“Why can’t we be just people?”

"Why can't we be just people?" Do you hear what you say? When did we ever question your right to be considered people? Do you question mine? I know what you think you say. You want me to consider myself not Native, not Cree, not Salish, but a person, absent of nationality or racial heritage. All of us just people, without difference. You fail to see your own hypocrisy. In the same breath, you pick up a guitar and teach European modern folk songs to all the children, but nowhere do European children learn the folk music of my children or any other nationality. Such sameness amounts to everyone's obliteration but your own.

I know we were supposed to have vanished by now. We do not apologize for our inability to do that. Not only are we still here, but some of us are amazingly intact. One hundred years ago General Custer's edict was to kill every man, woman, child and dog at Wounded Knee. To re-word this edict from physical oblivian to cultural banishment will not soften my natural resistance, I refuse to vanish.

To be fair, ought you not advocate your own obliteration before mine? 'Tis not my folk who teach children the sort of crude individualism that would allow them to starve one of your children to save their own ass.

In the interest of humanity, you ought to sound the death knell of your own decadent ways and the renaissance of my ways. Such things as genocide, confinement and cultural prohibition are not part of my ways. We were almost obliterated by your ancestors. I realize you hold no gun to my head, dear teacher, but it was your culture that spawned physical genocide and now you ask me to erase the shadow of my grandmother. Before you ask me to erase her, please reduce yourself to a shadow. Then, we will at least be equal. At base zero, I am willing to negotiate a whole new culture, if you like. Otherwise, keep your offensive words locked in your narrow mind.

from Maracle, Lee, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism, 1996, Press Gang Publishers, pg 81-2

it's very sad and I doubt  even if we go in 31 century we never change  the hypocritical racist mentality,  no matter how  intellectual we are, no matter how powerful we are, no matter how open minded we are, still we stick in to the way of  brutal as  groups, nationalists, racists  and never  live as free people.