Online Speech Bank: Chief Tecumseh - Address to William Henry Harrison on Selling a Country. [AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED: Text version below transcribed directly from audio.] Houses are built for you to hold councils in. The Indians hold theirs in the open air. I am a Shawnee. My forefathers were warriors. But I would say to him, "Brother, you have the liberty to return to your own country. " Since my residence at Tippecanoe, we have endeavored to level all distinctions, to destroy village chiefs, by whom all mischiefs are done. Brother, I wish you would take pity on the red people and do as I have requested. The way, the only way to stop this evil, is for the red people to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be now -- for it was never divided, but belongs to all.
No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers. Sell a country?! How can we have confidence in the white people? Eastern Woodland Indians. American Antiquity, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Jul., 1999), pp. 499-516. A molecular analysis of dietary diversity for three archaic Native Americans — PNAS. Indians and the American Revolution. Yet the passions engendered by the American Revolution, despite the good will expressed in the formal policy enunciated by the government, was to lead to bitter and violent confrontations on the frontier.
The bloody ground of Kentucky was to be repeated in region after region as the undisciplined and unregulated expansion of the American people got underway. In the end the Indian was the loser. That he would have been a loser even if the King had repressed the rebellion is probable; but his decline would not have been so swift or so bitter. 1. I have discussed the early English charters in my "Red Man's Land/White Man's Law: A Study of the Past and Present Status of the American Indian" (New York, 1971). 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 30. 31.