Pertinent Musings by Lotus Prince:

Black man in ‘white house’

But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people?

Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless.

Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see.
Chief Seattle

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.
`- Martin Luther King

You could always count on American to do the correct thing, after they have done everything else
Sir Winston Churchill

It would be a folly to question the wisdom of such eminent people, whose vision I have quoted above, but it would be interesting to understand the context in which that they have made such statements.

This is because very often we get carried away by statements without understanding the context that they were made, hoping that it would fit for every occasion.

Although America has a very short history as a nation, it had been full with colourful events. In a way, Chief Seattle was correct “tribe follows a tribe and nation follows a nation,” and it was how human civilization progressed.

It is interesting to understand even primitive men like red Indians, who had unshakable faith in their primitive rituals, realized that even God cannot exempt people, from this common destiny.

But once a nation is being formed, all those who fought for the nation would try to protect that nation, hoping that it would be the ultimate solution.

This is the irony of the mankind, in writer’s view; freedom fighters would then become nation protectors and would wage war against next generation of freedom fighters. Nation is nothing but a concept which has evolved over a period of time, due to some historical, social and economic reasons.

When native Indians had to give-up their lands to a white race that had no respect for nature, they were puzzled as to what was going on. Indians were brutal people in the eyes of white men, yet they killed animals only for food, not for pleasure.

White man travelling in steam, horse (train) shooting buffalos at random for pleasure was heartbreaking for them. And that made them sick more than anything else. They had no weapons to fight against the white man and also their methods of fighting were totally different to that of white race.

So they surrendered as a tribe, and gave away to a creation of a nation (I am assuming that Red Indians were a tribe not a nation). And they knew that it was their destiny to wither away as part of natural process.

Fighting against the white man would have destroyed their tribes completely; hence it was a wise move to surrender. Then white man fought against white man, to take control of America and poor Indians were amazed, wondering whether white god has gone crazy. (Indians always thought white man had a white God).

Once surrendered, they never fought back and their life totally changed thereafter, from the rulers of the land they became slaves of the land. Even today majority of them live in reservations, lost in a paradise with alcohol.