In Council, on the Spring Equinox, March 21, 2008, on ancestral lands now called
Silver City, New Mexico, we issue this

Unanimous Declaration of Independence of the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation.

I. Introduction

When in the course of history it becomes necessary for one people to shuffle off their status as a domestic dependency and to assume among other nations the separate and equal station to which positive laws and the laws of nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of humanity requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

II. Preamble

We, the people of the Chiricahua Ndeh Nation, the descendants of the original inhabitants and stewards of what is now called southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people, Indian and non-Indian, are created equal by Usen, that they are endowed by Usen with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, property, and culture. To secure these rights, governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed and from the eternal principles of creation, and whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right as well as the duty of the people to alter or to abolish it, or to modify their relationship to it in order to establish a new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety, to preserve their national identity, and to honor their ancestors and their relationship to Usen.

The desire for peace requires that claims of sovereignty long established should not be modified or challenged for light and transient causes. But the need for justice is even greater, and when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce a people and maintain them under conditions of dependency, poverty, and cultural deprivation, it is their right and their duty to modify their relationship to such a government and to provide new institutions for their future security, prosperity, cultural integrity, and relationship to Usen. Such has been the patient sufferance of the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation for nearly two centuries, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their relationship to the United States and its political subdivisions. The history of U.S. treatment of the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all directed to the depopulation and expropriation of Chiricahua Apache Ndeh lands and the destruction of Chiricahua Apache Ndeh government and culture. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:

III. Bill of Particulars

The U.S. has employed the legal fiction of “discovery” coupled with genocidal wars to claim ultimate title to the lands and resources granted us by Usen, which range from a point in southeastern Arizona near present-day Nogales and then north and east into New Mexico to the vicinity of present-day Los Lunas and then south to the vicinity of present-day El Paso and then west back to the point near Nogales.

The U.S. has imposed alien rule and colonies throughout our lands by way of aggressive and genocidal wars, driven many of us into diaspora and away from our ancestral lands, and now maintains settlers upon our lands without our consent while denying us the power of jurisdiction over them.  The U.S. and its political subdivisions have repeatedly effected the involuntary resettlement of Chiricahua Apache people and the division and dispersion of the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation to deprive us of our rights to political, economic, and cultural association, and to further injure us in the possession and stewardship of our ancestral lands.

The U.S., without trial or judicial process, incarcerated our ancestors and deliberately subjected them to starvation and diseases to further reduce our population, and continues to deny any legal responsibility to provide a remedy.

The U.S. has taken Chiricahua Apache children away from their families for the express purpose of alienating future generations from their ancestors and thereby eroding the culture and political integrity of the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation.

The U.S. has unlawfully claimed the plenary power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever and has impose its laws upon the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation, a sovereign people, against our will and in contravention of its own laws as well as international law.

The U.S. has interfered with the exercise of our independent and natural political powers to make those laws which we deem wholesome and necessary for the good of the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation.

The U.S. has used a system known as “federal Indian law” as a weapon to facilitate and ratify centuries of military and judicial assaults on the sovereignty of the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation, and to foreclose remedies for its misconduct.

The U.S. has disrupted and prohibited the trade of the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation with our ancestral trading partners across the North and Central American continent.

The U.S. has imposed taxes upon us without our consent.

The U.S. and its assigns have plundered the lands of the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation for their natural resources and taken from future generations their material and spiritual patrimony.

IV. Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Independence

For each of these oppressions the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation has petitioned for redress only to be denied a remedy. This causes us great pain, for at its best, and despite its imperfections, the U.S. is an exceptional and decent nation. Many of us have rendered military service to, and shed our blood for the survival of, the United States. We are proud of this service and hope to be able to encourage future generations to continue this tradition. At the same time, we seek peace and prosperity together with all people and all nations. Many of us were born, and hope to remain, citizens of the United States as well as citizens of the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation, and nothing in this Declaration is intended to prejudice this possibility.

Accordingly, even now if the U.S. were to acknowledge, recognize responsibility for, and repair the gross injustices suffered by the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation, we stand willing to grant forgiveness. The U.S. and the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation can build a relationship that advances on the basis of a recognition of, and respect for, mutual sovereignties, with disputes resolved not by coercion and domination but by negotiation and harmonization, and by the full flowering of justice and prosperity of both peoples. A new era of just peace and brotherhood can and should follow this Declaration. 

Until then, however, we, the People of the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation, unified and together, must conclude just as did the author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, so powerfully more than two centuries ago, that we are obliged to hold the U.S., “as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends” and allies.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation, in Council, appealing to Usen to make pure our aims and powerful our actions, in the name, and by authority of, the people of the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation, solemnly publish and declare that the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation, which consists of a population, a territory, a government, and a capacity to enter into international relations, is and of right ought to be a free, independent, and sovereign nation. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Usen, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

SIGNED THIS 21 st DAY OF MARCH, IN THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND EIGHT:

William Bradford

STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES: CHIRICAHUA APACHE NDEH NATION

(1) Indian nations, including the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation, are fully sovereign, co-equal members of the international legal system that predate the settler-state erected around them. As a consequence they are entitled to exercise sovereignty unbounded by the unilateral discretion of the states within which they have been subsumed and unlimited by any power or ideology on earth save for the fundamental norms of international law that restrict the sovereign prerogatives of all states through the operation of human rights regimes and humanitarian legal instruments.

(2) Indian nations, including the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation, enjoy the natural right to be left in peace to enjoy the freedom with which they had been endowed by nature, and they are impressed with the corresponding universal duty to respect the territorial integrity and political independence of all other law-abiding nations.

(3) Any theory of international law that embraces the primacy of the contemporary system of states to the injury of indigenous prior sovereigns, and in particular the legal authority of the U.S. and its political subdivisions over the affairs of Indian nations within exercised without their consent, thereby contravenes the natural legal rights of Indian nations.

(4) Federal Indian law, an applied positivist theory of international law territorially limited by the military power of the U.S. and designed to facilitate and ratify centuries of military and judicial assaults on indigenous sovereignty, has degenerated so far from its naturalist roots as to merit the brand of an evil legal system and can no longer serve as the basis for relations between the U.S. and Indian nations.

(5) As a matter of international law, Indian nations’ sovereignty predates the sovereignty of the settler-state that now asserts power over them notwithstanding the contrary pronouncements of the legislature or courts of their conqueror. Accordingly, recognition of the full international legal personality of Indian tribes requires simply the restoration of natural legal rights that predate the modern states-system rather than a contemporary creation of international law or a delegation of power from other states.

(6) Indian sovereignty, as a natural legal entitlement, cannot be divested save for in a overt, voluntary, and mutually agreed-upon manner consistent with natural international legal principles, such as by a treaty procured without fraud or duress. Forcible deprivation of Indian sovereignty, as well as judicial pronouncements of implied divestiture, are ineffective as a matter of domestic and international law.

(7) As a logical consequence of the premise that Indian nations possess and are entitled to the unimpeded exercise and enjoyment of their sovereignty and full international legal personality, nearly every law made by Congress and nearly every case decided by the Supreme Court over the last two centuries seeking to impose or sanctioning the imposition of authority over Indians without their consent is merely an exercise of power and not law.

(8) The United States has international legal duties to rescind and repudiate laws and judicial opinions purporting to impede the recognition and free exercise of Indian sovereignty and to recognize Indian nations as sovereigns. For the breach of these duties, Indian nations, including the Chiricahua Apache Ndeh Nation, are entitled to a remedy.

(9) Should the United States refuse to voluntarily renounce its unilateral claims to govern Indian Country without the consent of the governed, secession and the declaration of formal legal and political independence is a lawful option for those Indian nations that should elect it.