Basic Call to Consciousness

Continued from last week.

About three winters ago, the Canadian Government set out to take mortgages on farms of our returned soldiers to secure loans made to them intending to use Canadian courts to enforce these mortgages in name of Canadian authority within our country. When Ottawa tried that, our people resented it. We knew that would mean the end of our government. Because we did so, the Canadian Government began to enforce all sorts of Dominion and Provincial laws over us and quartered armed men among us to enforce Canadian laws and customs upon us. We appealed to Ottawa in the name of our rights as a separate people and by right of our treaties, and the door was closed in our faces. We then went to London with our treaty and asked for the protection it promised and got no attention. Then we went to the League of Nations at Geneva with its covenant to protect little peoples and to enforce respect for treaties by its members and we spent a whole year patiently waiting but got no hearing.

To punish us for trying to preserve our rights, the Canadian Government has now pretended to abolish our government by Royal Proclamation and has pretended to set up a Canadian Government over us, composed of the few traitors among us who are willing to accept pay from Ottawa and do its bidding. Finally, Ottawa officials, under pretense of a friendly visit, asked to inspect our precious wampum belts, made by our Fathers centuries ago as records of our history, and when shown to them, these false-faced officials seized and carried away those belts as bandits take away your precious belongings. The only difference was that our aged-wampum keeper did not put up his hands, our hands go up only when we address the Great Spirit. Yours go up, I hear, only when some one of you is going through the pockets of his own white brother. According to your newspapers they are now up a good deal of the time.

The Ottawa Government thought that with no wampum belts to read in the opening of our Six Nations Councils, we would give up our home rule and self-government, the victims of superstition. Any superstition of which the Grand River people have been victims are not in reverence for wampum belts, but in their trust in the honor of governments who boast of a higher civilization.

We entrusted the British, long ago, with large sums of our money to care for when we ceded back parts of their territory. They took $140,000 of that money seventy-five years ago to use for their own selfish ends, and we have never been able to get it back.

Your government of the United States, I hear, has just decided to take away the political liberties of all the red men you promised to protect forever, by passing such a law through your congress in defiance of the Treaties made by George Washington. That law, of course, would mean the breaking up of the tribes if enforced. Our people would rather be deprived of their money than their political liberties, so would you.

I suppose some of you have never heard of my people before and that many of you, if you ever did, supposed that we were all long gone to our happy hunting grounds. No! There are many of us as there were a thousand years ago. There are more of us than there used to be and that makes a great difference in the respect we get from your governments.

I ask you a question or two. Do not hurry with your answers. Do you believe, really believe, that all peoples are entitled to equal protection of international law now that you are so strong? Do you believe, really believe, that treaty pledges should be kept? Think these questions over and answer them to yourselves.

We are not as dependent in some ways as we were in the early days. We do not need interpreters now. We know your language and can understand your words for ourselves and we have learned to decide for ourselves what is good for us. It is bad for any people to take the advice of an alien people as to that.

Continued next week.