Audiobook Sample, \"God Is Red\", by Vine DeLoria, Jr.
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Until 18 90 American Indians played a critically important role in American domestic affairs, symbolizing the vast wilderness and frontier that Americans wish to tame. From the 18 nineties until the 19 sixties, Indians were truly the quote vanishing Americans, and most people believe that the tribes had largely been exterminated. There were token Indians present at Columbus Day and Thanksgiving celebrations, and some Indian women sitting at the Santa Fe Railroad station selling pottery. But for most American Indians had ceased to exist. It is difficult to describe just how America began to embrace Indians again in recent years. When the Indian protests began in the 19 sixties, white Americans learned that in the remote canyons of the West, the swamplands of the Great Lakes and the southeastern United States were seemingly thousands upon thousands of Indians. Perhaps their first response was a sense of outrage and shock. Where were these angry Indians coming from? And what was their gripe? They soon discovered that the Indians had enjoyed treaty rights for nearly a century. They learned that, as resource is had been gobbled up by urban America, they were now in conflict with American Indians over the remaining natural resource is of the continent, the best of which were in Indian hands. The initial tendency of many whites was simply to demand that these resource is also be taken and that Indians be moved into the mainstream of white society, thereby removing their legal rights to these lands. Needless to say, these same officials did not demand that African Americans and Chicanos or Hispanic Americans, be given the same rights as whites. They were not sitting on oil, water and mineral resource. Is white America only agitated to take away whatever rights Indians still had? Always, this pressure was disguised under the argument that all people being citizens should enjoy the same basic rights. Thus where Indians had preserved hunting and fishing rights, the right to self government tax exemptions on land, the power of his own reservation lands, The cry was to bring about equality at the county in town level, where Indians did not have employment, housing, equal criminal justice and social equality. There was no corresponding effort to provide these things that, allegedly all Americans enjoyed in the 18 sixties. Conditions were terrible for American Indians. The California Indians, for example, had been systematically neglected by generations of state and federal bureaucrats. In the 18 fifties, the federal government had signed a series of treaties with the bands and communities of Indians in California. These treaties gave the Indians clearly defined reservations in certain areas of the state, primarily in place is not wanted by whites or at that time, inaccessible to them. But his gold fever grew in intensity, and mining technology grew more sophisticated. Arriving settlers began to prowl the length and breadth of the state looking for gold. The miners objections to the federal effort to preserve Indians Ancestral lands were loud and violent.