Mathew Coon Come Quotes

Why did they pick the [Indian] Reservations to lay down their pipeline? They were probably thinking the indigenous people were not going to stand up.

The white man expelled the Indian, took his possessions, developed the unexplored resources, and now he devotes a portion of his accumulations to establish institutions where the red man learn the secret and method of his power.

White men come in like a river. They told us that they only wanted a little land. But we knew better.

The underlying justification for the theft of our lands has always been that we were not making proper use of them, and that these lands could be put to better use. The wilderness that we cultivated … was simply going to waste. It was selfish of us to padlock our vast forests and plains and deprive millions of hungry and millions of landless from their enjoyment. It was argued that stealing our land would provide for the common good … and all would become better off as a result…during this process, we would be lifted from our less-than-civilized state and would eventually recognize the goodwill that had been lavished upon us. Today, most of our lands and most of the wilderness are gone and yet there are more poor people than ever, more misery… And today there are those who still argue that tearing down the remaining … lands benefits humanity, or in today's jargon, "creates jobs." … we can only ask: "Has our land indeed been put to better use?" Could there have been another way?

When the white man came we had the land and they had the Bibles; now they have the land and we have the Bibles.

I am afraid the poor Indian will never stand a chance against the English in their land controversies because they are very poor, they have no money. Money is almighty nowadays and the Indians have no learning, no wit, no cunning, the English have it all.

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

When you put gas in your car you are making a political statement, because you are supporting the empires that control and continue the destruction of some countries.

We have crowded the tribes upon a few miserable acres on our Southern frontier; it is all that is left to them of their once boundless forest: and still, like the horse-leech, our insatiated cupidity cries, Give! Give! ... Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin?

Tyranny, Stupidity, and lack of vision have brought about the situation now alluded to as the Indian problem.

I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the approach of civilization. Their rights invaded, their morals corrupted, their lands wrested from them, their customs changed, and therefore lost to the world; and they at last sunk into the earth, and the ploughshare turning the sod over their graves, and I have flown to their rescue--not of their lives or of their race (for they are "doomed" and must perish), but to the rescue of their looks and their modes, at which the acquisitive world may hurl their poison and every besom of destruction, and trample them down and crush them to death

If you have got to wear golden slippers to enter the white man's heaven no Indian will ever get there, as the whites have got the Black Hills and with them all the gold.

Brother when we came here to relate our grievances about our lands, we expected to have something done for us .... You are not to expect to hear of me any more, and brother we desire to hear no more of you.

The world petroleum story is one of the most inhuman known to man: in it, elementary moral and social principles are jeered at. If powerful oil trusts no longer despoil and humiliate our country it is not because these predators have become human, but because we have won a hard-fought battle which has been going on since the beginning of the century.

The public domain has been squandered, our coal fields bartered away, our forests denuded, our people impoverished, and we are attempting to build a prosperous commonwealth among people who are being robbed of their homes.

The natives are very exact and punctual in the bounds of their lands, belonging to this or that prince or people, even to a river, brook, &c. And I have known them make bargain and sale amongst themselves for a small piece or quantity of ground ; notwithstanding a sinful opinion amongst many, that Christians have right to heathen's land.

If we had but one square mile left, they [the whites of Georgia] would not be satisfied unless they could get it.

In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, 'booming' state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.

Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.

Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems.

Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; and the Africans know that.

You get people talking about being worried about their art, and dances... their culture being wiped out or taken over, and yet these same people are taking advantage of their people to use them as cheap labour.

Certainly I'm angry at the way Indians have been treated and continue to be treated. But I don't think it's a helpless emotion.

They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.