If I Want My People To Be

Even Though The American Indian Movement On A National-international Scale Has Proven To Be Extremely Dysfunctional, The American Indian Movement I Was Associated With I'm Very Proud Of. We Were A Revolutionary, Militant Organization Whose Purpose Was Spirituality First, And That's How I Want To Be Remembered.

Young People And Indian People Need To Know That We Existed In The 20th Century. We Need To Know Who Our Heroes Are And To Know What We Have Done And Accomplished In This Century Other Than What Olympic Athletes Jim Thorpe And Billy Mills Have Done.

'indian Policy' Has Now Been Brought Down Upon The American People, And The American People Are The New Indians Of The 21st Century.

Before Aim, Indians Were Dispirited, Defeated, And Culturally Dissolving. People Were Ashamed To Be Indian. You Didn't See The Young People Wearing Braids Or Chokers Or Ribbon Shirts In Those Days. Hell, I Didn't Wear 'em. People Didn't Sun Dance, They Didn't Sweat, They Were Losing Their Languages. Then There Was That Spark At Alcatraz, And We Took Off. Man, We Took A Ride Across This Country. We Put Indians And Indian Rights Smack Dab In The Middle Of The Public Consciousness For The First Time Since The So-called Indian Wars.

Indians In America Are Yet To Be Considered Human Beings, Even Though The Pope Issued A Papal Bull In 1898 That Declared Us To Be Human Beings. But To Show You The Institutional Racism, The Sports Teams Are Still Using The Indians As Mascots.