A Statement of Duty Under Treaty, Law, and Ancestral Obligation

The Actions of Gichi Ogimaa Midegah Ogichidaa

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As told by the O’Jiibwaay Grand Council

On May 25, 2023, Gichi Ogimaa Midegah Ogichidaa appeared before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in Taylor v. Haaland, Case No. 20-3775 (TFH) and formally filed a Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order on behalf of the Red Bear Pembina Band and related Pembina Chippewa heirs. Acting under inherited treaty authority, he sought to halt the imminent disbursement of settlement funds connected to the Pembina Judgment Settlement, asserting that the underlying treaty obligations particularly those arising from the 1863 Old Crossing Treaty and the rejected 1892 McCumber Agreement had never been lawfully resolved. The motion requested a pause in payment to prevent irreparable harm, arguing that distribution would permanently foreclose judicial review, extinguish inherited rights without consent, and ratify agreements never accepted by the principal title holders. His appearance that day marked a formal intervention to preserve unresolved treaty issues before irreversible administrative finality occurred.

There comes a moment in the life of a people when history does not arrive loudly. It comes quietly, disguised as paperwork, as routine process, as money moving hands. By the time most notice, the thing that mattered has already been lost, sealed away under the appearance of legality.

This is how erasure often happens.

It was into such a moment that Gichi Ogimaa Midegah Ogichidaa stepped not forward in defiance, not backward in fear, but inward, into responsibility.

He did not wake one morning seeking conflict with the United States. He did not set out to make a name, to disrupt, or to posture as a symbol. What he encountered instead was something older and heavier: a closing door. A settlement prepared to be distributed. A matter labeled “resolved” that, in truth, had never been lawfully resolved at all.

And he knew, with the kind of knowing that does not allow retreat, that if the door closed while he remained silent, it would close forever not only on him, but on those whose voices had already been taken long before he was born.

He knew whose names were written into the treaties. He knew who had signed, who had refused, and why that refusal mattered. He knew that Chief Little Shell and Chief Red Bear had stood before commissioners and said no not because they were unreasonable, but because what was offered violated law, custom, and the future of their people. He knew that this refusal had never been cured by consent, only bypassed by convenience.

He also knew that silence would be interpreted as agreement.

So he did what his ancestors had done when faced with the same power imbalance: he went to the law itself.

Not to ask for favor, but to demand that the rules be followed.

The settlement money had a shape to it neat, final, appealing to those who wanted closure. But Gichi Ogimaa Midegah Ogichidaa saw through that shape to what lay beneath it. Once paid, the settlement would be used as proof that the past was settled. Once distributed, it would become the justification for denying every unanswered question that came before it. The law would be told, “You are too late.”

He refused to let lateness be manufactured.

He did not ask the court to give him land. He did not ask the court to punish anyone. He did not ask the court to rewrite history. He asked for something far more modest, and far more dangerous to injustice: time.

Time for the truth to be heard before money silenced it.

When he filed the motion, he did so with the full knowledge that it would make him visible. Visibility is not safety. Visibility invites distortion. But invisibility would have been a betrayal of his role. Under O’Jiibwaay law, a chief does not own the future; he guards it. And guardianship requires standing where harm is approaching, even when others tell you it is already decided.

The action he took was lawful, measured, and deliberate. It was grounded in treaties the United States itself calls supreme law. It was grounded in court decisions that still sit on the books. It was grounded in a principle older than the republic itself: that land and rights cannot be taken by trick, nor erased by bureaucracy, nor converted into money without consent.

What made his action unsettling was not that it was radical, but that it was correct.

For generations, his people had been told to wait. To accept. To move on. Each generation was assured that the matter was handled, even as the promised reservation never appeared, even as land passed into other hands, even as recognition was withdrawn not by treaty, but by administrative decision. The story was always the same: it is too old, too complicated, too late.

But duty does not expire.

When Gichi Ogimaa Midegah Ogichidaa acted, he was not acting for himself. He was acting for the grandmothers who had been forbidden to speak their language. For the chiefs who had protested in writing and been ignored. For the children who would one day ask why no one stopped the final erasure when there was still time.

He understood that the court might disagree. He understood that the path he chose would be lonely. What he did not accept what he could not accept was allowing an irreversible act to occur unchallenged.

Among the O’Jiibwaay, leaders are taught that there are moments when you are not measured by what you win, but by what you refuse to surrender. This was such a moment.

So he stood between the settlement and the silence that would follow it. He stood between money and memory. He stood between administrative finality and lawful truth. Not loudly. Not violently. But firmly, and on the record.

That is what he did.

By filing this motion, Gichi Ogimaa Midegah Ogichidaa acted as a treaty-bound fiduciary, not merely a private litigant. The filing asserts that treaty rights established under the 1789 Treaty of Fort Harmar and reaffirmed through the 1863 Old Crossing Treaty remain supreme law of the land under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, and that neither Congress nor the Department of the Interior possesses unilateral authority to extinguish those rights without the free, informed consent of the lawful title and occupancy holders. The motion specifically seeks to halt disbursement of settlement funds tied to the 1892 McCumber Agreement on the grounds that the principal chiefs Little Shell and Red Bear never signed that agreement, rendering later administrative actions constitutionally defective and legally void. In doing so, Gichi Ogimaa Midegah Ogichidaa placed the judiciary on notice that allowing payment to proceed would cause irreparable harm, because it would function as a retroactive ratification of fraud, sharp bargaining, and unlawful dispossession prohibited by the Indian Non-Intercourse Act and long-standing Supreme Court precedent .

Beyond law, the filing represents an act of ancestral duty carried forward into the present generation. Gichi Ogimaa Midegah Ogichidaa explicitly grounded his authority in matrilineal clan appointment, hereditary succession, and the seven-generation principle, asserting an obligation to speak where earlier generations were silenced by criminalization of culture, religion, and language. By invoking historical record, lineage, and treaty continuity, the filing reframes the case not as a dispute over money, but as a defense of living identity, inheritance, and moral responsibility to future descendants. In practical terms, the motion preserves the right of the Red Bear Pembina Band and Little Shell Band to seek full judicial review of unresolved treaty violations rather than being forced into a final settlement that would permanently foreclose those claims.

The O’Jiibwaay Grand Council affirms that his action was not only justified it was required. It was the fulfillment of inherited responsibility, carried forward without embellishment or fear. It was an act of care for a future he will never fully see, but which he was sworn to protect.

This is what duty looks like when it finally arrives.

And this is why his action will be remembered long after the paperwork is forgotten.

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