(Stone Ridge, N.Y, July 3, 2025) — “First
Voices Radio” will have its final broadcast on Sunday, July 6, 2025.
The program, which was founded in 1992 by Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Cheyenne
River Lakota) has explored global topics and issues of critical
importance to the preservation and protection of Mother Earth presented
in the voices and from the perspective of the original peoples of the
world.
“First Voices Radio” has been airing weekly for the past 33 years and has most recently been heard on Sundays from 7 to 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Radio Kingston WKNY 1490 AM and 107.9 FM in Kingston, New York. The final episode will air on Radio Kingston and will stream live at https://radiokingston.org/.
(*DISCLAIMER: I don’t have an editor so please forgive typos, misspellings and such. I’m just the cook…)
July 4th, 2025, here we go again…
Today, America celebrates Independence Day, another 4th of July.
Images
of kid rock and ted nuggets offspring drunkenly filling backyards BBQ
parties with American flag themed swag, beer guts, store bought buckets
of processed mayonnaise salads, cheap American beer and ending with a
display fireworks made in China exploding over stolen land.
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Sioux Chef by Sean Sherman is a reader-supported publication. To
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Cue the collective amnesia wrapped in red, white, and blue with matching Target apparel.
fuck this guy...
But
let’s call out the hypocritical bullshit. This holiday was never about
freedom or to celebrate a country where “All Men Are Created Equal”.
On
this day in 1776, a bunch of privileged, land and money hungry white
dudes, most of them slaveowners, declared independence from a king who
was, frankly, getting in the way of their expansionist wet dreams. They
wanted free land, labor, and power and King George was keeping from
that vision by policing their illegal land surveying and their penchant
for inciting violence with the Indigenous communities which the king was
tired of funding.
So they wrote a breakup letter to the Mr George, aka the Declaration of Independence.
And in it, they conveniently left out a key few things, like slavery,
genocide, and the fact that most of what they were pissed about was not
being able to steal more land fast enough.
The Real Grievance was that Land Theft Was on Pause
Here’s the part they won’t teach you in school and distract with well funded fireworks shows. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, passed by King George III, recognized that Indigenous nations were sovereign and owned
the land west of the Appalachian Mountains. This wasn’t generosity, it
was damage control after the Seven Years’ War. But it really meant
colonists couldn’t just run around with rifles and manifest destiny
their way across Turtle Island.
That
document super pissed off the Founding Fathers. Washington, Jefferson,
Franklin and such weren’t revolutionaries, they were actually just real
estate investors with violent tendencies that leaned towards scorched
earth tactics to get their way. The Proclamation was like zoning laws
for thieves. So they got mad enough to write 1,458 words of dramatic
colonial fan fiction about freedom and being equal while holding human
beings in chain, forcing labor, and planning how to divvy up the West
after they un-alived all the “savages”.
When
they wrote the line in the Declaration of Independence that says
“merciless Indian savages,” they meant people like my ancestors, Lakota,
Cherokee, Shawnee, Muscogee, and countless more, who dared to defend
their homes and cultures from violent settler immigrants and their
relentless encroachments.
Canada
recognized Royal Proclamation as part of it’s constitution in 1982 and
the land rights of Indigenous citizens (to an extent), but the U.S. has
always ignored this proclamation and has instead based all of it’s land
ownership laws instead on the Doctrine of Discovery, which is the 1493
papal decree that gave Christian Europeans the divine right to claim any
land not ruled by other Christians. This colonial doctrine was
codified in Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), where the Supreme Court declared
that “discovery” by Europeans gave them ultimate title to Indigenous
lands, reducing Native nations to mere occupants without ownership.
This notion just solidifies our perspective that sovereignty has never
mattered in the eyes of U.S. law, and settler colonialism remains the
foundation.
(I've wrote about this before in my previous Substacks, but it’s important.)
Slavery: The Economic Engine of the Founding Fathers
The other thing missing from the Declaration? Any mention of the enslaved Africans who were literally building this country while being beaten, sold, raped, and worked to death.
The truth is that U.S. Independence meant an economic explosion in the business of slavery.
Once they kicked out the Brits, there were no more restrictions on how
big, brutal, and profitable the system could get. Cotton, sugar, rice,
all booming industries built on stolen labor and the bodies of Black
people.
From
1776 until the Civil War, the enslaved population ballooned from under a
million to nearly four million enslaved humans (men, women, elderly,
children and babies) and with that, so did the profits. By 1860,
enslaved people were worth more than $3 billion, more than the value of
every railroad, factory, and bank in the U.S. combined. And if you take
that value with inflation today, the value of enslaved and abused
humans were over $100 billion USD. Commodities like cotton, hand picked
from the fields by Black hands, made up 60% of U.S. exports and powered
the global economy. Northern banks, insurance companies, and shipping
firms got filthy rich underwriting and insuring that system. Enslaved
peoples weren’t just free labor, they were financial collateral, used to
secure loans and expand empires. So when people talk about America
being built on hard work and elbow grease, let’s be honest about whose work they’re really talking about.
Enter the Northwest Ordinance
11 years after writing the Declaration of Independence, in 1787, the newly formed U.S. government passed the Northwest Ordinance,
a sterile-sounding name for one of the largest land-grab legislations
in history. It opened up massive territories like Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, Michigan, all for white settlement. And spoiler alert, those
lands were already full of Indigenous nations who had been stewarding
those spaces for countless generations..
The
Ordinance pretended to be “orderly” and “moral”, it even banned slavery
in those territories (not out of compassion, but so that white settlers
didn’t get nervous, think of it like the start of white suburbia).
Meanwhile, it laid the groundwork for displacement, removal, broken
treaties, and outright warfare against Indigenous communities because of
greed. It’s the legal ancestor of the Trail of Tears, Indian boarding
schools, and today’s pipeline projects and selling off of National park
lands to the fossil fuel and lumber industries (aka the billionaires).
From 1776 to 2025, Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
Let’s
fast-forward to today, exactly 249 years from the date of the
Declaration of Independence. And guess what? Colonialism has never
ended. It just got better PR, state controlled media, an army of red
Chinese hats, and a shit hairpiece in the lead.
We’ve been hearing about Project 2025
for a while now, it started as a little-known (but very real) blueprint
being pushed by right-wing think tanks and Trump’s allies. But this
isn’t just a policy proposal. It’s a modern-day Declaration of Authoritarianism. And with Trump’s political momentum and court-packed backing, it’s already a reality.
We’re witnessing in real time:
The dismantling of federal agencies (goodbye EPA, hello climate collapse)
The erasure of LGBTQ+ rights
The shredding of reproductive protections
The
militarization of ICE into a obscenely funded domestic Gestapo (to use
at the every whim of our senile orange fascist in power)
The purge of civil servants and installation of loyalist lapdogs in every corner of government
And now, with the passing of Trump’s so-called “big beautiful bill”,
we’re seeing the final lock click into place. Buried under patriotic
soundbites and media distraction is a sweeping expansion of executive
power, funneling billions into ICE and border militarization, stripping
regulatory checks, slashing judicial independence, and giving the
President unprecedented control over federal agencies. This bill isn’t
governance. It’s a coup for a fascist regime.
It’s
not just about deportations, weak borders, or who’s eating the pets,
it’s about remaking America into an ethno-nationalist surveillance state
where dissent is punished, history is rewritten, and democracy is
reduced to a media stage prop.
Let’s
be clear: this bill, alongside Project 2025, is a direct threat to the
very idea of the U.S. Constitution. It paves the road toward the
collapse of the so-called “great experiment” in democracy and replaces
it with a Christian nationalist, corporate-backed, climate-denying
police regime.
Billions
are being shoveled into ICE and border enforcement, not to solve real
problems, not to reunite families, but to criminalize brown and
Indigenous bodies and feed the beast of white supremacy with new
uniforms, newer cages, and the newest surveillance tech to match.
This
was never about “securing the border,” it was always about securing a
vision of America where white Christian men call the shots, everyone
else obeys, and the only history that matters starts in 1776 and ends
with them in power. Forever…
So What Does Freedom Mean Now?
Freedom
as absolutely nothing to do with grilling fucking hot dogs under a flag
stitched with violence, stolen land, and stolen bodies. “Liberty” for
billionaires and prison for the rest of us is a more accurate
description of where we are now. We have to stand together and stop
pretending this country started with democracy when it was actually born
with genocide in one hand and slavery in the other.
So let’s flip the script.
Let’s talk about creating a modern day model and Declaration of Interdependence. One where:
LANDBACK: Indigenous nations get their land back. (I say start with the Black Hills and all National Parks and move from there)
Black communities receive real lasting reparations—not
as guilt payouts, but as overdue justice with free education (not
Eurocentric education), healthcare, housing justice, and of course
healthcare.
Borders get abolished
as colonial scars. People deserve to move, live, and thrive without ICE
at their door. All Black, Indigenous and People of color should get
special passports enabling them to live and work in any fucking country
in the Americas they choose.
Food, water, and housing become basic human rights, not just luxury items.
Education Sovereignty to take the place of whitewashed textbooks and patriotic gaslighting.
And while we’re at it, let’s declare independence from Project 2025, Trumpism, and every system that treats human beings like collateral damage.
We can make this Project 2026.
Still Here. Still Fighting.
SEAN!
They tried to erase us. But here we still are.
They can label us as criminals by creating new laws in their favor, but we’ve always lived through those lies and propaganda.
We’re
still here. We’re building food systems from the soil up. We’re making
art, making beautiful babies, making real fucking change. We’re cooking
with ancestral knowledge. We’re planting seeds that outlive evil
empires. We’re tired of eurocentrism and we want to celebrate our
diversities globally.
We
survived smallpox blankets, forced removals, plantation slavery,
boarding schools, and we can survive Trump and his billionaire cronies,
ICE raids and spineless politicians. We’re not going anywhere.
So
while they light up the sky tonight and pretend we live in the world’s
greatest country, free and independent, let’s remember our warriors and
leaders who found their voices, fought with every bit of strength they
had, and died for all of us.
Action Steps (for those not too busy watching fireworks):
Vote like your life depends on it—because it might.
Fund mutual aid.
Support Indigenous and Black-led orgs (like NATIFS.org, for example just saying)
Push for sanctuary policies in your city.
Call out white supremacist policies wrapped in “freedom” branding.
Teach your kids real history.
Teach yourself if you didn’t get it in school.
Organize.
Show up.
Speak up and Don’t look away.
Now is not the time to feel hopelessness, now is the time to rise up as community and fuck up some Nazis.
The
Sioux Chef by Sean Sherman is a reader-supported publication. To
receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid
subscriber.
The
Sioux Chef by Sean Sherman is a reader-supported publication. To
receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid
subscriber.
