Industrial Hemp: The "Standing Silent Nation"

Hemp, the “standing silent nation” as the Lakotas call it, has tens of thousands of uses, from superior textiles and cosmetics to biodegradable plastics. It is environmentally friendly, requiring no pesticides, little water and fertilizer and no herbicides. It controls erosion, produces huge amounts of biomass and oxygen, and replaces trees in making not just paper products, but building materials. That wild-eyed revolutionary Henry Ford actually built a CAR out of hemp! Yet growing industrial hemp remains illegal in the US.

The White Plumes, a hard-working family, hoped to lift themselves and their fellows out of the grinding poverty of their windswept, hardscrabble reservation land – much of it unsuited to either farming or livestock.

Unemployment in the Pine Ridge Reservation where the White Plumes live is 85 percent. Clearly, hemp production could create desperately needed and creative alternatives to poverty and despair, now that the buffalo are gone.

Deborah White Plume says: “As hemp is a multi-BILLION dollar a year industry, it very well can take our people – as a Nation – out of poverty and dependence. Perhaps THAT is why the US does not want us to grow hemp. If we have resources as a Nation, we won’t need welfare AND we might fight for our land, water, treaty.”

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[ more ] article w/pictures of Drug Enforcement Administration raiding an Industrial Hemp farm, on sovereign Native American Soil.