Should we sign this treaty or should we not? If you were there deliberating the course of action that you should take for your family, for your tribe. The white man had a very terrible reputation of killing mostly women and children. The old statement they made, knits make lice, mothers make children. So they always attempted to kill the women and the girls off so they wouldn’t have any more Indian kids. As you sit there wondering, do I sign a treaty or do I not? If I don’t sign a treaty, will they kill my children off? I wonder what would happen if our brother the deer could sit right there and listen to the discussion of treaties, or the bear, or the elk, the hawks, the eagle. As we sign this land away, we are not only giving up our rights on it but their rights also, our animal brothers and sisters. Always they have supported our way of living; always these animals were there when we needed them. And now we give the land up to the white man. What will the white man do with all you animals? At this point we can only guess. We signed the treaty. After we signed the treaty, with much remorse we returned to our camps. Our older women, our young women and the girls they cut their hair short after they had witnessed the signing of the treaties. The older women cut off their thumbs and they let the blood drain on Mother Earth in sorrow. They cry heavily for what they have done and what they have just witnessed. They allow their blood from their thumb to drip in a circle to nourish the Mother Earth. The tears that flowed from their eyes, it saturated the dust. Mother Earth was sad and so are we. They had three fires where as they cut off their hair they burned it. They burned the hair in each one of these three fires. As they watched their men return after they had signed the treaty, they too took their turn. They built their own fires and they cut their own braids. They took their drum and they sang their mournful death song. Quiet at first, hoping Mother Earth would listen to the drumbeat, each chief asking, what have we done with our lands? What will we do for our children?

We have already given up millions of acres. Our land used to run to the Yellowstone National Park, up to Livingston, straight west to the Columbia River, straight south to maybe Burns, straight east back to Yellowstone Park. Comprising of approximately 28 million acres. Out of that 28 million acres we carved 13.5 million acres in the ‘55 treaty area. The government forgot about the 15 million acres. They have never attempted to compensate us for its losses. Instead they just took the land and called it their own. We would hope with the land free of any encompasses of the other 15 million acres that they would allow us to live on the ‘55 treaty area without molestation, without trespassing. That was not to be, but instead they reduced us again with the ‘63 treaty. That ‘63 treaty was fraudulently made. Our elders today can only sense a very few names of the 51 signatures that are on the ‘63 treaty, which means then that the interpreter that came out here for the ‘63 treaty had maybe a dozen signatures of the Indians and he made up the rest and placed an ‘x’ on the paper. Congress wouldn’t know whether it was fraudulent or not; all they wanted was signatures. But the Indians at that time and even today, we actually have no recourse. Who can we complain to? Maybe things will be changing. Maybe if we approach the United Nations maybe we can resolve these issues. It is that, that makes us who we are today.