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;void(0)) AMERICAN INDIANS . . . see: "WEST (THE)" see: "PEOPLE" for other related links There was one little child, probably three years old, just big enough to walk through the sand. The Indians had gone ahead, and this little child was behind, following after them. The little fellow was perfectly naked, traveling in the sand. I saw one man get off his horse at a distance of about 75 yards and draw up his rifle and fire. He missed the child. Another man came up and said, 'Let me try the son of a b----. I can hit him.' He got down off his horse, kneeled down, and fired at the little child, but he missed him. A third man came up, and made a similar remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped. --Maj. Anthony (18201891) Present at the Sand Creek Massacre. Testimony before a Congressional committee investigating "The Sand Creek Massacre" carried out in November 1864. In Helen Hunt Jackson, _A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's Dealing with Some of the Indian Tribes_ [1881]. - To be an Indian is hard, very hard . . . . What I remember the most is the terror and sadness that fell upon me when the Mexican soldiers killed my mother," he said softly, as if the memory was still painful. "She was a poor and humble Indian. Perhaps it was better that her life was over then. I wanted to be killed with her, because I was a child. But the soldiers picked me up and beat me. When I grabbed onto my mother's body they hit my fingers with a horsewhip and broke them. I didn't feel any pain, but I couldn't grasp any more, and then they dragged me away." He stopped talking. His eyes were still closed and I could detect a very slight tremor in his lips. A profound sadness began to overtake me. Images of my own childhood started to flood my mind. "How old were you, don Juan?" I asked, just to offset the sadness in me. "Maybe seven. That was the time of the great Yaqui wars. The Mexican soldiers came upon us unexpectedly while my mother was cooking some food. She was a helpless woman. They killed her for no reason at all. It doesn't make any difference that she died that way, not really, and yet for me it does. "I thought they had killed my father too, but they hadn't. He was wounded. Later on they put us in a train like cattle and closed the door. For days they kept us there in the dark, like animals. They kept us alive with bits of food they threw into the wagon from time to time. "My father died of his wounds in that wagon. He became delirious with pain and fever and went on telling me that I had to survive. He kept on telling me that until the very last moment of his life. "The people took care of me; they gave me food; an old woman curer fixed the broken bones of my hand. And as you can see, I lived. Life has been neither good nor bad to me; life has been hard. Life is hard and for a child it is sometimes horror itself. --Carlos Castaneda (19251998) Peruvian-born American author. _A Separate Reality_ [1971], Chapter 9 - We are powerful and they are weak ... The poor children of the forest have been driven by the great wave which has flowed in from the Atlantic Ocean to almost the base of the Rocky Mountains, and, overwhelming them in its terrible progress, has left no other remains of hundreds of tribes, now extinct, than those which indicate the remote existence of their former companion, the mammoth of the New World. --Henry Clay (17771852) American politician. [20 January 1819] President Jackson pushed a bill through Congress ordering all the Indian tribes, whether farmers or hunters, peaceable or hostile, to move west of the Mississippi. And they started to move away, the Choctaws, the Creeks, and the Chickasaws. There was a brave pause while the Cherokees appealed to the Supreme Court and Chief Justice John Marshall upheld their claim that there was no constitutional right to remove them from their ancestral lands. Jackson called this decision "too preposterous," and, in what is surely one of the most shameless and arbitrary acts of an American President, he simply ignored the Supreme Court and ordered the army to "get them out." And so, in what is truly called "the trail of tears," thirty thousand Cherokees were persuaded or chained, gently led or viciously driven, as far west as Oklahoma, and along the way a quarter of them died. --Alistair Cooke [Alfred Cooke] (19082004) British-born American broadcater and journalist. _America_ [1973] All dead bodies stripped naked, crushed skulls, with war clubs, ears, nose and legs had been cut off, scalps torn away and the bodies pierced with bullets and arrows, wrists, feet and ankles leaving each attached by a tendon ... We walked on the internals and did not know it in the high grass. --Private John Guthrie after the massacre of a US army detachment by Sioux Indians at Sand Creek, Wyoming Territory, Dec. 1866; in Geoffrey C. Ward _The West_ [1996] p.232. - You and my white children are too near to each other to live in harmony and peace ... Beyond the great river Mississippi, where a part of your nation has gone, your father has provided a country large enough for all of you, and he advises you to remove to it. There your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to the land, and you can live upon it, you and all your children, as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty. It will be yours forever. --Andrew Jackson {Old Hickory} (17671845) American military hero and 7th president of the United States [18291837]. To the Creek Nation [23 March 1829] in _Niles Weekly Register_ [13 June 1829], p.258. & see: Brothers, I have listened to a great many talks from our great father [President Jackson]. But they always began and ended in this: 'Get a little further; you are too near me.' --Speckled Snake (c. 17291829) American Creek Indian chief. Statement when President Andrew Jackson recommended that the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles move west beyond the Mississippi [1829] & note: [The Indians] listened to our professions of friendship. We called them brothers and they believed us. They yielded millions of acres to our demands and yet we crave more. We have crowded the tribes upon a few miserable acres of our southern frontier: it is all that is left to them of their once boundless forests; and still, like the horse-leech, our insatiated cupidity cries, give! give! give!. --Theodore Frelinghuysen (18171885) American politician. In M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 580. - Shawee Chief Tecumseh ... had organized a league of Indian tribes and he told their elite (mainly Creeks) in October 18II: 'Let the white race perish! They seize your land. They corrupt your women. They trample on the bones of your dead! Back whence they came, on a trail of blood, they must be driven! Back aye, back to the great water whose accursed waves brought them to our shores! Burn their dwellings destroy their stock slay their wives and children that their very breed may perish! War now! War always! War on the living! War on the dead!' --Paul Johnson (1928 ) British historian. _A History of the American People_ [1997] p. 271 {Tecumseh (1768-1813) Shawnee leader} - You might as well expect all rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. If you tie a horse to a stake, do you expect he will grow fat? If you pen an Indian up on a small spot of earth, and compel him to stay there, he will not be contented, nor will he grow and prosper. I have asked some of the great white chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he should stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They can not tell me. --Chief Joseph (c. 18401904) Nez Percι leader. In the "North American Review" [April 1879]. Our chiefs are killed. . . The old men are all dead. . . The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are, perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Hear me, my chiefs. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever. --Chief Joseph (c. 18401904) Nez Percι leader. To the Nez Percι tribe after surrendering to U.S. forces [October 1877]. - And so, stoic and unafraid, departed the last wild Indian of America. He closes a chapter in history. He looked upon us as sophisticated children smart, but not wise. We knew many things, and much that is false. He knew nature, which is always true. His were the qualities of character that last forever. He was kind; he had courage and self-restraint, and though all had been taken from him, there was no bitterness in his heart. His soul was that of a child, his mind that of a philosopher. --Saxton Temple Pope (18751926) American hunter, author, and doctor. Quoted in Theodora Kroeber's book, _Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America_. A government treaty gave Cherokees their land as long as the grass grows and the water flows, but when they discovered oil, they took it back because there was nuthin' in the treaty about oil. --Will Rogers [William Penn Adair Rogers] (18791935) American humorist and actor. In "Will Rogers U.S.A.," CBS-TV [9 March 1972]. Eleanor Roosevelt once subjected Winston Churchill to a diatribe on the subject of British imperialism. 'The Indians have suffered for years under British oppression,' she declared. 'Are we talking about the brown-skinned Indians in India who have multiplied under benevolent British rule,' Churchill retorted, 'or are we speaking about the red-skinned Indians in America who, I understand, are now almost extinct?' --during a WWII visit to the White House. Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) American human rights activist, diplomat, and wife of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Winston Churchill (1874-1965) British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister [1940-1945, 1951-1955]. The only good Indians I ever saw were dead. --Philip H. Sheridan (18311888) American army general. On being introduced to an Indian chief identified as a "good Indian," at Fort Cobb, Indian Territory [January 1869]. (The incident was reported by Edward Ellis.) We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children. Nothing less will reach the root of the case. --William Tecumseh Sherman (18201891) American Union general. Dispatch to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant [28 December 1866]. What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux; because I was born where my fathers lived; because I would die for my people and my country? --Sitting Bull [Tatanka Iyotake] (c. 18311890) Hunkpapa Sioux leader. Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families that we loved was it "wild" for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the "Wild West" began. --Luther Standing Bear (1868-1939) Native American writer and actor. _Land of the Spotted Eagle_ [1933] Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun. --Tecumseh (17681813) Shawnee leader. In Dee Brown _Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee_ [1970]. - While some tribes were known for their gentle and humane ways, others glorified fighting, developed warrior cultures, and aggressively pursued imperialistic policies toward their neighbors. While it is true Europeans fought for and took Indian lands, this was nothing new in America; Indians had been fighting and dispossessing each other for centuries. The Sioux Indians, memorialized in Costner's Dances With Wolves, are an excellent example. Theaters-full of movie-goers felt bad that Costner's buddies were going to lose their land in the Black Hills to encroaching settlers. The film failed to mention, however, that the Sioux were also recent immigrants to the area, arriving in the mid-18th century to drive out the Kiowa and Cheyenne tribes. These tribes had, in turn, driven out the Crow Indians. And before that, the Arapahoe occupied the Black Hills; no one knows which tribes they dispossessed. The Sioux moved to the region because they were driven out of Minnesota by the Ojibway, or Chippewa tribe. The next time Ojibway Indians complain about settlers taking their ancestral lands in Minnesota, ask for a Sioux perspective. --Paul Valentine, "Hollywood's Noble Indians: Are We Dancing With Myths?" - The Indians had suffered plenty before the U.S. started moving into the West in the early 1800s. By then, the Spanish had been in the Southwest for more than two centuries. Under their rule, pestilence and slavery, along with raids by other Indians, had reduced the population of New Mexico's once stable and prosperous Pueblo communities from at least 60,000 Indians to about 9,000. The death toll in California was equally dire. By 1800, a string of Spanish missions had converted some Indians, enslaved others, and by means accidental and intended managed to kill off a lot more, perhaps up to 90 percent of the indigenous population. --_The Wild West_ Time-Life Books [1993] p. 29 ----- calumet (noun) A long-stemmed sacred or ceremonial tobacco pipe used by certain Native American peoples. 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