To the editor:

I find it ironic that Mr. Lauppe writes about the wetlands. (“‘Bottoms’ history shouldn’t halt trafficway,” Journal-World, Aug. 8)

Never once did he mention that Haskell students helped convert the wetlands to barely sustainable farmland by laying down the tiles and building the draining ditches in the early 1900s.

He doesn’t mention that the Haskell lands, of which there were over 1,100 acres, were paid for with Indian money. This makes the land “Indian Country” under Title 18, section 1151, parts a, b, or c.

Mr. Lauppe didn’t acknowledge that in the 1950s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was mostly comprised of white people. Talk about the fox guarding the chicken house. Native voices were silenced then. Since 1970, laws have been enacted to allow native self-determination. The opposition to this road has always been there. In the last 17 years, the opposition has had faces and voices behind it. This country has started to acknowledge the theft and deception toward indigenous peoples that allowed this country the land base it has now and the capacity to deny cultural atrocities.

I wonder where Mr. Lauppe was when the Kansas Parks and Wildlife people and Baker University “laundered” the wetlands down from federal status? I wonder if he knows that Baker received over 11 times the amount of land allowed in the Indian School Surplus Lands Act of 1962. Treaties and laws can be broken, even if they’re the highest law of the land in the U.S. Constitution, right?

Mike Ford,

Bonner Springs