Constitution of the Northern March
The Constitution of the Northern March, ordinarily called the Constitution of 2028, is the instrument of government of the Northern March, the polity that was the State of the Dakotas from its admission in 1889 and that most of its people, and the Register, still call the Dakotas. Its people ratified it on 8 November 2028, by 53.1 per cent to 46.9 on a turnout of about two-thirds, and it comes into force when the Governor deposits it with the Clerk of the Parliaments in New Westminster, which she has said she will do in person on 28 November. It replaces the Admission Constitution of 1889, under which the northern plains were admitted to the Union as a single State, which had been amended a hundred and forty-one times and which the polity’s Supreme Court had found, in 2024, to contradict itself.
It resumes the March, and the March’s name. Under the Charter’s rule that the form of every polity’s government is its own to determine, the Constitution makes the State of the Dakotas a March again, the form its country had from 1861 to 1889, and takes back the name it had then, the Northern March. It is the Realm’s second March beside Arizona, and the first ever resumed by its own people rather than made by Act of Parliament. Both the form and the name were proposed by the treaty nations’ delegations on the commission that drafted it, who said that a March is the Crown’s compact form, that what the Northern March had done with it in the Black Hills did not decide what it could be used for now, and that the name of the government that took the Hills should be held under a constitution that answers for it rather than forgotten.
It keeps the bargain of 1889 and changes what the bargain can block. County equality in the upper chamber, one senator for every county whatever its population, survives, and the Senate of Counties keeps its name. But a bill the Senate refuses twice in a calendar year may now be sent by the ministry to a referendum of the whole March, whose result binds both chambers, and the rule has no exceptions. It was this, and the Senate’s refusal in the summer of 2028 of the Missouri corridor framework bill that occasioned it, that made the vote a contest.
It does more than any polity constitution since California’s. It holds the Missouri, its reservoirs, its tributaries and the groundwater connected to them as the Mni Sose Trust, with treaty rights ranked first, and makes the Governor its trustee, with a power to refuse any bill that breaches the trust that nothing can override. It gives the stewardship of Custer State Park in the Black Hills to a Pahá Sápa Authority governed in equal halves by the March and four Lakota nations, while providing in terms that it settles, waives and extinguishes nothing of the claim to the rest of the Hills. It gives the Governor a fixed term, confirmation by the Assembly and a March’s emergency authority; it restates the Rights Act and adds ten rights of the plains’ own; it entrenches the Public Bank, the family farm and the resource trust; it makes the Assembly ninety-nine single-member districts and gives the vote at sixteen; and it gives the voters the initiative and the referral the prairie radicals asked for a century ago.
It was a narrow vote and a clear one. Yes won about 414,800 votes and No about 366,400, a majority of about 48,000, and carried 52 of the 119 counties: the cities, the treaty country and the Red River Valley’s farm counties against the ranching west and the irrigated Missouri country. The Premier, Elias Berg, had said he would resign if it lost. On the night it won he announced that he would ask for a dissolution as soon as it was in force, and the first election under the new constitution will be held on 16 January 2029.
Status
The requirement
The Constitution is the instrument the March will hold under the Polity Instruments Act 1889, the statute that requires every polity to hold a single written instrument, to deposit an authenticated copy and every amendment with the Clerk of the Parliaments, and to provide for a legislature, an executive answerable to it and a judiciary consistent with the Charter of Union and the law of the Realm. The Act was passed in the year the Dakotas were admitted, and the Admission Constitution was among the first instruments deposited under it.
The Act asks very little and the Law Officers asked nothing. No letter came from New Westminster during the commission’s three years or the campaign, and the Law Officers let it be known that they had read the draft and saw nothing in it to certify. The power to certify a provision inconsistent with federal law under section 6 of the Act applies to a deposited instrument, and so remains available after 28 November; nobody in the March expects it to be used.
The Constitution comes into force on deposit. The commission considered a transitional year, as California had, and rejected it on the ground that the March could not govern for twelve months under two instruments while a corridor dispute was before both of them. Article XV provides that the Admission Constitution is repealed and the new instrument in force at the moment the Clerk of the Parliaments enters the deposit on the register.
The form and the name
The change of form rests on Article VII.6 of the Charter: “The form of government of every part of the Union is that part’s own to determine, saving this Charter and the liberties secured by it.” Every March before 2028 had been made by Act of Parliament: the Northern March in 1861 and Arizona in 1884. The commission’s lawyers advised that no Act was needed for a polity to take a form the Realm already recognised, since Article VIII.5, which lets Parliament recognise new local forms, concerns forms the Charter has never had, and the March has been one of the Realm’s forms for a hundred and sixty-seven years. That the March in question was this polity’s own first form made the argument easier.
Charter House agreed. On the morning after the vote the Prime Minister’s office said in a short statement that the form of a polity’s government is its own to determine under Article VII.6, and that the federation would deal with the Northern March as it had dealt with the State of the Dakotas. It said nothing else. The ministry’s business in Parliament is confined by the Heads of Agreement of 10 September 2028, and the statement made it plain that no bill would be needed.
The March keeps the State’s place in the Union. Its four seats in the Commons, its constituencies and its member of the Lords are unchanged, and in federal law it is the same polity under its old name. Whether the terms on which the State was admitted in 1889, which the Charter says bind the Union as they bind the State, survive the change of form, the Constitution does not say, and nobody has yet asked. The Dakotas Dragoons, the Royal American Army’s cavalry regiment raised at Bismarck in 1889, keep their name, which the regiment’s association asked for on the day after the vote.
Citation and the official texts
The Constitution is cited by Article and section, as Article VIII, section 6. Three provisions are known by name: the trust, Article VIII; the Hills article, Article IX; and the deadlock referendum, Article VI, section 11, which the No campaign called “section eleven” throughout and which is the provision most voters could name.
The English text is authoritative. Article I, section 9 requires the March to publish official translations into Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Ojibwe, Hidatsa, Mandan and Arikara, each approved by the language authority of the nation whose language it is, and the translations were made during the commission’s last year and printed beside the English in the copy sent to every household.
Relation to federal law
The Constitution is subordinate to the Charter and the law of the Realm, and Article I, section 8 says so in the words California used, providing that a provision which cannot stand with federal law is to be read as if it were not there. The clause matters most to the treaty articles. A treaty right protected by federal law cannot be reached by anything in the Constitution, the deadlock referendum included, and the commission’s report said so in its first chapter, in answer to the nations’ objection to a referendum with no exceptions.
History
The Admission Constitution, 1889
The Admission Constitution was a compact for a single State. The Northern March had filled with settlers through the 1870s and 1880s, and its elected Council petitioned for an elected head and the ordinary standing of a State. Parliament agreed, refused to admit two States where one would do, and admitted the State of the Dakotas on 2 November 1889 under an instrument negotiated between the Council and the federal government, which entrenched the treaty guarantees and forbade the State to treat the nations’ lands as ordinary counties. It abolished the Lord Wardenship, created a Governor with no reserve power, and set the Assembly of the Dakotas, elected by population, beside a Senate of Counties with one senator for every county.
County equality was the price of the single State. The small southern and western counties feared Bismarck’s distance and the cities’ growth, and the Senate gave them a chamber in which a county of two thousand people weighed the same as a county of two hundred thousand. Ordinary bills that the Senate refused could be passed over it by the Assembly after conference and delay; county, treaty and constitutional measures needed the joint consent of both chambers and could not. The bargain held for a hundred and thirty-nine years, and it was the bargain, not the State, that the Dakotas’ politics were about.
It was amended a hundred and forty-one times. The prairie radicals of the 1910s amended it to found the public bank and the grain inspection; the Depression amended it for relief; the 1960s amended it for the Rights Act; the 1970s amended it to found the permanent resource trust; and successive Assemblies added to its treaty provisions, mostly to make up for what the 1889 text had left out. By the 2020s the instrument ran to about sixty thousand words, its county and treaty articles cross-referred to each other in ways no drafter had intended, and the State’s lawyers kept a commentary of three volumes to explain which amendment governed which.
The Harding County judgment, 2024
In 2024 the Supreme Court of the Dakotas said that the constitution contradicted itself. The case concerned a road through treaty land in Harding County, in the far north-west, and turned on whether the road was a county measure, needing the Senate’s consent, or a treaty measure, needing the affected nation’s consent, or both. The Court held that it was both, that two amendments made forty years apart required inconsistent procedures for it, and that it could not reconcile them. It decided the case on the narrower ground and said, in a passage the commission later printed on the first page of its report, that the instrument was “no longer a constitution a citizen of this State can read and know what it requires”, and that the remedy lay with the Legislature and not the Court.
The Legislature set up a commission in 2025 with no deadline. The joint resolution that created the Constitutional Commission of the Dakotas asked it to propose either a consolidated text or a new instrument, as it judged best, and to report when it was ready. Nobody in the Assembly expected the report to be acted on quickly, and several members said so in the debate.
The commission, 2025 to 2028
The commission had thirty-one members. Six were named by the Assembly and six by the Senate of Counties; nine came from the treaty nations that chose to take part, one from each, sitting as equals and not as observers, which the nations made a condition of taking part at all; nine came from the county association, the cities, the unions, the farm organisations and the cooperatives; and the chair was a historian from outside politics. The nations that did not send delegates were consulted government to government, as they asked.
Walter Kessler chaired it. Born in 1951 to a family of Germans from Russia in the Missouri country, Kessler taught the history of the treaties and the river at the State university at Vermillion for forty years, and his Paper and Grass: The Treaty of 1868 and the Northern March (1994) showed from the Lord Warden’s own papers that the March had known the Hills were reserved when it let the miners in. The counties trusted him because he was one of them, and the nations because his book is the one their lawyers cite. He was seventy-four when he took the chair and seventy-seven when the vote was held, and he refused throughout to give an interview about any provision before the commission had agreed it.
The commission chose a new instrument, in plain words. It spent its first year reading the old one, and concluded that a consolidation would preserve the contradictions it was meant to remove. It then drafted, in short sections and ordinary words, the instrument the voters were given, less the two provisions the ministry added after the Senate’s refusal. The drafting rule, printed in the report, was that a section should be readable aloud at a county fair and mean the same thing to everybody who heard it, and that “shall” should appear only where something was required of someone.
The March was the nations’ proposal. The nations’ delegations put it to the commission in its second year, on the ground that the March is the one form whose founding instrument puts the nations’ land beyond the polity’s own law and makes its head deal with them under compact, as the Crown does. Several members objected that the Northern March had been the instrument of the seizure of Pahá Sápa. The nations’ delegates answered that they knew this better than anyone in the room, that the form was the Crown’s and not the Lord Warden’s, and that the past did not decide what it could be used for. The commission agreed without a division.
So was the name. The same delegations proposed that the polity take back the name it had borne under the Lord Warden, the Northern March, rather than a new one. A name the Lord Warden had used, they said, would be held now under a constitution that answers for him, and to choose a new and innocent name would be the State forgetting what it did. It would also stop the polity taking its name from the Dakota people, which some of the delegations had asked for from the start. Kessler, whose book is the history of the first Northern March, spoke from the chair for the only time in the commission’s recorded proceedings: “A name is not an apology. But forgetting one is worse.” The ranching counties liked an old name from the settler years, and Carol Lindgren, who led the No campaign, later said it was the one thing in the Constitution she would have voted for, which the nations’ delegations noted without comment. The Standing Rock delegate supported it. The name of the Dakota people, as the name of a people, is untouched by it, and the people of the March go on calling the country the Dakotas.
The commission reported in June 2028. Its report ran to four hundred pages, with the draft instrument, a commentary on every Article and a chapter of dissents. The ministry received it with thanks and laid it before the Legislature without a motion, which in the Dakotas meant that it would sit on the table until somebody needed it.
The corridor and the Senate’s refusal
Somebody needed it within weeks. Berg’s ministry had spent two years on the Missouri corridor framework, a plan for water, transmission, storage, irrigation, habitat and transport along the river, which fixed no route and needed a statute to proceed. The Assembly passed the framework bill. In the summer of 2028 the Senate of Counties refused it, on the votes of small counties that feared their land would serve metropolitan demand while they bore the cost, and under the 1889 rules the refusal could not be overridden, because the bill touched county finance.
Berg took the draft off the table the next morning. He announced that the commission’s draft would go to the voters in November, with two additions that were the ministry’s and not the commission’s: the deadlock referendum, under which a bill the Senate refused twice could go to the voters, and the river trust, holding the Missouri in trust with the Governor as trustee. Kessler said in a letter to the Premier, which Berg published, that the additions were the ministry’s work, that the commission had not considered them, and that he would not defend them. He did not attack them either, and never did.
Through the Legislature
The Admission Constitution required special majorities in both chambers before a vote of the people. The Assembly, which has ninety-nine members, passed the constitution bill in September 2028 by 72 votes to 27, six more than the sixty-six that two-thirds required, with the urban members of the Conservative and Crown Union who support Berg’s ministry on confidence and supply voting for it.
The Senate of Counties passed it comfortably. It voted a fortnight later, by 84 to 35, four more than its two-thirds of eighty. The senators’ reasons were stated in the debate with unusual frankness. The new instrument kept county equality and every seat in the chamber, and most of the Senate’s powers over county finance and boundaries; the deadlock referendum could take a bill out of their hands, but only by sending it to voters who, in the senators’ judgment, would reject almost any bill the Senate had twice refused. Several senators said that they were voting to let the people decide, and that they expected the people to decide against it.
The nations’ consent
The treaty articles needed the consent of the affected nations. Under the Admission Constitution’s amendment rules, any provision touching a treaty right required the consent of the nations it affected, and both the Hills article and the trust touched treaty rights. The commission’s draft had been negotiated with the nations’ delegations throughout, and the ministry put the two additions to the nations’ governments in the summer.
Four Lakota nations consented to the Hills article; Standing Rock refused. The councils of the Oglala Lakota of Pine Ridge, the Sicangu Lakota of Rosebud, and the Cheyenne River and Lower Brule nations, the four nearest the Hills, each approved the Pahá Sápa Authority before the vote. The council of the Standing Rock nation refused. It said that a joint authority over any part of the Hills conceded the State a place there, that the Hills were not the State’s to share, and that its refusal was final. Standing Rock’s delegate had sat on the commission throughout and had supported the March’s name, and the nation’s council made clear that its refusal was of the Hills article and not of the rest.
The campaign
The Yes campaign was run by a cross-party committee. Its chair was Robert Haldane, a Conservative and Crown Union member of the Assembly for a Fargo seat, a banker of sixty and chair of the Assembly’s public accounts committee, who was chosen to show that the Constitution was not the Labour and Social Democratic Party’s. Haldane argued that a bill of rights and a Governor who could stop a ministry from breaching the river trust were conservative things, and that the State’s own Supreme Court had said its constitution could not be read.
Berg staked his office on it. In September he said that he would resign as Premier if the Constitution was rejected, which turned the vote, in part, into a vote on him. He campaigned in every part of the State, and his rallies in the Red River Valley were the largest of the campaign.
The No campaign was led by the ranchers and the irrigators. Its leader was Carol Lindgren, chair of the Dakotas Irrigation Association, from the James River country that is Berg’s own home, which made the campaign personal on both sides. The No campaign’s case was that the trust handed the Missouri to a Governor nobody elected, that the referendum emptied county equality of its meaning while pretending to keep it, that the Hills article was a first step towards taking the western counties’ land, and that the emergency authority, which the text did not forbid to be used for civil order, was the Lord Warden’s power come back under the Lord Warden’s name. It barely noticed the vote at sixteen. The county senators who had voted against the bill campaigned with it, and most of the western counties’ councils.
The Conservative and Crown Union was neutral and divided. The party took no position. Its urban members campaigned for the Constitution and its rural members against it, which the Dakotas’ political writers said was the State’s politics in a single party.
The federal minister said nothing. Lena Whitefeather, the federal minister for the treaty nations, an Oglala Lakota of Pine Ridge, made no public statement in the campaign, as a federal minister on a polity’s vote is expected not to. Because her own nation had consented to the Hills article, her silence was closely watched, and she kept it.
The campaign stopped twice in its last ten days. Both sides suspended campaigning for two days after the accession of George V on 31 October, and again for two days after the San Andreas earthquake struck Los Angeles on 2 November. The No campaign asked the Election Commission, which the Secretary of State chairs, to postpone the vote. The Commission refused, on the ground that the law fixed the date and that neither event had touched the State’s ability to hold a poll, and the vote went ahead on 8 November.
The vote, 8 November 2028
Yes won by 53.1 per cent to 46.9. About 781,000 votes were cast from an electorate of about 1.18 million, a turnout of about 66 per cent. Yes won about 414,800 and No about 366,400. Yes carried 52 of the 119 counties: Sioux Falls, Fargo, Bismarck-Mandan, Rapid City and Grand Forks, the university towns, the counties with large treaty-nation populations, and, unexpectedly, most of the farm counties of the Red River Valley, where Berg had campaigned hardest. No carried the ranching west, the Missouri country above and below the reservoirs, and the oil counties.
Lindgren conceded on the night. She congratulated Berg in a short statement from the irrigation association’s office at Huron, said that the people had decided, and went home to the James River.
The Governor said one sentence. Ruth White Crane, who will be the first holder of the trusteeship and of the March’s emergency authority, said on the night only that she would hold the river as the Constitution asks, and for no one. She has said nothing since.
Berg called an election. He said in Bismarck that he would ask the Governor for a dissolution as soon as the Constitution was in force, so that the first Assembly of the Northern March would be chosen under the instrument it would govern by, and that the corridor would be the election’s business. The Election Commission certifies the result on 22 November; the Governor deposits the Constitution on 28 November; and the election will be held on Tuesday 16 January 2029, seven weeks after the dissolution, the shortest period the Constitution allows. It will be the first at which the March’s sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds may vote, about forty thousand of them, and the first in which every senator is elected at once.
The vote was heard in New Westminster the next day. On 9 November 2028 Joseph Many Horses, the Labour and Social Democratic top-up member for the Dakotas, who had advised the nations’ delegations to the commission, asked the Commons for leave to bring in a bill for a convention to write a new Charter of Union, keeping the Crown, and cited the Harding County judgment in doing it. Leave was given by 214 votes to 71, and the campaign’s first speaker that night was Ruth Olson, a Sioux Falls civics teacher who had sat on the commission. See The Convention Bill.
The text
The Constitution has a preamble, fifteen Articles and a Schedule, and runs to about five thousand words, a twelfth of the length of the instrument it replaces. It is set out below in full, Article by Article, with a short commentary after each.
The preamble
We the people of the Northern March, having governed ourselves under one constitution since the year of our admission, and finding that it can no longer be read and known, resume the form in which our country was first governed, and ordain this Constitution, to keep the bargains we have made, to hold in trust what we hold in common, and to govern ourselves in our own country under the Crown and within the Union.
The preamble names nobody but the people. The nations’ delegations asked for it to be written so. A preamble in which the State spoke for the nations, they said, would be the State answering for them, and a preamble that acknowledged them would be the State deciding how they were to be acknowledged; they preferred to be named in the body, as governments, with their rights stated as law. The words “read and known” are the Harding County judgment’s, and the clause on resuming the form in which the country was first governed is the only place the text looks back before 1889.
Article I: The March
1. The Northern March, which Parliament constituted in 1861 and which was admitted to the Union as the State of the Dakotas in 1889, resumes the form of a March of the United Kingdom of America.
2. The March governs itself in its own affairs. Its Governor holds for the Crown the frontier business this Constitution gives the Governor. The lands of the treaty nations lie within the March under compact, and beyond its own law.
3. The Crown in right of the Northern March is the source of the Governor’s authority. It holds the lands of the March, and it holds the Mni Sose Trust.
4. Bismarck is the capital of the March and the seat of the Governor, the Ministry and the Supreme Court. The Legislature sits at Bismarck, and may sit anywhere else in the March it chooses by resolution.
5. The flag of the March is a bison standing, brown, on a field of green above a base of gold.
6. The Great Seal of the March shows the bison of the flag within a ring bearing the words THE NORTHERN MARCH and the year 1861, with the year 2028 beneath.
7. The motto of the March is Fidem servamus.
8. This Constitution is the supreme law of the March, and is subordinate to the Charter of Union and to the law of the Realm. Where a provision of this Constitution cannot stand with the law of the Realm, the law of the Realm prevails, and the provision shall be read as if it were not enacted.
9. The English text of this Constitution is authoritative. The March shall publish official translations into Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Ojibwe, Hidatsa, Mandan and Arikara, each approved by the language authority of the nation whose language it is.
Section 1 says “resumes”. The commission’s lawyers chose the word with care. The Northern March was constituted by Act of Parliament in 1861 and converted by Act in 1889; section 1 does not claim that the Act of 1861 revives, which only Parliament could say, but that the polity it created takes back its first form under Article VII.6 of the Charter. Charter House accepted the reading the morning after the vote.
Section 2 is the definition of a March the Realm had never written down. Neither the Act of 1861 nor the March Charter of Arizona defines the form: each makes a March and says what it does. The commission wrote the section from the March as the Realm has known it, a polity that governs itself in its ordinary business while the Crown keeps a hand on its frontier business, and from the nations’ proposal, which was that the third mark of the form, the nations’ land lying inside it under compact and beyond its law, was the one that mattered.
Section 3 makes the river the Crown’s. The Crown in right of the Northern March, the March’s own Crown inside the American one, as Michigan has its Crown in right of Michigan, is named as the holder of the March’s lands and of the trust, so that the Governor holds the Missouri for the Crown and not for the ministry. Section 4 lets the Legislature sit anywhere in the March, which the southern counties asked for and which the Legislature has not yet used.
Sections 5 to 7 are the symbols. The bison is drawn dark-brown and the text says so, because the first design the commission saw showed a white one, and the nations’ delegations pointed out that a white buffalo is the most sacred image the Lakota have. Some nations’ councils objected to the State taking the bison at all, on the ground that the herds were destroyed by the people who founded it, and the commission kept it over their objection. The seal carries the year of the first March and the year of the second, and the motto, Fidem servamus, “we keep faith”, is in Latin like the Dakotas Dragoons’ and appears in the text alone, not on the seal or the flag. The quartered flag of the State of the Dakotas is retired.
Article II: Rights
1. The rights in this Article. Every person in the March holds the rights in this Article against the March and every public authority in it. They add to the rights secured by the Charter of Union and the American Rights Act and take nothing from them. Where a section of this Article restates a right in the Act and the words differ, the Act prevails.
2. Liberty. No person shall be deprived of liberty except under lawful authority and by a procedure the law prescribes. A person arrested shall be told at once, in a language the person understands, why; and shall be brought before a court without unnecessary delay, and within the time the law prescribes.
3. Habeas corpus. The writ of habeas corpus shall issue on application to any court of the March and shall not be refused for want of form. It shall not be suspended in the March except by Act of Parliament, and then only for the time the Act prescribes.
4. Counsel. A person arrested, detained or questioned under caution may consult counsel at once and in private. Where the person cannot pay, counsel shall be provided at public expense in every proceeding in which liberty is at stake.
5. Civil standing. Every person may make and enforce contracts, sue and be sued, give evidence, inherit, and buy, lease, sell and hold property. No public authority shall deny or diminish that capacity on any ground named in the American Rights Act.
6. Security of the person. Every person has the right to security of the person and to the protection of the law against violence, from whatever source it comes. A public authority that knows, or ought to know, of a real and immediate risk of violence to an identified person shall take the steps that are reasonable to protect that person.
7. Fair trial. A person charged with an offence is presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law; is entitled to a fair and public hearing before an independent and impartial court; is entitled to know the charge in time, and in enough detail to answer it, and to examine the witnesses; shall not be tried twice for the same offence on the same facts; and shall not be punished under a law that was not in force when the act was done, or by a heavier penalty than was then prescribed.
8. Evidence unlawfully obtained. Evidence obtained in breach of this Article shall be excluded where admitting it would bring the administration of justice into disrepute. The court shall weigh how serious the breach was, whether it was deliberate, and what exclusion would do to the public interest.
9. Private life. Every person has the right to respect for private life, family life, home and correspondence. No search of a person, dwelling, vehicle, effects or communications shall be made except under a warrant issued by a court on sworn information and describing exactly what it authorises. A general warrant is void.
10. Property. No person shall be deprived of property except under lawful authority, for a public purpose, and on compensation fixed by law. Nothing in this section prevents the regulation of the use of property in the public interest.
11. Movement. Every person lawfully in the Realm may enter the March, move freely in it, and live anywhere in it. The March shall impose on no one entering it from another polity any condition, charge or licence that it does not impose on its own residents.
12. Expression. Every person has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to hold opinions and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas. No public authority shall require a licence or approval to publish, nor stop a publication in advance except on the order of a court, made on evidence, where the harm to be prevented is grave.
13. The press. The press is free. No public authority shall license or approve a publisher, broadcaster or journalist. No person shall be made to disclose a confidential source of information except on the order of a court satisfied that disclosure is necessary.
14. Assembly and association. Every person has the right to assemble peaceably and to associate with others. An assembly does not cease to be peaceable because it is unwelcome, gets in the way of ordinary business, or criticises authority.
15. Conscience and religion. Every person has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the right to hold, change and practise a belief and the right to hold none. The March shall not compel anyone to profess, practise or support a religion, and shall impose no religious test for any office, employment or public service.
16. Petition. Every person may petition the Legislature, the Governor and any public authority for redress, without penalty.
17. Political rights. Every person may take part in public affairs, form and join a political party, and stand for office. No public authority shall penalise, disadvantage or watch any person for a lawful political opinion or association.
18. Equality. Every person is equal before the law, and entitled to its equal protection and equal benefit without discrimination.
19. Discrimination. No public authority shall discriminate against any person on any ground named in the American Rights Act. A measure neutral on its face that puts persons sharing such a ground at a disadvantage is discrimination unless it is justified. A measure to remedy disadvantage is not discrimination.
20. Separate provision. A public provision kept separate by reason of a ground named in the American Rights Act is not equal, and no evidence that it is equal shall be received.
21. Public accommodation. No person shall be refused, or served on different terms in, any place, conveyance or service offered to the public, on any ground named in the American Rights Act.
22. Sex. The rights in this Article belong equally to persons of every sex.
23. The vote. No person shall be denied the vote, or have it abridged, by any test of literacy, understanding, character or payment, or on any ground named in the American Rights Act. Every authority that runs an election shall make voting practically open to every elector.
24. Remedies. A person whose right under this Article is infringed may apply to any court of the March, which may grant whatever remedy it considers just.
25. Water. Every person has the right to water fit to drink. The March, and every authority that supplies water, shall secure it.
26. Rural service. Every person has the right to a court, a school and emergency medicine within an hour’s travel in ordinary weather, or, where an hour is impossible, by remote means. Emergency medicine shall always be provided in person.
27. Organising. Every person may join a trade union, and every worker, in public or private employment, may bargain collectively through it.
28. Housing. The March shall take reasonable measures, within its available resources, to secure step by step the right of every person to adequate housing.
29. Environment. Every person has the right to a clean and healthful environment. The March and every person shall maintain it for this and future generations.
30. Schooling. Every child has the right to free public schooling to the age of eighteen.
31. Public records. Every record of a public authority is open to any person, except as a law passed by two-thirds of the members of both Houses withholds it.
32. Hunting and fishing. The people have the right to hunt, fish and trap, subject to law for conservation. This right does not diminish the treaty rights of the nations to hunt and fish, which rank first.
33. Arms. The people may keep arms for hunting, for the protection of stock and for the defence of the home, subject to law.
34. Life. No person shall be put to death by the March.
35. Enforcement. Every right in this Article, those in sections 25 to 30 included, may be enforced in the courts of the March by any person whose right is affected.
Article II is a full bill of rights. Sections 2 to 24 restate the rights of the American Rights Act in the Act’s own order, with the Act’s qualifications kept: the warrant that must describe exactly what it authorises, the evidence excluded only where admitting it would bring justice into disrepute, the assembly that does not stop being peaceable because it is unwelcome. The commission chose a fuller restatement over a short one so that a citizen of the March could read her rights in her own constitution, and so that a court of the March could enforce them as its own. Section 1 says that the restatement adds nothing to the Act and takes nothing from it, and that the Act wins wherever the words differ.
Sections 25 to 34 are the plains’ own. The right to water fit to drink came from the counties along the Missouri and from the treaty country, where water systems had failed often enough to make it a campaign. The right to rural service is the old test of the State’s rural policy made enforceable, measured in time rather than miles. The right to organise and bargain was the unions’ condition for their members’ votes on the commission. The housing duty is progressive and within the March’s means, and the No campaign called it the most expensive sentence in the instrument, which the commission’s report concedes it may be. The environment and schooling rights follow the newer polity constitutions, and the right to public records writes in the open-records practice the Dakotas already kept, with two-thirds of both Houses needed to keep anything back.
Three of the plains’ rights were the counties’. The right to hunt, fish and trap is the ranching west’s, and the commission added the sentence that treaty hunting and fishing rights rank first, which the nations asked for and the counties accepted. The right to keep arms is narrow on purpose, for hunting, for stock and for the home, and no other polity’s instrument has one; the Rights Act has none. Section 34 abolishes capital punishment in five words. The State had not executed anyone in living memory, and the commission wrote it down so that no Legislature could change its mind.
Section 35 makes every right enforceable. Most constitutions that state social rights make them aims rather than rights, and the commission’s draft did the same for housing. The final text does not: water, rural service, organising, housing, the environment and schooling may each be enforced in the ordinary courts by any person whose right is affected, and the Legislature’s lawyers expect the housing section to be the first one tested.
Article III: The nations
1. The treaty nations whose lands lie within the March are governments of their own. Their authority does not come from this Constitution, and the March deals with each of them under compact, government to government.
2. Nothing in this Constitution gives the March any authority over the lands, citizens or governments of a treaty nation that it did not lawfully hold before, or diminishes any right secured by treaty or by the law of the Realm.
3. The treaty nations whose lands lie within the March are named in the Schedule. A nation may change its own entry by notice to the Governor.
4. A compact made between the March and a nation, once the Legislature approves it, has the force of a statute of the March.
5. The courts of a treaty nation are the courts of its government. The courts of the March shall recognise their judgments as they recognise the judgments of another government’s courts.
6. Within the lands of a treaty nation, its language or languages are official with English in the business of the March, and every person may use them in dealing with any authority of the March there.
7. The March shall levy no tax within the lands of a treaty nation except as a compact with that nation provides.
8. When a person is reported missing, every police force and public authority of the March shall search at once, whatever government’s land the person was last seen on, and shall share what it knows with the police of any nation concerned. The Ministry shall report every such case to the Assembly each year.
9. No seat in the Legislature is reserved to a treaty nation or its citizens, who vote and stand as citizens of the March. A person may hold office in the government of a treaty nation and in the March at the same time.
10. A provision of this Constitution, or of any amendment to it, that affects a right secured by treaty takes effect, as to each nation, only with that nation’s consent. A nation gives or refuses its consent in whatever form its own constitution and law provide, and notifies the Governor. The March shall not question how a nation decided, only whether it did.
Article III writes down what the 1889 instrument assumed. The Admission Constitution entrenched treaty guarantees and forbade the State to treat the nations’ lands as ordinary counties, but it never said what the nations were. Section 1 says it, in the words the nations’ delegations wrote: governments of their own, whose authority does not come from the March. Section 5 is the first recognition in any polity instrument of the Realm of the nations’ courts as courts, which had until now rested on statute and comity.
Section 4 left the compacts where they were. The nations’ delegations asked that compacts stand above statute, so that no Legislature could change one without the nation’s consent. The commission declined, and a compact approved by the Legislature has the force of a statute and no more, as before; the nations’ answer is section 2, which no statute can reach. Section 7 states the practice on taxation the courts had reached after a generation of litigation over fuel and tobacco, and ends the litigation.
Section 8 is about the missing. The State’s record on violence against Indigenous women was one of jurisdiction: a woman reported missing on treaty land fell between the nation’s police, the county sheriff and the State’s, and each waited for another. Section 8 makes every police force of the March search at once, whatever government’s land the person was last seen on, and the yearly report to the Assembly was the nations’ delegations’ condition for the section.
Sections 9 and 10 are the nations’ own choices. The commission considered reserved seats, elected from a roll of nation citizens, and the nations’ delegations rejected them: a nation is a government and not a constituency, they said, and a seat in the Assembly would make its citizens a district of the March. They asked instead that office in a nation’s government should never disqualify anyone from office in the March. Section 10 lets each nation consent in its own way, by council, by referendum or by whatever its own law requires, and forbids the March to look behind the answer.
Article IV: The Governor
1. There shall be a Governor of the Northern March, who represents the Crown in right of the March and is its head.
2. The Governor is commissioned by the Crown on the advice of the Premier, given only after the Assembly has confirmed the person to be commissioned by the votes of two-thirds of its members. If the Assembly has refused three nominees in succession, the next nominee may be confirmed by a majority of its members.
3. The Governor holds office for eight years from commissioning, and may not be commissioned again.
4. On taking office the Governor takes the oath of allegiance and of office that the law prescribes for the Crown’s representatives.
5. The Governor acts on the advice of the Ministry, except as this Constitution provides.
6. The Governor may by proclamation certify an emergency of water, of the border, of defence, of fire, of flood or of blizzard within the March. While the certificate stands, the powers that the law of the March makes conditional on it may be used.
7. A proclamation under section 6 lapses after thirty days unless the Assembly extends it, for thirty days at a time. The Assembly may revoke it at any time by resolution.
8. The Governor is the trustee of the Mni Sose Trust under Article VIII.
9. While the office is vacant, or the Governor is absent from the March or unable to act, the Chief Justice acts as Governor; but the Chief Justice shall not refuse a bill under Article VIII, nor certify an emergency except of fire, of flood or of blizzard.
10. The Governor may be removed from office only on impeachment by two-thirds of the members of the Assembly, for misconduct or incapacity, tried by the Supreme Court; and never for refusing a bill under Article VIII.
The Governor is a March’s head. Under the Admission Constitution the Governor was commissioned on the Premier’s advice, held office during pleasure and had no reserve power at all, and the State’s own account of the office, that the Governor “neither directs departments nor selects policy”, was exact. Article IV keeps the commission on advice and adds what a March’s head has: a fixed term, which in Arizona is eight years and here is eight years and not renewable, so that no trustee can be kept on by a grateful ministry; an emergency authority; and the trusteeship. The Governor takes the ordinary oath of every Crown representative in the Realm; the commission considered one of its own, and decided that a Governor with new powers should swear the same oath as every other.
Confirmation by two-thirds of the Assembly was the price the commission set for the trusteeship. A Premier who could choose the trustee of the river alone could choose one who would let his corridor through, and section 2 requires that the name he advises be confirmed first, by a majority no single party in the Dakotas has held since the 1930s. The Assembly may not hold the office empty for ever: after three refusals a simple majority will do. Ruth White Crane, Governor under the old instrument, is deemed by the transitional Article to have been confirmed, and her eight years run from 28 November 2028.
Sections 6 and 7 are Arizona’s emergency authority, adapted to the plains. Arizona’s Lord Marcher certifies emergencies of water, the border, defence, heat, fire and flood; the Governor of the Northern March certifies water, the border with New Albion, defence, fire, flood and blizzard. Every certificate lapses in thirty days unless the Assembly extends it, and the Assembly can end one at any time. The Article does not say what the authority may not be used for. Arizona’s has never been used for civil order, by a convention fixed in 1917 when the Lord Marcher of the day declined to proclaim during the deportation of the strikers, and the commission’s report says that it expected the Northern March to keep the same convention. It did not write it down, and the No campaign made a great deal of the omission, reminding the Dakotas that the last head of their country to rule by proclamation had been the Lord Warden, under the same name.
Sections 9 and 10 protect the trusteeship from its holder’s absence and its holder’s enemies. The Chief Justice acts as Governor, but cannot use the trust refusal or certify an emergency of water, the border or defence, so that an acting Governor in the Premier’s gift cannot do in a fortnight what a confirmed one has refused. A Governor can be impeached only for misconduct or incapacity, and the text says in terms that refusing a bill under the trust is neither.
Article V: The Premier and the Ministry
1. The Governor shall commission as Premier the member of the Assembly who commands its confidence, and, on the Premier’s advice, the other ministers.
2. The Ministry is collectively responsible to the Assembly, and holds office while it holds the Assembly’s confidence.
3. If the Assembly resolves that it has no confidence in the Ministry, and no Ministry commanding its confidence is formed within twenty-one days, the Governor shall dissolve the Assembly.
4. The Governor shall dissolve the Assembly when the Premier so advises. An Assembly lasts four years at most from the day of its first sitting.
5. The Senate of Counties may not make or unmake a Ministry.
Article V is the 1889 settlement, with the dissolution written down. The Premier keeps the title, which the commission considered changing to Arizona’s High Steward and did not, on the ground that it was keeping every title it could. The ministry’s size is not limited. The Senate’s inability to make or unmake a ministry, the other half of the county bargain, is restated in section 5. Section 4 makes the Premier’s advice to dissolve binding on the Governor, which is the ordinary rule of the Realm, and it is the section under which Berg will ask for the dissolution of 28 November.
Article VI: The Legislature
1. The Legislature of the March consists of the Assembly of the Northern March and the Senate of Counties. It sits continuously and adjourns as it chooses.
2. The Assembly has ninety-nine members, one for each of ninety-nine districts of nearly equal population.
3. After every federal census the districts shall be drawn by a Boundary Commission of five: two members named by the two largest parties in the Assembly, one each; two named by the Senate of Counties; and a retired judge named by the Chief Justice, who chairs it. The Commission’s map takes effect unless both Houses reject it within sixty days.
4. The Senate of Counties has one senator for each county, elected by the electors of the county for six years. One third of the senators are elected every two years.
5. Any person resident in the March may be elected to either House. No person may sit for more than twelve years in the Assembly, or for more than twelve years in the Senate.
6. Every member, before taking a seat, shall swear allegiance to the King and to keep this Constitution, or make an affirmation to the same effect.
7. The Assembly elects a Speaker and the Senate a President, each from its own members. Neither votes except to break a tie.
8. Every bill shall embrace one subject only, and the subject shall be stated in its title.
9. A bill becomes law when both Houses have passed it in the same words and it has received assent. The Senate may amend or refuse any bill, a bill of supply included.
10. A bill passed by the Assembly and refused or amended by the Senate shall go to conference between the Houses. If the conference fails, the Assembly may pass the bill again after ninety days, and it shall then be presented for assent; save that a bill affecting the boundaries or the finances of the counties shall be presented only with the Senate’s consent.
11. If the Senate refuses a bill twice in the same calendar year, the Ministry may submit it to the electors of the March at a referendum, within ninety days of the second refusal. If a majority of those voting approve it, it shall be presented for assent as if both Houses had passed it.
12. A member of the Assembly, or a senator, may be recalled by a petition signed by a quarter of the electors of the district or county, followed by a vote of those electors. A member who is Premier may not be recalled while Premier.
County equality is in section 4, untouched. One senator for each county, whatever its population, is the bargain of 1889, and the Constitution keeps it. What it changes is how senators are chosen. Under the State’s law the whole Senate turned over at once; under section 4 each senator serves six years and a third of the Senate is chosen every two, so that the chamber the counties defend can never be swept at a single election. The transitional Article starts the cycle by electing every senator in January 2029 and drawing lots for the first terms.
The Assembly changes more. The State’s Assembly was elected from equal-population constituencies with a proportional correction, which kept the chamber close to the parties’ shares of the vote and let small parties and independent treaty-rights members win seats. Section 2 ends the correction. From January 2029 the Assembly is ninety-nine single-member districts, drawn after every census by a Boundary Commission whose map takes effect unless both Houses reject it. The change was the counties’, who said that a member for a district answers to people and a member from a list answers to a party, and the smaller parties’ objection was the loudest the commission received. The Alliance 90 / Green Realm called it the price of the bill of rights, and the treaty-rights members, who had won their seats under the correction, said they would stand in districts and see.
Section 5 sets no minimum age. The Constitution gives the vote at sixteen and says only that “any person resident in the March” may be elected to either House: not a voter, not an adult, nobody of any particular age. The commission’s report does not explain the omission, and nobody who sat on the commission has been able to. The March’s lawyers expect the first candidate under the age of sixteen to be told by the courts that a person who cannot vote cannot sensibly stand, and the court to find that the text says otherwise. Section 5 also limits members to twelve years in each House, which the counties proposed and the ministry accepted.
Section 9 gives the Senate supply. The Senate may amend or refuse any bill, a budget included, and section 10’s override after conference reaches every bill except those on county boundaries and finance. That was the 1889 position for ordinary bills, and the commission kept it for supply too, over the ministry’s objection, on the ground that a Senate that could not touch the budget could not protect the counties’ finances.
Section 11 is the deadlock referendum. It is the ministry’s addition of the summer of 2028 and the provision on which the campaign was fought. A bill the Senate refuses twice in a calendar year may go to the voters within ninety days of the second refusal, at the ministry’s choice and on any day it chooses, and a simple majority enacts it. It has no exceptions. It reaches a bill on county boundaries or finance, which otherwise needs the Senate’s consent, and it reaches a bill touching treaty matters. The nations’ delegations objected that a settler majority could not be allowed to vote on a treaty right, and the commission, which had not drafted the section, recorded in its dissents chapter that it would have excluded them; the ministry overruled both. The answer given in the campaign was that a treaty right protected by federal law cannot be reached by a referendum of the March whatever its text says, and that Article III, section 10 requires the nation’s consent to anything in the Constitution that affects one. The nations did not find the answer sufficient, and said so.
The senators expected the voters to side with them. Section 11 sends to the people only bills the Senate has twice refused, and the Senate’s view, stated in its debate on the constitution bill, was that a bill twice refused by the counties would usually be refused by the voters too. The vote of 8 November, which the counties lost, has made the expectation less comfortable.
Sections 1, 8 and 12 are the plains’ habits. The Legislature sits continuously, ending the State’s sessions; every bill has one subject, the old rule against riders, which means that a corridor bill cannot carry a payment to the counties on its back; and members, but not a sitting Premier, may be recalled by a quarter of their electors, which keeps the recall of a head of government Cascadia’s alone.
Article VII: The courts
1. The judicial power of the March is vested in the Supreme Court of the Northern March and in such other courts as the Legislature establishes.
2. The Supreme Court has seven justices.
3. For each vacancy, a Judicial Commission of judges, lawyers, members of the public and a member named by the treaty nations shall draw up a list of three. The Governor shall commission a justice from the list on the advice of the Premier.
4. A justice holds office for ten years, and may be commissioned once again.
5. The Chief Justice is commissioned from among the justices on the advice of the Premier.
6. The courts of the March shall enforce this Constitution, the rights in Article II and the Trust in Article VIII, on the application of any person whose interest is affected.
The court grows and its justices stop standing for election. The State’s Supreme Court had five justices elected on non-partisan ballots. The Constitution makes it seven, for the rights and trust cases it expects, and has them chosen from a Judicial Commission’s list of three, with a member named by the nations on the Commission. A justice serves ten years and may be commissioned once more. The commission considered a constitutional chamber and rejected it, on the ground that a court which already decides treaty, county and federal questions in a single docket is the court that should decide the new ones, and that the Harding County judgment had come from the ordinary Supreme Court doing its ordinary work.
The Chief Justice is the Premier’s choice. Section 5 has the Chief Justice commissioned on the Premier’s advice, as the other justices are, and because the Chief Justice acts as Governor in a vacancy, the acting head of the March is in the Premier’s gift. Article IV, section 9 is the answer: an acting Governor cannot refuse a bill under the trust or certify an emergency of water, the border or defence.
Article VIII: The Mni Sose Trust
1. The Missouri, its reservoirs and its tributaries within the March, with the lands beneath them and the groundwater connected to them, are held in trust by the Crown in right of the Northern March, for the people of the March and for the nations whose rights in them are secured by treaty. They are called the Mni Sose Trust.
2. In the administration of the Trust, rights secured by treaty rank first; the supply of water fit to drink ranks next; and every other use ranks after them, as the law of the March provides.
3. The Governor is the trustee, and shall act on the advice of a Trust Council of nine: three named by the treaty nations whose lands lie on the river, two by the councils of the counties along it, two by the cities, and two by the Ministry. The Council chooses its own chair. A member’s term ends when the Assembly in which the member was named is dissolved or expires, and a member may be named again.
4. No bill affecting the Trust shall be presented for assent until the Trust Council has reported on it, and its report shall be published.
5. A bill breaches the Trust if it would diminish a right secured by treaty in the waters of the Trust, make water unfit to drink, or take from the river more than it can sustain on the figures the Trust Council publishes.
6. If the Governor, having received the Council’s report, finds that a bill would breach the Trust, she shall refuse assent to it, and give her reasons in writing. The refusal is final as to that bill.
7. A court may review a refusal under section 6 only to ask whether the Governor had the Council’s report and gave her reasons in writing.
The trust is the ministry’s second addition. Berg’s ministry added it in the summer of 2028, after the Senate refused the corridor framework bill, and it is the answer the ministry gave to the question the refusal had raised: if the counties may not decide the river alone, who should? The commission’s draft had said nothing about the river at all, and Kessler’s letter to the Premier said that the trust was a good idea that the commission had not had time to think about, and that he would not defend a provision he had not drafted.
Its name is the river’s Lakota name. Mni Sose is the Lakota name of the Missouri, and the trust carries it at the request of the four nations that consented to the Hills article, who asked that the one provision of the Constitution about the river should name it in a language that had named it first. Some members of other nations’ councils said that the March was taking a word as the State had taken the land, and the ministry kept the name.
Section 1 reaches under the ground. The trust covers the river, its reservoirs and its tributaries, and the groundwater connected to them, so that a well field cannot drain the river by the back door. It says “its reservoirs” without qualification, and the great reservoirs of the Missouri are federal works, built and run from New Westminster. Whether a trust of the Crown in right of the Northern March can hold a federal reservoir the text does not say, and nobody has yet asked the Law Officers.
Section 2 ranks treaty rights first. The order is the heart of the provision. Treaty water rights, which the courts of the Realm have long held to carry the earliest priority of any right in the river, are put ahead of drinking water, and drinking water ahead of irrigation, power, navigation and industry, so that a corridor which takes water must first show what it does to the rights above it. Since the Missouri’s great reservoirs were built in the middle of the twentieth century over the treaty bottomlands, the nations along the river have argued that their priority existed in law and not in practice. Section 2 makes it the first thing the trustee must consider.
Sections 5 to 7 give the Governor a power no political body can override. A bill breaches the trust if it would diminish a treaty right in the waters, make water unfit to drink, or take more from the river than the Council’s published figures say it can sustain. If the trustee, having the Council’s report, finds a breach, she must refuse assent and give her reasons in writing, and the refusal is final as to that bill: it cannot be passed again over her, by the Assembly, by a referendum under Article VI, section 11, or by both. A court may ask only whether she had the report and gave her reasons, not whether she was right. The ministry may redraw the bill and bring it again, and the new bill must go back to the Council. The No campaign called this handing the Missouri to a Governor nobody elected. The Yes campaign answered that it handed the Missouri to nobody, and made the trustee the one official in the March who could not be persuaded by a majority to breach the trust, which was what a trustee was for.
The Council turns over with each Assembly. Its members serve until the Assembly in which they were named ends, so that a new Assembly brings a new Council. The commission’s critics pointed out that a ministry with a corridor bill would therefore know which Council it would face, and could wait for a better one; its defenders that the nations’ three and the counties’ two are not the ministry’s to name.
Article IX: Pahá Sápa
1. There shall be a Pahá Sápa Authority of eight members: one named by each of the Oglala Lakota, the Sicangu Lakota, the Cheyenne River and the Lower Brule nations, and four named by the Ministry.
2. The chair of the Authority is held by a member named by the nations and by a member named by the Ministry in alternate years. Where the Authority is equally divided, the question shall go to an arbitrator agreed by both halves, or, if they cannot agree, named jointly by the Chief Justice of the Northern March and the chief judges of the courts of the nations represented on the Authority; and the arbitrator’s award binds the Authority.
3. The Authority holds the stewardship of Custer State Park and governs ceremonial access to it. The March continues to own the park and to run it for visitors under the Authority’s rules of stewardship.
4. The Authority receives the fees the park takes, and lives on them.
5. The Legislature may by law place further lands of the March within Pahá Sápa in the Authority’s stewardship, with the consent of the nations represented on it.
6. Any nation with a claim to Pahá Sápa may join the Authority by decision of its own council, and the Ministry shall then name a further member, so that the members named by the nations and by the Ministry stay equal.
7. Nothing in this Article, nor anything the Authority does, settles, waives or extinguishes any claim of any nation to Pahá Sápa. The March shall support, before Parliament and the Crown, the return of the lands of the Crown in Pahá Sápa to the nations.
The Hills article is the commission’s, and it is small on purpose. The title to Pahá Sápa, taken from the Lakota in the 1870s by the Northern March in breach of the treaty of 1868, is in the Crown in right of America, and no polity can give it back. What the March holds in the Hills is its own land. The commission chose to give the Authority only the stewardship of Custer State Park, about seventy-one thousand acres in the southern Hills, and ceremonial access to it, which the report calls a small and symbolic start, and to let the Legislature add the stewardship of other March land later by ordinary law, with the nations’ consent. The land stays the March’s, and so does the running of the park for its visitors.
The Authority is governed in equal halves. Four members are named by the four consenting nations and four by the ministry. The chair alternates each year, and an equal division goes to binding arbitration rather than to the chair’s casting vote, which the nations asked for and the ministry accepted on the ground that a joint authority in which one side could always win was not a joint authority. The Authority lives on the park’s fees, and the March bears the cost of the visitor services it runs.
The park keeps Custer’s name. It is named for George Armstrong Custer, whose expedition of 1874 found the gold that brought the miners and the seizure, and the commission kept the name, on the ground that it was a record of what had happened and that the Authority, which would govern the park for ceremony, should govern it under the name of the man who opened it to the miners. The bison stay the March’s too: the herd of about thirteen hundred remains the March’s property under the transitional Article, and the Authority’s critics on both sides call the arrangement the joint authority in miniature.
Section 7 is the clause the nations insisted on. It says that nothing in the Article or anything the Authority does settles, waives or extinguishes any claim to Pahá Sápa, and binds the March to support the return of the Crown’s lands in the Hills to the nations, before Parliament and the Crown. The consenting nations would not have consented without it. The Black Hills claim was offered compensation in money a century ago and refused, because the land itself is what is sought, and the nations were not prepared to let a park be read as a settlement. Mount Rushmore, which is federal, is not mentioned; section 7 covers it with the rest of the Crown’s land in the Hills.
Standing Rock is not on the Authority. The Standing Rock nation refused to consent, on the ground that a joint authority over any part of the Hills conceded the State a place there. Section 6 leaves the door open, and the Standing Rock council has said that it will not walk through it.
Article X: The Public Bank and the family farm
1. The Public Bank is a public institution of the March. It shall not be sold, merged, wound up or taken out of public ownership except by amendment of this Constitution.
2. The Public Bank is governed by a professional board. No minister shall direct it in any loan, or in any other decision on a particular application.
3. Every fund of the March, and of every county, city, township and other public body in it, shall be kept on deposit with the Public Bank.
4. Farmland in the March may be owned only by natural persons, by families, by cooperatives, by family farm corporations as the law defines them, and by the treaty nations.
5. A corporation that owns farmland it may not own under section 4 shall sell it within ten years of the day this Constitution comes into force.
The bank is the oldest institution of prairie radicalism. It was founded by amendment in 1919, in the years when the grain farmers of the plains decided that they would not borrow from banks in the East, and it has survived every attempt since to sell it, the last in the 1990s. The Constitution names it plainly the Public Bank and puts it beyond the reach of any Legislature, and the commission’s report says that this was the one provision on which every member, from every chamber, nation and organisation, agreed at the first reading. Section 3, which requires every public fund in the March to be kept with it, writes in the State’s law of 1919, which is the source of the bank’s strength.
The family-farm clause is the counties’ own radicalism. The prairie radicals’ law that no corporation may own farmland except a family farm corporation has been on the State’s books since the 1930s and survived two attempts to repeal it by referendum. Section 4 puts it in the Constitution, with the nations’ right to own their own farmland stated beside the families’, and section 5 gives the corporations that own farmland the law should never have let them buy ten years to sell it, which the ranchers’ No campaign, which opposed nearly everything else, supported.
Article XI: The permanent resource trust
1. One quarter of the revenue of the March from the severance of oil, gas and lignite shall be paid into the permanent resource trust.
2. The capital of the trust shall never be spent. In each year the Legislature may pay into the general revenue of the March no more than four in every hundred of the trust’s average value over the five years before.
3. The trust shall not be wound up, nor its share of revenue reduced, except by amendment of this Constitution.
The quarter is the statute’s figure, made permanent. The resource trust has taken a quarter of the State’s severance revenue since the 1970s under an ordinary statute, which successive ministries in hard years proposed to reduce and the Legislature refused. The oil counties, which pay most of it, wanted the share left to statute so that it could be changed in their favour; the commission fixed it, on the ground that a trust whose share could be cut in a bad year was not permanent. Section 2 lets the March spend the earnings and never the capital, up to four per cent a year of the trust’s average value, the rule the trust’s own board had followed by habit.
Article XII: Counties and local government
1. The counties are the units of local government of the March, and each is represented in the Senate of Counties by one senator.
2. The townships are units of local government. A township may dissolve itself into its county by a vote of its electors.
3. A county or a city may adopt a charter of home rule by a vote of its electors, and it then governs its own affairs, except where the law of the March provides otherwise.
4. A county may be created, divided or merged only by a law passed by two-thirds of the members of both Houses and approved by the electors of the counties affected, after consultation with any treaty nation whose lands are affected.
The counties keep everything they had, and gain home rule. The rules on county boundaries in section 4, the hardest in the Realm to satisfy, are those of the Admission Constitution as amended, restated in one section; the commission’s report says it found them the clearest part of the old instrument. The text does not list the counties: “one senator for each county” leaves the list, and so the Senate’s membership, to the law. Section 2 recognises the townships, the small rural governments the plains have kept where a county is too large, and lets each dissolve itself into its county, as many have; section 3 lets any county or city adopt a charter of home rule, which the cities asked for and the counties took too. The Constitution says nothing about duties the March imposes on the counties without the money to perform them, which the county association asked for, and which the commission left to the Senate’s ordinary power over county finance.
Article XIII: Elections and public office
1. Every citizen of sixteen years or more who lives in the March is an elector, and may vote at every election and referendum of the March.
2. Elections are run by the Secretary of State, and their results are certified by an Election Commission, which the Secretary of State chairs.
3. A general election shall be held not less than seven weeks after a dissolution.
4. The member of the House of Lords returned for the March is elected by the electors of the March.
5. No corporation shall give money, or anything of value, to a political party, a candidate or a campaign.
6. Every minister, member, senator, justice, and the Governor, shall publish each year the land, mineral rights and shares they hold, and every gift above the sum the law fixes.
7. There shall be an Ombudsman and an Auditor of the March, each appointed by two-thirds of the members of the Assembly for eight years, removable only for cause, and reporting to the Assembly and not to the Ministry.
Section 1 is the commission’s boldest change, and the campaign barely noticed it. The vote at sixteen came from the commission’s youngest member, a delegate of the cooperatives, and was agreed in an afternoon. The No campaign, which spent the autumn on the trust, the referendum and the Hills, did not mention it until the last week. About forty thousand sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds will vote on 16 January 2029.
Section 2 keeps elections with a minister. The State’s elections were run by the Secretary of State, a minister, and the commission considered an independent commission like the newer polities’ and kept the old arrangement, with the certification left to an Election Commission that the Secretary of State chairs. The commission’s critics said that an independent body would have been safer with a Governor who can refuse bills and a ministry that can call referendums when it chooses; its defenders that the Dakotas had never had an election anyone disputed. It was the Election Commission that refused the No campaign’s request to postpone the vote of 8 November.
Section 4 writes in the Dakotas’ Lords member. The Dakotas have elected their member of the House of Lords directly since they copied the practice from Cascadia within a generation of 1908, and section 4 puts it beyond the reach of a future Legislature.
Sections 5 to 7 are the prairie radicals’ suspicion of money. No corporation may give to a party or campaign, in the tradition of the farmers who founded the bank; unions may, which the Conservative and Crown Union’s rural members protested and the urban ones let pass. Every minister, member, senator, justice and the Governor publishes each year the land, minerals and shares they hold, which the State’s ministers already did by statute. The Ombudsman and the Auditor, who already existed by statute, are put in the text, appointed by two-thirds of the Assembly and answerable to it.
Article XIV: Amendment, initiative and referral
1. An amendment to this Constitution may be proposed by a bill passed by two-thirds of the members of the Assembly and a majority of the Senate of Counties, or by a petition signed by electors numbering not less than five in every hundred of those who voted at the last general election to the Assembly.
2. A proposed amendment shall be put to the electors at a referendum, and if a majority of those voting approve it, it becomes part of this Constitution.
3. Any part of this Constitution may be amended under this Article, subject to Article III, section 10.
4. A law may be proposed by a petition signed by electors numbering not less than two in every hundred of those who voted at the last general election to the Assembly, and shall be put to the electors at a referendum; if a majority of those voting approve it, it becomes law.
5. A petition signed by electors numbering not less than three in every hundred of those who voted at the last general election to the Assembly, delivered within ninety days of a law’s passing, suspends that law until the electors have voted on it at a referendum; but no law of supply, and no law the Legislature declares necessary to meet an emergency, may be suspended so.
6. A law made by the electors may be amended or repealed only by the electors.
The initiative and the referral are the prairie radicals’ last demands. The farmers’ movements of the 1910s asked for a popular initiative, for amendments and for laws, and for a popular veto of laws the Legislature passed, at the same time as they asked for the public bank, and got the bank. The Constitution gives them the rest at the bars they asked for: five per cent of the last Assembly vote to propose an amendment, two per cent to propose a law, and three per cent, within ninety days, to suspend a law until the voters have decided on it. The commission’s report notes that Cascadia has had an initiative since 1908 and that the Dakotas were a hundred and twenty years late.
Nothing is beyond the initiative except the nations’ consent. Section 3 lets the voters amend any part of the Constitution, county equality in the Senate included, which the senators noticed only after the Senate had passed the bill. An amendment that affects a treaty right still needs the consent of each nation it affects, under Article III, section 10, whether it was proposed by the Legislature or by petition. Section 6 means that a law the voters make can be unmade only by the voters, which the commission adopted from the prairie radicals’ programme and which the Legislature’s lawyers expect to regret.
The Lord Warden’s March can be undone by the same means. The No campaign pointed out that the March form, the name and the trust could all be amended away by a petition of five per cent and a majority, as the commission conceded they could. Lindgren, who conceded on the night, said nothing about trying.
Article XV: Transition
1. The Admission Constitution of 1889 is repealed at the moment the Clerk of the Parliaments enters on the register the deposit of this Constitution, and this Constitution is in force from that moment.
2. Every law in force continues until it is changed; but a law that cannot stand with Article II is void from that moment, to the extent that it cannot.
3. Every person holding office continues to hold it. The Governor in office is deemed to have been confirmed under Article IV, and her eight years run from that day.
4. Every institution named for the State of the Dakotas takes the name of the Northern March. The Senate of Counties keeps its name.
5. The Assembly in office continues, as the Assembly of the Northern March, until it is dissolved. At the first general election under this Constitution every senator shall be elected, and at the Senate’s first sitting the senators shall decide by lot which third of them serve two years, which four and which six.
6. The justices of the Supreme Court in office continue for the rest of their elected terms, and may then be commissioned under Article VII. The two further justices shall be commissioned after the first general election.
7. Every bill before the Legislature lapses.
8. The members of the Pahá Sápa Authority shall be named, and it shall first meet, within ninety days. The bison of Custer State Park remain the property of the March.
9. The Mni Sose Trust is constituted at once. No bill affecting it shall be presented for assent until the Trust Council is complete.
Article XV makes the change at the moment of deposit. Section 2 is the strictest transitional clause in any polity instrument of the Realm: a law of the March that cannot stand with the bill of rights falls at once, with no period of grace, and the Legislature’s lawyers spent the campaign compiling a list of the statutes they expect to lose, which the ministry has not published. Section 7 means that the corridor framework bill, refused by the Senate in the summer, falls with the old Constitution; any corridor bill begins again under the new one, with the Trust Council’s report, the trustee’s test, and two refusals in a calendar year before any referendum. The Pahá Sápa Authority must first meet by 26 February 2029, and the ministry’s four members will be named after the January election.
The Schedule
The treaty nations whose lands lie within the March are the Oglala Lakota; the Sicangu Lakota; the Cheyenne River nation; the Standing Rock nation; the Lower Brule nation; the Crow Creek nation; the Ihanktonwan nation; the Sisseton-Wahpeton nation; the Flandreau Santee nation; the Spirit Lake nation; the Turtle Mountain nation; and the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation.
The Schedule names twelve nations, and each may change its own entry. The names are the ones the nations’ delegations gave the commission, and Article III, section 3 lets a nation change its own entry by notice to the Governor, without an amendment and without anyone’s leave, so that the Constitution never names a nation in words the nation has not chosen.
Assessment
What the Constitution keeps
The Constitution of 2028 keeps the county bargain and changes its terms. County equality survives, the Senate keeps its seats, its name, its power over supply and over county boundaries and finance, and its inability to make a ministry. What it loses is the last word. Under the Admission Constitution the counties could stop anything large that touched them; under the new instrument they can stop it twice in a year, and the ministry can then ask the voters. The senators voted for that, comfortably, because they expected to win referendums. Whether they do will decide what the bargain has become.
What it changes
It moves power to places the 1889 instrument left empty. One is the Governor’s office, which had been ceremonial for a hundred and thirty-nine years and now holds the river, a fixed term, an emergency authority without a stated limit on its use, and a confirmation that makes its holder answerable to two-thirds of the Assembly before she is answerable to nobody. Another is the treaty nations, which the 1889 text guaranteed without describing and the new one describes as governments, with courts, languages, a share in the stewardship of the Hills and the first place in the river’s priorities. A third is the voters, who get the initiative, the referral, the recall and the vote at sixteen. And it ends the proportional correction that let small parties and treaty-rights members into the Assembly, which the smaller parties fought on the commission and the campaign barely noticed.
The arguments against it
The No campaign’s arguments survive the vote. The trustee is not elected, and her refusal is final. The emergency authority has no stated bar on its use for civil order, in a country whose last head to rule by proclamation was the Lord Warden, under the name the polity has just taken back. The deadlock referendum has no exceptions, and the nations objected to it in terms the ministry overruled. The Hills article gives the Authority the stewardship of one park, under Custer’s name, and leaves the land, the visitors and the herd with the State. And the Constitution was ratified by fifty-two counties of a hundred and nineteen, so that the instrument which keeps county equality was carried by the cities against most of the map. Each of these is an argument that the 1889 instrument’s defenders will make again, and the citizens’ initiative gives them the means.
What the nations made of it
The nations proposed the form and the name, and refused parts of the substance. The March was their idea, and so were the name, the recognition of their courts, the duty to search for the missing and the non-extinguishment clause. The deadlock referendum and the absence of a bar on the emergency authority’s use for civil order were not, and four Lakota nations consented to a joint authority over a park while Standing Rock refused it outright. The Constitution is the first polity instrument of the Realm written with the nations at the table as equals, and it is also an instrument parts of which the nations at the table opposed.
The newest constitution
It is the newest polity constitution in the Realm. The Constitution of California, ratified in 2019, held the distinction for nine years and remains the more unusual; the Northern March’s instrument is the more cautious, and it was written to be. California rebuilt its executive, legislature and courts at once after a fire and a scandal. The Dakotas kept their legislature, their courts and their ministry, changed what the Governor holds and what the counties can stop, and took back a name, after a road case and a river bill.
Chronology
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1861 | Parliament makes the Northern March out of the northern plains, under a Lord Warden commissioned by the Crown |
| 1868 | The treaty of 1868 reserves Pahá Sápa to the Lakota |
| 1870s | The Black Hills taken from the Lakota under the Lord Warden’s proclamations |
| 2 November 1889 | The Northern March admitted as the State of the Dakotas under the Admission Constitution; the Lord Wardenship abolished; the Polity Instruments Act passed the same year |
| 1919 | The public bank founded by amendment, with every public fund to be kept in it |
| 1930s | The family-farm law: no corporation may own farmland except a family farm corporation |
| 1970s | The permanent resource trust founded by amendment, with a quarter of severance revenue by statute |
| 1994 | Walter Kessler publishes Paper and Grass: The Treaty of 1868 and the Northern March |
| 2024 | The Harding County judgment: the Supreme Court of the Dakotas finds the constitution inconsistent with itself and leaves the remedy to the Legislature |
| 2025 | The Legislature sets up the Constitutional Commission of the Dakotas, thirty-one members under Kessler, with no deadline |
| June 2028 | The commission reports, with a draft instrument resuming the March and its name, on the nations’ proposal |
| Summer 2028 | The Senate of Counties refuses the Missouri corridor framework bill; Berg sends the draft to the voters, adding the deadlock referendum and the river trust |
| September 2028 | The Assembly passes the constitution bill 72 to 27; Berg says he will resign if it is rejected |
| Autumn 2028 | The Senate of Counties passes it 84 to 35. The Oglala Lakota, Sicangu Lakota, Cheyenne River and Lower Brule nations consent to the Hills article; Standing Rock refuses |
| 31 October to 4 November 2028 | Campaigning suspended twice, after George V’s accession and after the San Andreas earthquake; the Election Commission refuses a postponement |
| 8 November 2028 | Ratified by 53.1 per cent to 46.9, on a turnout of about 66 per cent, carrying 52 of the 119 counties. Lindgren concedes; Berg announces an early election |
| 9 November 2028 | Charter House says that the form of a polity’s government is its own to determine |
| 22 November 2028 | The Election Commission certifies the result |
| 28 November 2028 | The Governor deposits the Constitution with the Clerk of the Parliaments in New Westminster; it comes into force, and the State of the Dakotas is the Northern March again |
| 16 January 2029 | The first election to the Assembly of the Northern March, by single-member districts and from the age of sixteen, and of the whole Senate of Counties |
| By 26 February 2029 | The Pahá Sápa Authority first meets |
Trivia
- In-Universe The Northern March is the Realm's first March resumed by its own people. Parliament made it in 1861 and converted it in 1889; the Dakotas took back both the form and the name by a vote, under the Charter's rule that a polity's form of government is its own to determine.
- In-Universe The name of the government that took the Black Hills was given back to the polity on the proposal of the nations whose land it took. 'A name is not an apology,' said the commission's chair. 'But forgetting one is worse.'
- In-Universe The commission's chair wrote the book that proved the Northern March knew the Black Hills were reserved when it let the miners in. Walter Kessler's Paper and Grass was published in 1994; thirty-four years later he chaired the commission that made the country the Northern March again.
- In-Universe The new flag's bison is brown by constitutional text, because the first design the commission saw showed a white one, and a white buffalo is the most sacred image the Lakota have.
- In-Universe The Constitution gives the vote at sixteen and sets no minimum age at all for the Assembly or the Senate. Nobody who sat on the commission has been able to explain the second.
- In-Universe The Senate of Counties voted 84 to 35 for a constitution that lets the voters overrule it, on the stated ground that the voters would almost always agree with it. Since the vote of 8 November, which the counties lost, nobody in the Senate has repeated the argument.
- In-Universe The Governor's refusal of a bill that breaches the Mni Sose Trust cannot be overridden by the Assembly, by a referendum or by both, and a court may ask only whether she read the Council's report and gave her reasons. The commission's report says that it knows of no other power in any polity instrument of the Realm that no majority can reverse.
- In-Universe The Pahá Sápa Authority holds the stewardship of a park named for George Armstrong Custer, whose expedition found the gold that led to the seizure of the Hills. The commission kept the name as a record of what happened.
- In-Universe The No campaign's leader said the restored name was the one thing in the Constitution she would have voted for. She led the campaign of ranchers and irrigators against everything else in it, conceded on the night, and went home to the James River.
- In-Universe Section 11 of Article VI, the deadlock referendum, was the provision most voters could name, and the No campaign called it 'section eleven' so often that the Yes committee's chair began calling it that too.
- In-Universe The Constitution is a twelfth the length of the instrument it replaces, and its drafting rule was that every section should mean the same thing to everybody who heard it read aloud at a county fair.
- Design Jake built the Constitution in two hundred answers on polling day: a hundred for the vote and its politics, and a hundred, after renaming the polity the Northern March, for the text itself, Article by Article. The two matters the Register had held unresolved since August 2026, the title to Pahá Sápa and the Missouri corridor, he ruled on in part: the Constitution acts on the Hills and the river, and settles neither the claim nor the corridor.
- Real-World The Black Hills were reserved to the Lakota by the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868 and taken after gold was found by Custer's expedition of 1874. In 1980 the United States Supreme Court upheld an award of compensation for the taking, which the Lakota nations have refused; the fund, held in trust, is now worth well over a billion dollars.
- Real-World Custer State Park is real, about seventy-one thousand acres in the southern Black Hills, with a herd of about thirteen hundred bison that is rounded up every September. Mount Rushmore is a federal memorial nearby.
- Real-World North Dakota really has a state-owned bank, founded in 1919, which holds the state's funds by law; a law of 1932 against corporate ownership of farmland, which its voters kept in 2016; a Legacy Fund that takes a share of oil taxes; and the initiative and the referral. Both Dakotas adopted their constitutions in 1889 and have amended them many times; neither has replaced its constitution.
- Real-World The Garrison and Oahe dams on the Missouri flooded the bottomlands of the Fort Berthold, Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations in the 1950s and 1960s. Standing Rock's refusal here echoes, for a real-world reader, its stand against the Dakota Access pipeline under the Missouri in 2016 and 2017.
- Real-World The real northern plains were the Dakota Territory from 1861, not a March, and the name 'Northern March' belongs only to the Register.
✎ Editor's Note · How this constitution was built
The Black Hills claim, the treaty of 1868, Custer and Custer State Park and its herd, the Missouri dams over the treaty bottomlands, the twelve nations of the Schedule, and the prairie institutions the Constitution entrenches, the public bank, the family-farm law, the initiative and the referral, are real or follow real models. Everything about the Constitution of 2028 is invented: the commission and Walter Kessler, the Harding County judgment, the Senate’s refusal, the vote and its figures, the Northern March resumed, the Mni Sose Trust, the Pahá Sápa Authority and the nations’ consents and refusal, which belong to the Register’s nations and not to any real nation’s government, and every word of the text. Jake chose all of it from two hundred questions on 8 November, polling day.
See also
- The Northern March - the polity, until deposit the State of the Dakotas, and still the Dakotas to most people
- March - the form, from the Northern March of 1861 to Arizona and the Northern March resumed
- Constitution of the March of Arizona - the other March’s instrument, the March Charter of 1884
- Constitution of California - the replaced admission constitution before this one
- Polity Instruments Act 1889 - the Act under which the Constitution is deposited
- Treaty nations - the nations whose consent the treaty articles needed
- American Rights Act - restated in Article II
- Charter of Union - Article VII.6, on which the change of form rests
Categories
Laws · Polity Constitutions · The Northern March · The Dakotas · Treaty Nations · Pahá Sápa