When I was a kid, we used to go to the Saturday matinee movies at the local theater. For 10 cents we would be entertained from ten o’clock in the morning until three or four in the afternoon. We watched all sorts of things — cartoons, serials and adventure/war movies, but mostly westerns. Our heroes were Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger. One of the standard western scenarios was the Indian bad guys attacking innocent white settlers. We were never told why the Indians hated us whiteys and wanted to kill us. Was it for our freedom and our values? Neither in the movies nor in our schools did they tell us that the Europeans simply stole the continent from the Indians by force. No way. After all, we were the good guys, so the Indians had to be the bad guys in our little matinee morality plays.

Now the Indians are turning the tables on their pale-face masters:

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free — provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.

The treaties signed with the United States are merely “worthless words on worthless paper,” the Lakota freedom activists say on their website.

The treaties have been “repeatedly violated in order to steal our culture, our land and our ability to maintain our way of life,” the reborn freedom movement says.

Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said.

“This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution,” which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, he said.

“It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent,” said Means.

The Lakota relaunched their journey to freedom in 1974, when they drafted a declaration of continuing independence — an overt play on the title of the United States’ Declaration of Independence from England.

Thirty-three years have elapsed since then because “it takes critical mass to combat colonialism and we wanted to make sure that all our ducks were in a row,” Means said.

One duck moved into place in September, when the United Nations adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples — despite opposition from the United States, which said it clashed with its own laws.

“We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children,” Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977, told the news conference.

The US “annexation” of native American land has resulted in once proud tribes such as the Lakota becoming mere “facsimiles of white people,” said Means.

Secession from Empire is obviously not a new idea. It was, as ironic as it might seem today, the essence of the American Revolution. But the legitimacy of the idea of secession (local freedom) has been crushed in the domain of public discourse by Lincoln’s violent success in preventing the South from abandoning the union. Secession is a peaceful act. It merely says that I no longer wish to be politically associated with you and will act in the future in accord with that wish. Keeping me from withdrawing is an act of violence directed against my free choice. Let’s see how the US Empire deals with the Lakota this time. You can be sure it will be a mixture of legal threats and offers of billions of taxpayers’ dollars to stay in the union. Joining the Lakota looks like a great way to avoid international wars and the IRS. Maybe we should all sign up.