JULY 4TH~America's Independence Day
Chief Joseph, Nez Perce
"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 Chief. They are all brothers. The Earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it....... Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade.... where I choose my own 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."Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Sioux
"I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in his sight. It is not necessary for Eagles to be Crows. We are poor..but we are free. No white man controls our footsteps. If we must die...we die defending our rights."Spotted Tail
"This war did not spring up on our land, this war was brought upon us by the children of the Great Father who came to take our land without a price, and who, in our land, do a great many evil things... This war has come from robbery - from the stealing of our land."John Wooden Legs, Cheyenne
"Our land is everything to us... I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember that our grandfathers paid for it - with their lives."When there was War
I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heapen and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A peoples dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. . . .the nations hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead. Black Elk, Lakota"The Indian survived our open intention of wiping them out.
And since the tide turned they have even weathered our good intentions toward them, which can be more deadly." John Steinbeck....American and AmericansThe American Indian and First Nations People have served honorably in every conflict and war, dating back to the Revolution, and even earlier than that. When the Europeans became "free" in this land they called America, so began the demise of once mighty native nations.
In their win for freedom a democracy was born and a part of that democracy and its principals was borrowed from the Iroquois and Choctaw Confederacies and added to the United States Constitution.
In the name of this freedom, the original inhabitants of this land had to give up theirs.In spite of treaties never honored, in spite of the continued theft of Indian land (the most recent Western Shoshone), the American Indian, more than any other minority combined, willingly volunteered to fight with the Americans and history has shown how their contributions saved this land.
As I write this, native men and women serve in Iraq and the Middle East and all over the world, to protect this earth we call our Mother.
This country celebrates its independence. But none of us are free. Now, more than at any other time, even the non-native has lost many of the rights guaranteed under the document that is the reason for celebrating this day - the Declaration of Independence.
We must all come together to fight for freedom for the Earth- to stop the continual assaults on the earth, the water, the air, the forests and seas - the minerals that are ripped from the earth's inner core. We must all come together to resolve to have peace on earth - no more wars, no more innocent lives taken by violence.
If we do not work toward these goals, no one will be free.
ALL celebrations will end.
Last updated on July 03, 2005
Music is Anthem of the American Indian by Brule. Please visit their website. Official Website for Brule Records