So I’m going to start it off with this quotation by Chief Joseph in 1879. Joseph was saying this, and it still applies for today.
If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian, he can live in peace, treat all men alike, give them all the same law, give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same great spirit. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and people should have equal rights upon it. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. We ask that the same law shall work alike unto all men. Let me be a free man, free to work, free to trade me, to choose my teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers. Free to think and talk and act for myself. And I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.
Well, it’s like to me, we’re standing up for what exactly? [Chief] Joseph said the right to be free. This country leads the world in wealth. And we lead in poverty. This country leads the world in the average life expectancy. And Indian people lead the country in the death rate, the shortest life expectancy. This country leads the world in employment. And this country leads in unemployment. And I don’t know. I think one way to judge a society is by the way they treat the people of the land. And that’s the way I’m going to judge it. And it’s, we are the people of the land here. We have always known how to live and survive with the land. We have never been better off, until the whites came in and told us that we were doing it all wrong. And the whole deal is we weren’t doing it all wrong. And we’re going to in the future. We’re going to be free. There’s no reason why we want to be to be white. Why we want to assimilate. Because what advantages are there to it? I don’t want to assimilate into this society and be dehumanized. I would rather have human feelings and respect for people, and I would rather be able to look another person in the eye and know that I can show him respect. I’m not ready to sell my soul for a dollar. Maybe it’s because while this society was preaching assimilation to us and telling us of all the advantages, they withheld them from us. And it has reached to the point now where I don’t want it. And I think, with what Indian people had, all of our societies, we always call ourselves the people, like the name for the two people, which is Lakota or Dakota. When translated, it means the people. Same way with the Navajo. When that’s translated, that means the people. Hopi. All these Indian names mean the people. And this is how our societies were. This is how we considered ourselves. The people. But United States of America, no. Where can you get the people out of that? Not one place. And even with this last week, the things that have went on with the young campus demonstrators or the campus demonstrations and things, and the people’s right to dissent and the way the government has handled that, I don’t know, it’s starting to show me a lot of things that I’ve always known were there. And it’s like being in this movement. All of us in this room here have been in this movement all our lives. Maybe we just weren’t active until we reached a point where we saw that it was going to take action to bring about changes and all we want is to be able to take care of ourselves. We just want to be us. That’s all there is to it. ~