NDN Collective announces all charges dismissed against CEO Tilsen

RAPID CITY—NDN Collective sent out a press release last week indicating that their CEO Nick Tilsen had had all charges dismissed stemming from a July 2020 protest incident at Mount Rushmore during the visit of then President Donald Trump. Generally, when you type any noted personality’s name into a search engine you get the positive as well as the negative, but it is difficult to find much of anything negative about Tilsen. The high-profile activist has been highly successful at courting controversy and attention while getting the public to view him favorably, and keeping most of the media from challenging his Land Back narrative.

Tilsen is alleged to have led protestors in shutting down an access road to Mt Rushmore during Trump’s appearance. The National Guard forcibly removed the protestors and arrested 19 of them, Tilsen included. 

He was charged with seven crimes and faced what was reported by many news outlets as 16 or 17 years in prison.

Tilsen’s response was, “This was a politically and racially motivated prosecution to begin with because they don’t like the power that we’re building, and the Land Back movement, and they don’t like the power that we’re building among Indigenous people. So, they’ve clearly targeted me.”

Tilsen has never explained by what legally achievable measures the land in the Black Hills could be returned and has given no indication he is familiar with the legal history back to when attorney Ralph Case first represented the tribes concerning the return of the Black Hills back in the 1920’s. But media have identified Tilsen as the face of a new Native movement dedicated to the return of the Black Hills.

Tilsen is no stranger to working the system to get huge grants from renowned granting foundations. His grandfather was a Wasicu attorney who came to the reservation in support of AIM a half century back, and Tilsen was raised in an activist savvy environment, where a Lakota mother insured he would not be an outsider, like his father and grandfather, but an enrolled tribal member with the smarts and skills to create platforms to build deeply funded coalitions and fight perceived injustices against the Lakota people. There has not been an activist personality of Tilsen’s caliber since the AIM heyday of the mid-1970’s.

Tilsen has his rhetoric finely honed: “My case held a mirror up to the so-called legal system, where prosecutors – fueled by white fragility and fear of Indigenous power – wasted years of state resources to intimidate, criminalize, and violate me. The fact that I’ve gone from facing 17 years in prison to all charges dismissed is not a coincidence or an act of justice – it’s evidence that the charges were bogus from the start. We only won because we had effective tools and a strong network to fight them and did not back down until we had exhausted the system that was built to exhaust us.”

Relocating from his reservation to Rapid City, Tilsen has attempted to ingratiate himself to the 20,000 strong Rapid City Indian Community with mixed reaction from that community. There is little doubt NDN Collective intends to use their big grant funding of $60 million from two separate sources to impact the lives of tribal members directly, as they state in their press release: “In the past year alone, the organization has opened Rapid City’s first Indigenous-led school, granted $19.4 million to Indigenous people fighting for liberation across Turtle Island, began investing into sustainable housing solutions for Rapid City’s unsheltered community, sent a delegation to the United Nations Climate Change conference, mobilized people to stand up to systemic racism in Rapid City resulting in a federal civil rights lawsuit, and much more.”

Above and beyond these objectives is the Land Back campaign, and this is where it is hard to find any quotes or activities that speak to the understanding necessary to achieve this objective. Tilsen said, “I will continue fighting for the Black Hills to be returned to the Lakota people, and for all rightful Indigenous land to be returned to its people across Turtle Island.”

How will Tilsen fight for the return of the Black Hills when he has no connection to the legally trained minds of tribal members who fought for the return of the Black Hills? Mario Gonzalez, an enrolled member of Tilsen’s tribe, whose 11^th hour injunction stopped the Hills from being sold back in June of 1980, does not even know Tilsen, even though Gonzalez has a downtown Rapid City office and all you have to do is knock on his office door. In traditional Lakota culture Gonzalez is Ciye, the older, and Tilsen, misun, the younger, and respectfully obligated to honor an older Lakota, especially perhaps the leading expert on the legal and treaty history of the Black Hills. Other Lakota activists, like Canupa, honor this relationship with Gonzalez.

It would take an act of Congress to return the Black Hills, twice tried in the 1980’s, by the Bradley Bill and the Martinez Bill, both bills largely written by Gonzalez. The reasons these bills failed are bad history to be repeated unless today’s activists study and understand that history. But the nuanced particulars that would indicate that understanding are missing from their rhetoric and so those quotes cannot be supplied here.

At some point NDN Collective will probably unveil a comprehensive, realistic strategy to get back the Black Hills. But this has yet to be formulated and shared, at least publicly.

(Contact James Giago Davies at skindiesel@msn.com)

The post NDN Collective announces all charges dismissed against CEO Tilsen first appeared on Native Sun News Today.

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