Dan Goodleaf Quotes
As a Mohawk from Kahnawake, I consider Montreal a suburb of our reserve.
Dan Goodleaf, Mohawk Indian, Deputy Minister of the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs, Interview with Peter C. Newman, 1994
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
While Jefferson was clear on this point, there were other forces and points of view that did not recognize Indian rights and were prepared to use force to obtain Indian lands. These, together with some Indians who made bad and sometimes corrupt bargains and treaties ceding land, produced the loss of most of the Indian land in America.
First Indian newspaper in the U.S.
The Lenape Tribe (Delaware Tribe) were the strongest Indian nation in America until they were supplanted by the Iroquois and then dominated by the Colonial whites who took much of their land. See {592309}.
Cass was negotiating with the Shawnees and Cherokees to persuade them to move to land west of the Mississippi. See John Henry Eaton for similar unkept promises.
In early America large numbers of whites who had been captured by Indians would refuse to leave their new families even when they had the opportunity to do so. J. Hector St. John
His negative predictions were tragically prescient.
Justification for policy of settling all Indians west of the Mississippi River.
Other than the United States, almost all constitutions define citizenship as a matter of birth, geography, ethnicity, and race. What made the Iroquois so successful was that they were bound by ideas and norms of social organization that tended to trump the other variables. When whites first came to America, the Iroquois, were the most sophisticated Native Americans. They were actually a confederation of 5 different tribes each of which was composed if many clans. Although fierce warriors, they had agreed not to fight each other and to assist if any were attacked. They developed a strong agricultural base, to go with the fishing and hunting, and their confederation were very aggressive and sophisticated traders taking them far from their upstate New York “capitol.” Their governmental structure was quite sophisticated with an elaborate, formal, system of checks and balances, multi-cameral legislatures that recognized numbers of citizens, power and wealth, and even cultural traditions. They were literate, capitalistic and globalistic in that they wanted to trade with all. They had written laws, and women had a role that was unique in world history in that only women owned property in a matrilineal society. Further, it was only the Clan Mothers who voted for the 50 Sachems (~Senators)—but their selections had to be accepted by the people they represented. Ironically the descendants of the Iroquois who remained in New York became a very successful Native American group. In the 2000 census, the average Indian in New York State earned the same income as the average White with no Indian gambling money.
