Native American History

"“We think we have been much wronged,” Spotted Tail replied, “and are entitled to compensation for the damage and distress caused by making so many roads through our country, and driving off and destroying the buffalo and game. My heart is very sad, and I cannot talk on business; I will wait and see the counselors the Great Father will send.”"

"The Fetterman Massacre made a profound impression upon Colonel Carrington. He was appalled by the mutilations—the disembowelings, the hacked limbs, the “private parts severed and indecently placed on the person.” He brooded upon the reasons for such savagery, and eventually wrote an essay on the subject, philosophizing that the Indians were compelled by some paganistic belief to commit the terrible deeds that remained forever in his mind. Had Colonel Carrington visited the scene of the Sand Creek Massacre, which occurred only two years before the Fetterman Massacre, he would have seen the same mutilations—committed upon Indians by Colonel Chivington’s soldiers. The Indians who ambushed Fetterman were only imitating their enemies, a practice which in warfare, as in civilian life, is said to be the sincerest form of flattery."

"“Fathers, fathers, fathers, hear me well. Call back your young men from the mountains of the bighorn sheep. They have run over our country; they have destroyed the growing wood and the green grass; they have set fire to our lands. Fathers, your young men have devastated the country and killed my animals, the elk, the deer, the antelope, my buffalo. They do not kill them to eat them; they leave them to rot where they fall. Fathers, if I went into your country to kill your animals, what would you say? Should I not be wrong, and would you not make war on me?”"

"“The operations of General Hancock,” Black Whiskers Sanborn informed the Secretary of the Interior, “have been so disastrous to the public interests, and at the same time seem to me to be so inhuman, that I deem it proper to communicate my views to you on the subject. … For a mighty nation like us to be carrying on a war with a few straggling nomads, under such circumstances, is a spectacle most humiliating, an injustice unparalleled, a national crime most revolting, that must, sooner or later, bring down upon us or our posterity the judgment of Heaven.”"

"It was then that General Sheridan uttered the immortal words: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Lieutenant Charles Nordstrom, who was present, remembered the words and passed them on, until in time they were honed into an American aphorism: The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

"Tall Bull declared that he would not settle down within the confines of the poor reservation chosen for the Cheyennes below the Arkansas. The Cheyennes had always been a free people, he said. What right had the white men to tell them where they should live? They should remain free or die."

"Roman Nose was dead; Black Kettle was dead; Tall Bull was dead. Now they were all good Indians. Like the antelope and the buffalo, the ranks of the proud Cheyennes were thinning to extinction."

"In those days a young man became a lawyer by working in a law office and then taking a state bar examination. Ely Parker worked for three years with a firm in Ellicottville, New York, but when he applied for admission to the bar he was told that only white male citizens could be admitted to law practice in New York. No Indians need apply. Adoption of an English name had not changed the bronze color of his skin."

"It was a great experience, riding on their old enemy the Iron Horse. Omaha (a city named for Indians) was a beehive of white people, and Chicago (another Indian name) was terrifying with its noise and confusion and buildings that seemed to reach to the sky. The white men were as thick and numerous and aimless as grasshoppers, moving always in a hurry but never seeming to get to whatever place it was they were going to."

"Red Cloud responded by shaking hands with Secretary Cox and the other officials. “Look at me,” he said. “I was raised on this land where the sun rises—now I come from where the sun sets. Whose voice was first sounded on this land? The voice of the red people who had but bows and arrows. The Great Father says he is good and kind to us. I don’t think so. I am good to his white people. From the word sent me I have come all the way to his house. My face is red; yours is white. The Great Spirit has made you to read and write, but not me. I have not learned. I come here to tell my Great Father what I do not like in my country. You are all close to the Great Father, and are a great many chiefs. The men the Great Father sends to us have no sense—no heart.""

"If it had not been for the massacre, there would have been a great many more people here now; but after that massacre who could have stood it? When I made peace with Lieutenant Whitman my heart was very big and happy. The people of Tucson and San Xavier must be crazy. They acted as though they had neither heads nor hearts … they must have a thirst for our blood. … These Tucson people write for the papers and tell their own story. The Apaches have no one to tell their story."

"When they came within sight of the camp, Mangas and his party waited for the capitán to show himself. A miner who spoke Spanish came out to escort Mangas into the camp, but the Apache guards would not let their chief go in until Captain Shirland mounted a truce flag. As soon as the white banner was raised, Mangas ordered his warriors to turn back; he would go in alone. He was protected by a truce, and would be perfectly safe. Mangas rode on toward the soldier camp, but his warriors had scarcely disappeared from view when a dozen soldiers sprang from the underbrush behind him, with rifles cocked and ready. He was a prisoner."

"After the discovery of gold in 1848, white men from all over the world poured into California by the thousands, taking what they wanted from the submissive Indians, debasing those whom the Spaniards had not already debased, and then systematically exterminating whole populations now long forgotten. No one remembers the Chilulas, Chimarikos, Urebures, Nipewais, Alonas, or a hundred other bands whose bones have been sealed under a million miles of freeways, parking lots, and slabs of tract housing."

"The day was springlike, the sun quickly burning away the night fog. “My heart tells me I had just as well talk to the clouds and wind,” he said, “but I want to say that life is sweet, love is strong; man fights to save his life; man also kills to win his heart’s desire; that is love. Death is mighty bad. Death will come to us soon enough.”"

"“You are no better than coyotes that run in the valleys,” Jack answered them. “You come here riding soldiers’ horses, armed with government guns. You intend to buy your liberty and freedom by running me to earth and delivering me to the soldiers. You realize that life is sweet, but you did not think so when you forced me to promise that I would kill that man, Canby. I knew life was sweet all the time; that is the reason I did not want to fight the white people. I thought we would stand side by side if we did fight, and die fighting. I see now I am the only one to forfeit my life for killing Canby, perhaps one or two others. You and all the others that gave themselves up are getting along fine, and plenty to eat, you say. Oh, you bird-hearted men, you turned against me. …”"

"Around the Kiowa campfires that winter there was much talk about the white men who were pressing in from all four directions. Old Satank was grieving for his son, who had been killed that year by the Texans. Satank had brought back his son’s bones and placed them upon a raised platform inside a special tepee, and now he always spoke of his son as sleeping, not as dead, and every day he put food and water near the platforms so that the boy might refresh himself on awakening. In the evenings the old man sat squinting into the campfires, his bony fingers stroking the gray strands of his moustache. He seemed to be waiting for something."

"One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk."

"Early in the Moon of Making Fat, the Hunkpapas had their annual sun dance. For three days Sitting Bull danced, bled himself, and stared at the sun until he fell into a trance. When he rose again, he spoke to his people. In his vision he had heard a voice crying: “I give you these because they have no ears.” When he looked into the sky he saw soldiers falling like grasshoppers, with their heads down and their hats falling off. They were falling right into the Indian camp. Because the white men had no ears and would not listen, Wakantanka the Great Spirit was giving these soldiers to the Indians to be killed."

"When the white men in the East heard of the Long Hair’s defeat, they called it a massacre and went crazy with anger. They wanted to punish all the Indians in the West. Because they could not punish Sitting Bull and the war chiefs, the Great Council in Washington decided to punish the Indians they could find—those who remained on the reservations and had taken no part in the fighting."

"I have also had a close look at the Windover data. Unlike the Norris Farms sequences, which are overwhelmingly drawn from the four known Native American clusters, the Windover sequences are highly variable and contain only one that is anywhere near a Native American sequence in cluster A. The rest either have no matches that I can find or they are European"

"Windover DNA testing indicates that the people of the Windover bog were of European descent, not Asian descent as had been previously thought. If this DNA testing is accurate, the Windover bog inhabitants were not descendents of people who migrated across the great land bridge. Rather they were Europeans who must have somehow managed to migrate across the Atlantis Ocean centuries before their descendants."

"The Windover Bog people, dating from 9,000 to 7,000 years ago, appear to be contemporary or slightly earlier predecessors to the Ancient Canal Builders. Their DNA and Haplogroup sequence tests indicate they are of European rather than Native American ancestry."

"While Hauswirth et al. [55] claimed to have isolated both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from a number of the Windover brains, their data are suspect as the mtDNA lineages they reported are absent in all other prehistoric and contemporary Native American populations studied to date"

"Time estimates for the arrival of X in North America are 12,000–36,000 years ago, depending on the number of assumed founders, thus supporting the conclusion that the peoples harboring haplogroup X were among the original founders of Native American populations. To date, haplogroup X has not been unambiguously identified in Asia, raising the possibility that some Native American founders were of Caucasian ancestry. An ancient arrival of haplogroup X in the Americas could be corroborated by the presence of haplogroup X in pre-Columbian human remains. Two studies on mtDNA variation in pre-Columbian samples have reported partial CR sequences that include the 16223T-and-16278T motif (Hauswirth et al. 1994; Ribeiro-Dos-Santos et al. 1996)."

"[You] must understand that if peace is not now made all efforts on our part to make it are at an end."

"I believe, however, religiously, that the only ultimate solutions of this whole question is, that the Indian shall take his place among other men and accept the march of civilization, as he must ultimately, or there is nothing except his destiny that awaits him, which is extinction."

"The object of greatest solicitude should be to break down the prejudices of tribe among the Indians; to blot out the boundary lines which divide them into distinct nations, and fuse them into one homogeneous mass. Uniformity of language will do this -- nothing else will."

"If it be said that because they are savages they should be exterminated, we answer that, aside from the humanity of the suggestion, it will prove exceedingly difficult, and if money considerations are permitted to weigh, it costs less to civilize than to kill."

"If the savage resists, civilization, with the ten commandments in one hand and the sword in the other, demands his immediate extermination."

"[A]griculture and manufactures should be introduced among them as rapidly as possible; schools should be established which children should be required to attend; their barbarous dialects should be blotted out and the English language substituted."

"You must have the protection of the President of the United States and his white soldiers or disappear, from the earth...We have not been making war with you. You are at war with us. We have not commenced yet."

"There is one thing which is not good in your speeches; that is , building us medicine houses. We don’t want any. I want to live and die as I was brought up. I love the open prairie, and I wish you would not insist on putting us on a reservation."

"I will sign, and if there is anything wrong afterwards I will watch the commissioners, and they will be the first one that I will whip."

"If you follow it, it will bring you herds of cattle and horses, instead of buffalo and antelope, good houses instead of tepees, and lead you to civilization and Christianity, instead of a wild, roving life; you will have confortable homes, and instead of want and misery you will enjoy peace and happiness. We therefore offer you two homes—one on the Missouri, and the other below the Arkansas"

"One thing is demonstrated, either the Indians must give way or we must abandon all west of the Missouri River and confess as you say that forty millions of whites are cowed by a few thousand savages."

"Of course I don’t believe in such things for commissions cannot come into contact with the fighting Indians, and to talk with the old ones is the same old senseless twaddle. It may be that we had better dally along this year and hurry up the railroad, and try to be better prepared next year."

"This building of homes for us is all nonsense. We don’t want you to build any for us. We would all die. My country is small enough already. If you build us houses, the land will be smaller. Why do you insist on this?"