American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike; as long as people believed the lies, they would never be able to see what had been done to them or what they were doing to each other... if the white people never looked beyond the lie, to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it in motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it. The relationship between the federal government and American Indian activists raises fundamental questions about the use and place of power in a democracy. Originally conceived and subsequently understood in theory as a limited democracy, the American polity continues to hold out the promise of individual freedom within a context of constitutional stability and societal order. In practice, this emphasis on stability and order has tended to mean the protection of some of society’s interests at the expense of others, and the continent’s indigenous peoples historically have been required to pay high prices for the protections and freedoms enjoyed by others.