An expose of bad businesses and their unethical practices

This is a story that is almost too painful to write. The Lakota tribe has withdrawn from its treaties with the United States and essentially declared the land of the Lakota to be a sovereign nation. This will certainly rile some people, just on the face of it, but I am not one of them. Let us consider the ethics that were involved in those treaties, essentially business deals with the Lakota, finalized by our government.

The initial tactics leave something to be desired, of course. Essentially, the Europeans came to this continent with a superior technology and incredibly superior diseases. Both those advantages were used to drastically reduce the numbers of Native Americans, making it easier to move them out of the way of the rapidly proliferating European settlers. We were so efficient at this task that we nearly wiped an entire culture off the face of the Earth.

I understand that times were different then, but the concept of armed theft was well known, nonetheless. It was not considered to be good ethics, even then. Later, biological warfare came to be viewed with even more disdain, but that is essentially what the Europeans used to decimate the Native Americans with their diseases. The same government that perpetrated much of this wanton destruction later famously took Bill Gates to court because they did not like his tactics. Go figure.

Pondering the ethics of the European plunder of the Americas is like being assigned to write a university test essay with the following descriptive instructions: “Ethics and the Perpetrators of the Holocaust – Explain, Compare, and Contrast.” There is absolutely no way to look at the beginnings of this story and not see Bad Business writ large.

All of that said, we are many generations past the ancestors that performed these ethical travesties. We, the descendents, cannot be blamed directly for the misdeeds of our forbears. Still, one can see why the Lakota might be a little annoyed…