Overview

I Have Spoken is a collection of American Indian oratory from the 17th to the 20th century, concentrating on speeches focusing around Indian-white relationships, especially treaty-making negotiations. A few letters and other writings are also included. Here, in their own words, is the Indian's story told with integrity, with drama, with caustic wit, with statesmanship, with poetic impact; a story of proffered friendship, of broken promises, of hope, of disillusionment, of pride, of a whole land and life gone sour.

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9780804005302

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The words of the victims who perished under the great American steamroller of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion. Miss Armstrong has compiled the eloquent protests of the American Indians from the 17th century to the present as they watched their defeats and humiliations multiply across the decades. The occasion for the speechifying is frequently the signing of an extorted treaty - like the one in 1821 which ceded five million acres east of Lake Michigan to the U.S. government. Many realized quite early on what was happening. A Creek chief in 1829 predicted: The time is near when our race will become extinct. Resistance to the aggression of the whites is useless. Editor Armstrong annotates the selections and concentrates on the 18th and 19th centuries. (Josephy's Red Power, p. 411, provides more contemporary and formal claims for redress.) A brief introduction by Frederick W. Turner suggests an anti-historical bias in American culture which expresses itself as the propensity to see ourselves as agents and principal actors in world history and all others as props in our production. Those aroused by Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee will find further documentation of systematic destruction here. (Kirkus Reviews)

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I Have Spoken is a collection of American Indian oratory from the 17th to the 20th century, concentrating on speeches focusing around Indian-white relationships, especially treaty-making negotiations. A few letters and other writings are also included. Here, in their own words, is the Indian's story told with integrity, with drama, with caustic wit, with statesmanship, with poetic impact; a story of proffered friendship, of broken promises, of hope, of disillusionment, of pride, of a whole land and life gone sour.

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