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All the tribes tell the same story. They are surrounded on all sides, the game is destroyed or driven away; they are left to starve, and there remains but one thing for them to do - fight while they can.

I'm Lakota Sioux.

This is going to sound weird, but when I was a kid my old man used to tell us that he was a Sioux Indian warrior in his former life. Native American culture was always big in my house - I don't know why.

I represent nine sovereign Sioux tribes. In South Dakota, some of the tribes are in the most remote, rural areas of the country. They lack essential infrastructure. Some communities don't even have clean drinking water.

I am a Shawnee. My forefathers were warriors. Their son is a warrior. From them, I take my only existence.

What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50 million years. It's about leading and connecting people and ideas. And it's something that people have wanted forever.

Before the rise of the nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them.

The greatest of all the Sioux in my time, or in any time for that matter, was that wonderful old fighting man, Sitting Bull, whose life will some day be written by a historian who can really give him his due.

Land of opportunity, land for the huddled masses where would the opportunity have been without the genocide of those Old Guard, bristling Indian tribes?

Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless.