Wes Studi Quotes
We, as Indian tribes, should be able to prosecute non-Indians on tribal lands. But on Indian land, we have no ability to prosecute anyone but another Indian. American Indians having status as a foreign nation is good for us, but it's not good in some ways if we don't have the jurisdictional power that the federal government claims.
Parker, Melissa. "Wes Studi Interview: Actor Talks 'Hostiles' and Protecting Mother Earth." Smashing Interviews Magazine, 21 Dec. 2017.
This law allowed the President to forcibly move entire tribes from their native lands to sparsely settled land in the West. Oklahoma became knows as Indian Territory as so many Indians were relocated there. The act, and this clause in particular, gave the President the authority over all Indian tribes in the nation and established the difficult if not impossible relationship between the Indian nations and the Federal government. The act—the last sentence of the quote—also ratified all treaties with the Indians and pronounced them inviolate. That was not to be.
Marshall was in general very sympathetic with the Indians and their rights, but even for him the notion of treating the Indians as sovereign masters of all their lands was unthinkable.
Most of the Colonies had laws against Indians possessing guns and any white seeing such was allowed to attack such Indians. Rhode Island had peaceful relations with the Indians and not only allowed Indians to carry firearms for hunting but hired them to do the hunting as they were better at it and did not value their time as highly as the whites. However, travelers coming from out of the colony would see an Indian with a gun, and shoot at him thereby killing or injuring friendly Indians and causing racial problems when there were few. The quotation also illustrates that there was little uniformity amongst the colonies as to how to deal with their various social and political problems.
The intentions of the Founding Fathers towards the Indians was decent, respectful, and well intentioned. However, there was not enough of a system of enforcement or the will to enforce when the greed of the average whites grew too great. Many settlers saw these vast lands and could not see any harm in using a few acres for their farm. And if there had been only a few, there would have been little trouble. However, the settlers kept coming and coming and soon the Indians began to push back. In a sense, it was a class problem. The members of the Continental Congress who wrote the Northwest Ordinance were educated, affluent men who had plenty of land. Most of the men who contested for the Indian lands had little land or were newly affluent and saw few limits to America.
Wesley Studi is a Cherokee American actor and film producer who has won critical acclaim and awards, particularly for his portrayal of Native Americans in film. He has appeared in Academy Award-winning films, such as Dances with Wolves (1990) and The Last of the Mohicans (1992), and in the Academy Award-nominated films Geronimo: An American Legend (1993) and The New World (2005). He is also known for portraying Sagat in Street Fighter (1994). Other films he has appeared in are Hostiles, Heat, Mystery Men, Avatar, A Million Ways to Die in the West, and the television series Penny Dreadful. In 2019, he received an Academy Honorary Award, becoming the first Native American and the second Indigenous person from North America to be honored by the Academy (the first was Buffy Sainte-Marie). In 2020, The New York Times ranked him #19 in its list of the 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century.
