According to treaties signed by representatives of the United States, American Indian nations are sovereign. U.S. politicians pay lip service to this sovereignty while campaigning in Indian country. President Bill Clinton did it, promising to respect American Indian sovereignty. So did President Barack Obama.

But, as recent events regarding American Indian passports prove, the words written on these treaties mean nothing.

An American Indian team headed off to Great Britain with passports issued by the Iroquois Confederacy to compete in a lacrosse tournament.

At first, however, the U.S. State Department, the job of which it is to deal with sovereign nations, at first refused to accept the passports. Apparently, the suits there don’t yet understand the meaning of the word “sovereign,” perhaps one reason U.S. foreign policy continues to be problematic. But when the players refused to travel with U.S. passports because they felt doing so deprived them of their true identities, the State Department gave them a one-time exception.

Hardly encouraging, but a start.

Great Britain, however, could not be persuaded, refusing to accept the passports, effectively barring the team from participating in the World Lacrosse Championships in Manchester.

While not all American Indians agree that passports issued by their respective nations are essential for preserving Native identity, many argue that this issue cuts past government rhetoric and political campaigning to prove that Indian nations have never truly been able to exercise the sovereignty promised them by treaty.

A person need not be American Indian to be concerned by the United State’s apparent inability to live up to its treaty obligations to American Indian nations. Every American who cares about the nation’s reputation, its integrity, and its moral authority ought to be disturbed by our country’s repeated and continued failure to honor its promises.

We’ve had a long time to get this right, America. What’s the problem?

Here’s how this scenario ought to have played out: The State Department ought to have granted the one-time exception, then worked with the Indian nations that issue passports to help them develop documents that include adequate security features. Canada and the United States had to discuss this very issue after 9/11, so the precedent of sitting down with another government and working this out together already exists.

Then, when Great Britain refused to accept the passports, the State Department ought to have stood by its allies, i.e., the Iroquois, urging the British government to accept these documents provisionally.

It’s time for the United States either to begin upholding these treaties or to admit that its leaders lied and that it has no intention of honoring these agreements. In which case, the Black Hills belong to the Lakota, Boulder Valley belongs to the Cheyenne and Arapahoe and so on.

Of course, it was probably a relief to the teams who did make it to Manchester that the Iroquois players didn’t arrive.

After all, it must be intimidating for lacrosse players to compete against the direct descendents of the people who invented the game.

How could a mother hand her little girl over to be sexually assaulted and, ultimately, murdered? That’s the question so many of us are asking ourselves in the wake of little Shaniya Davis’ disappearance. And the answer may be long in coming.

Shaniya, 5, was last seen on Nov. 10 being carried away by Mario Andretti McNeill, an adult male. A surveillance video captured the image of McNeill waiting outside an elevator with the little barefoot girl in his arms. Now Shaniya is dead, her body found Monday, Nov. 16, in Sanford, N.C., around 30 miles from her Fayetteville home.

Antoinette Davis, Shaniya’s mother, is sitting in jail, pregnant again, and charged with human trafficking — handing her own daughter over to sexual servitude. This charge has yet to be proved in court. Shortly after McNeill was taped carrying Shaniya away, Davis reported that her daughter had been kidnapped. It will be up to the judicial system to weight the truth of her claim and the allegations against her.

In the meantime, it hurts the heart to see that child in the surveillance video, being carried by a man who allegedly meant her harm, and to know what awaits her.

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If you’re a supporter of the county’s open space or ClimateSmart Loan programs and you didn’t vote, pat yourself on the back for enabling the failure of County Ballot Issues 1A and 1B. Both measures failed by small margins, largely due to a high conservative voter turnout in the city of Longmont.

About 34 percent of county voters who received a ballot returned those ballots. In Boulder, the turnout was only about 29 percent. In Longmont, it was approximately 41 percent.

If the turnout in Longmont had been similar to Boulder’s there would have been 5,490 fewer votes cast. According to unofficial results, the margin of defeat on County Ballot Issue 1A was only 2,568 votes; the difference was even narrower on 1B at 1,190 votes.

Yes, your lack of vote counted.

It’s no secret that voters find municipal elections to be boring. Typically revolving around ho-hum issues such as wastewater treatment, sales taxes and libraries, these odd-year elections don’t provoke our passions the way general elections often do. But municipal elections are arguably just as important as general elections, perhaps even more so, because the impact of municipal elections will be felt where we live.

Take the economic situation, for example. Wall Street execs land the nation in hot financial water, and Washington, D.C., hands them our money, ostensibly to limit the impact on average everyday Americans. By the end of the year, CEOs are taking home fat bonus checks, while most of us have to take on faith that bailing out billionaires was good for the country.

Closer to home, overwhelming voter support for the ClimateSmart Loan Program resulted in more than $6 million being dumped into our local economy through money that participants spent on energy efficiency and renewable energy improvements to their homes. Those improvements brought demonstrable and in some cases dramatic decreases in money being paid out to utility companies, money that stayed in the hands of local residential property owners. This financial shot in the arm was a boost to local construction and solar-energy companies at a time when the construction industry and even the solar industry were seeing hard times.

In contrast to the bailout and other dubious “stimulus” actions, ClimateSmart offered true local economic stimulus that was much easier to quantify and that brought relief to your towns, your neighbors and maybe even your own family.

Ballot Issue 1B would have authorized bonds of up to $85 million to continue funding for the ClimateSmart Loan Program. Thanks to those who supported the program—but did not take time to vote—we’ll have to wait till next November to secure that funding.

Fortunately, there’s still enough bonding authority left to see ClimateSmart through most of 2010.

“We will continue expanding the program using our current bonding authority of $40 million,” County Commissioner Will Toor told Boulder Weekly. “We have used up about $13 million and plan on a commercial round at $12 million in a few months. This will still leave another $15 million for residential rounds in 2010.”

Toor says the program will probably run out of bonding capacity in mid to late 2010, meaning that new loans will have to be put on hold until the November 2010 election.

“I think it is highly likely that there will be a ClimateSmart loan bonding issue on the 2010 ballot, with a strong well organized campaign like the 2008 election, and that the voters will support this next fall.”

Interestingly, voters in both Pitkin and Eagle counties voters approved loan programs modeled after ours. Further, the feds are announcing $80 million in seed funding to help communities start programs and have highlighted the ClimateSmart loan model as a key strategy for generating investment in clean energy nationwide. Ironic that that a program we launched and which brought our county so much attention internationally — Boulder County was the first local government body to enact a program like ClimateSmart on such a broad scale — was a program that we defeated this year.

What does all of this mean? It means that Boulder voters blew it when it came to defending their own interests at the polls this year. They let Longmont conservatives, who were highly motivated, to decide important issues on their behalf.

Think about that next time you can’t even take five minutes to fill out and stick a stamp on your mail-in ballot.

An Oklahoma county judge who last week temporarily blocked enforcement of a controversial abortion-reporting law was right to do so. The law, which requires women to answer a host of personal questions and undergo a vaginal ultrasound, is at best useless and at worst is tantamount to state-sponsored rape.

The law was put in place by Oklahoma’s state legislature as House Bill 1595 and was set to take effect on Nov. 1. It would have required doctors who perform abortions to administer questionnaires to their abortion patients, asking deeply personal questions, including: age and race; marital status; the number of previous pregnancies and abortions; how she’s paying for the abortion; the nature of her relationship to the man who impregnated her; and her reason for choosing to end her pregnancy. Doctors would then be required to post the answers to these questions, but not the patients’ names, online for the world to see. Doctors who declined to obey the new law would face criminal prosecution.

The anti-abortion activists behind the legislation say the purpose of the law is to gather more information about abortions in order to decrease the number of abortions that occur.

“This bill is an abortion-reporting bill that will measure the prevalence of abortion in Oklahoma, the reasons abortions are sought and the complications that result,” Tony Lauinger, director of Oklahoma for Life crowed to the media.

While decreasing the number of abortions is a laudable goal, this is the wrong way to go about it. It’s more likely that anti-abortion busy-bodies hope to use the law to intimidate women, to manipulate them emotionally and to use information gathered as the basis for more legislation geared at curbing women’s reproductive rights.

What’s wrong with this law? Lots, as it turns out.

First, there’s the matter of privacy. It isn’t hard to see how the public posting of this information might serve as emotional blackmail, especially for women and teenage girls who live in small towns and worry that their personal information might give them away.

One opponent of the measure described it as “undressing women in public, exposing their most personal issues on the Internet.”

“Why don’t we just tattoo a scarlet ‘A’ on their foreheads?” asks Mike the Mad Biologist on his blog at Scienceblogs.

But it’s not just an issue of public humiliation or of stripping women and girls of their constitutionally implied right to privacy. It could also result in harassment and violence against these women. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that anti-abortion crusaders have taken private information on women who enter abortion clinics and then called those women at home, even threatening them. What’s to prevent some anti-abortion lunatic from putting the pieces together and murdering these women?

Then there’s the ultrasound requirement. Though many states require women seeking abortions to have an ultrasound in hopes that seeing the fetus on the screen will deter them from terminating their pregnancies, Oklahoma would become the only state that mandates a vaginal ultrasound.

The vast majority of pregnant women have ultrasounds in which the transducer is moved over their abdomen. During a vaginal ultrasound, a cylindrically shaped transducer is pushed inside the vagina, an experience that could be traumatic for some women, particularly if they don’t want the procedure or are pregnant through rape or incest.

The law makes no allowance for women who find the idea of having a foreign object shoved inside them objectionable. Any woman who wants the abortion would therefore have to spread her legs and submit to this state-mandated violation of her body — at best an uncomfortable inconvenience at worst state-sponsored rape with a foreign object.

Yes, the quest to end abortions has reached a point where male lawmakers feel no qualms about doing to women that which would end other men in prison.

Perhaps the men who passed the measure — only about 10 percent of the Oklahoma House of Representatives is made up of women — figure that any woman who’d have an abortion is used to having any old thing inside her. Or perhaps being men, they simply have no freaking clue about the experience of being a woman. (It’s unlikely that men in any state will soon face state-mandated rectal exams, but perhaps it would do men well to think about the procedure from that point of view.)

As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that, although this law strips away the privacy of women who have the temerity to seek abortions, it leaves the men who impregnated them untouched. So perhaps to balance things out, the Oklahoma legislature should pass a law requiring all babydaddies to fill out a questionnaire asking similarly personal questions: the number of women they’ve impregnated; the number of abortions they’ve funded; their lame-ass excuses for not using condoms; how many STDs they have and how many they’ve passed on; their financial status; their education; their plans to improve both so as to make child-support payments; and so on.

Of course, the real purpose of the Oklahoma law, and so many other laws like it, is to target women, to harass and burden them to the point where carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term is preferable to running a state-sponsored gauntlet of shame and humiliation.

This law is despicable and should be declared unconstitutional for violating women’s privacy and their bodies.

As long as women continue to get pregnant, some of them will choose to have abortions, no matter what hardship they must endure.