 I have known you when your forests were mine. When they gave me my meats and my clothing, I have known you in your streams and rivers, where your fish flashed and danced in the sun. And whose water said, Come, come and eat of my abundance. I have known you in the freedom of your wind and my spirit, like your wind, once roamed this good land. But in the long hundred years since the white man came, I have seen my freedom disappear like the salmon mysteriously going out to the sea. The white man's strange customs, which I could not understand pressed down upon me until I could no longer breathe. When I fought to protect my home and my land, I was called savage. When I neither understood nor welcomed this new way of life, I was called. When I tried to rule my people, I was stripped of my authority. How can I celebrate with you this centenary, this hundred years? Shall I thank you for the reserves that are left me on my beautiful forests, for the canned fish in my rivers, for the loss of my pride in my authority, even among my own people, for the lack of my will to fight back? I must forget what has passed and gone. O great spirit, give me back the courage of the olden chiefs, and let me wrestle with my surroundings. Let me once again live in harmony with my environment. Let me humbly accept this new culture, and through it rise up and go on. I shall grasp the instruments of the white man's success, his education, his skills, and with these new tools, I shall build my race into the proudest figment of your society. I shall see our young braves and our chiefs sitting in the house of law and government, ruling and being ruled by the knowledge and freedom of our great land. So shall we shatter the barriers of isolation. So shall the next hundred years be the greatest and the proudest in the history of our tribes and nations.