BEFORE THE UNITED STATES HAD A CONSTITUTION
"...Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves..." President Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated Monday, March 4, 1861. (Abraham Lincoln's first Inauguration Speech.) Abraham Lincoln is credited with much positive commenting currently and yesterday was a wonderful celebration of Barack Obama's upcoming inauguration at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. I have a book that I bought for $2.50 ~ Great Speeches by Native Americans. And I would have included one of the speeches from 1862, a year closest to President Lincoln's first year in office, but I preferred the ones I have selected to include here. To enlarge the scanned pages, click on them.
When I read Lincoln's words and think about what the United States government was doing to those who lived on the North American continent before the Europeans immigrated to this land, it is sobering to accept what "we" did to human beings that the immigrants ignorantly and incorrectly named as Indians. The indigenous human beings had their lands taken from them, their way of life stolen from them. Robbing the Native Americans of their very lives and future generations that would never carry on due to the presumption that taking this land was the right of the invaders. I am an ancestor of those invaders. And I believe it is the time to acknowledge that those of us who claim this country as the land of the free to admit we based our democracy on principles that were betrayed from the very beginning.


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