(originally posted on rabble.ca, 9 October 2015) Russell Means, the late Oglala Lakota activist and provocative spokesperson for the American Indian Movement, is reputed to have said: “If voting could change anything, they’d make it illegal.” This hard-won wisdom was the result of centuries of brutal education about Eurowestern democracy for Indigenous peoples: for all the claimed benefits of western “civilization” and citizenship, the all-too-common (and continuing) Indigenous reality has been the loss of lands,…