Joseph Bruchac Quotes
My own special knowledge is about the Abenaki people and, to some degree, my Iroquois neighbors. But whenever I write anything about another tribal nation, I always get a lot of help. Not just from books, but from people who belong to that tribal nation.
Bruchac, Joseph. "Joseph Bruchac Interview Transcript." Scholastic, Scholastic Inc., 2001.
Introducing a bill to require a name change for the Washington professional football team:
The British, with few troops in the West, armed Indians and paid for American scalps.
President Thomas Jefferson and the Congress worked at making a workable set of relationships with the Indians. Here Congress gave Jefferson a fund so that he could invite influential Indian leaders to Washington and give them presents. The hope was that the Indian leaders would see the achievements of white society and then work to transform their people to this more desirable way of life. While this was a good strategy with a few Indian nations, the reaction of most Indian leaders was being very impressed but not really wanting to trade their existing lifestyle, customs and values for the undeniable advantages that American society could bring. Both the white and Indian leadership miscalculated, Jefferson believed that as soon as the Indian leaders could examine the two alternative societies, they would clearly choose to change. The Indians were so impressed with the sincerity, reasonableness, and friendliness that the white leadership exhibited, that the Indians did not realize that a large part of white society was different from the leadership and that the leaders spoke for and could control the other whites.
The Lenape Tribe (Delaware Tribe) were the strongest Indian nation in America until they were supplanted by the Iroquois and then dominated by the Colonial whites who took much of their land. See {592309}.
He had done an analysis of American History textbooks and found that 9 pages about American Indians and their history before and after Europeans came to America. He and most other historians consider that to be inadequate.
Jackson refused to obey this decision, He was the only American President who disobeyed a Supreme Court Decision. In doing this, he killed tens of thousands of Indians, allowed the Southern Whites to steal most of the Cherokee land. His Indian Removal, contrary to this Supreme Court decision, was the worst case of ethnic cleansing in the history of the United States.
This quotation shows that man has always had a serious effect on the environment. And that indigenous peoples did not necessarily have a harmonious relationship with nature. A few did, just like some modern humans do, but most did not then as most of us do not now.
Joseph Bruchac is a writer of books relating to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a particular focus on northeastern Native American and Anglo-American lives and folklore. He has published poetry, novels, and short stories. Bruchac is from Saratoga Springs, New York, and is of Abenaki, English, and Slovak ethnicity. Among his works are the novel Dawn Land (1993) and its sequel, Long River (1995), which feature a young Abenaki man before European contact.
