM takeover and 71-day federal siege of the town in 1973. As if centuries of genocide and ethnic cleansing weren’t enough for America’s First Nations, our government apparently feels the need to kick them while they’re down and erode what little sovereignty they have left.

Second, Pine Ridge is an incredibly impoverished place with high rates of unemployment, drug & alcool abuse. Census data shows that almost 69% of Pine Ridge families live below the poverty line. This was a chance for Alex White Plume to lift himself out of that poverty through hard work and innovation.

You know … the American Dream???

Hat Tip: Tasiyagnunpa for Stumbling the story from Mother Jones.