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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

It is a much more complicated problem than that. There are all sorts of potential biological problems like limited disease resistance and potential psychological problems when forcing someone who grew up so primitively into a modern life. The standard has been to let these people make the choice for themselves without forcing them out of their current life. However they can never really make a true choice because they have no real understanding of what the modern world has to offer.

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"The white people, who are trying to make us over into their image, they want us to be what they call "assimilated," bringing the Indians into the mainstream and destroying our own way of life and our own cultural patterns. They believe we should be contented like those whose concept of happiness is materialistic and greedy, which is very different from our way. We want freedom from the white man rather than to be intergrated. We don't want any part of the establishment, we want to be free to raise our children in our religion, in our ways, to be able to hunt and fish and live in peace. We don't want power, we don't want to be congressmen, or bankers....we want to be ourselves. We want to have our heritage, because we are the owners of this land and because we belong here.

The white man says, there is freedom and justice for all. We have had "freedom and justice," and that is why we have been almost exterminated. We shall not forget this."

Very beautiful. Where is this quote from?

It's widely attributed to a notice published by the 1927 Grand Council of American Indians. E.g. see http://lakotadakotanakotanation.org/GENOCIDE.html (search for "1927"); see also https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0YzWCgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA349&o...

Sadly, this reminds me of a line from Star Trek: "Resistance is futile."

> we want to be free to raise our children in our religion, in our ways

Do those children get a choice? Modern western is a multi-culture of choice.

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