"I would like to say with all sincerity- and with no disrespect- that I don't consider myself and American citizen. I am a native of Great Turtle Island. I am of the Ikce Wicasa- the Common People, the Original People. Our sacred land is under occupation, and we are now all prisoners, not just me."
"Even so, I love being an Indian, for all of its burdens and all of its responsibilities. Being an Indian is my greatest pride. I thank Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery, for making me Indian. I love my people. If you must accuse me of something, accuse me of that- being an Indian. To that crime- and to that crime alone- I plead guilty."
"When you grow up Indian, you quickly learn that the so-called American Dream isn't for you. For you that dream's a nightmare."
"White man's books will tell you there are only 2.5 million or so of us Indians here in America. But there are more than 200 million of us right here in this Western Hemisphere, in the Americas, and hundreds of millions more indigenous peoples around this Mother Earth. We are the Original People. We are one of the fingers on the hand of humankind. Why is it we are unrepresented in our own lands, and without a seat - or many seats- in the United Nations?"
"This was during the last years of the Eisenhower administration, when a resolution was passed by Congress and signed by President Eisenhower to "terminate" all Indian reservations and to "relocate" us off our lands and into the cities. Those suddenly became the most important, the most feared, words in our vocabulary: "termination" and "relocation." I can think of few words more sinister in the English language, at least to Indian people. I guess the Jews of Europe must have felt that way about Nazi words like "final solution" and "resettlement in the East." To us, those words were an assault on our very existence as a people, an attempt to eradicate us." ..."It's no accident that the BIA started off back in the 1800s as part of the Department of War. They're still waging war on us today."
"To implement their inhuman policy, the federal government in the late 1950s cut off the reservations' already meager supply of food and commodities- the pitiful little "payment" they'd promised us in those treaties to recompense us for all the vast and holy continent they'd stolen. Hunger was the only thing we had plenty of; yeah, there was plenty of that to go around, enough for everybody. When frantic mothers took their bloated-bellied children to the clinic, the nurses smiled and told them the children just had "gas." A little girl who lived right near us on the reservation died of malnutrition. Sounds like "termination" to me.
"One night in 1958, a few friends and I sneaked out to watch the Sun Dance at Turtle Mountain, which was held secretly because piercing went on, which was illegal at the time...I envied them and vowed that someday I would be a Sun Dancer. Then, my friends and I were actually arrested by BIA police as we came out of the Sun Dance grounds. They claimed we were drunk- a total lie- and jailed us overnight. They were afraid to arrest the Sun Dancers, who would surely have put up a fight, but we young teenagers were there, and we were Indian, so why not arrest us? They did. Here I was, not yet fifteen, and already I was getting firsthand experience in government-fabricated criminal charges and false imprisonment. I began to realize that my real crime was simply being who I was- an Indian."
"So speaking my language was my first crime, and practicing my religion was the second. When I was also arrested that winter for siphoning some diesel fuel from an army reserve truck to heat my grandmother's freezing house, I was arrested again and spent a couple of weeks in jail. That was my first stretch of hard time. So trying to keep my family from freezing was my third crime, the third strike against me. Henceforth, I would be considered "incorrigible." My career as a "hardened criminal" was already well on its way."
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.