"How long have I known you, oh Canada? A hundred years? Yes, a
hundred years. And many many 'seelanum" more. And today, when you
celebrate your hundred years, oh Canada, I am sad for all the Indian
people throughout the land.

For I have known you when your forests were mine; when they gave me
my meat and my clothing. I have known you in your streams and rivers
where your fish flashed and danced in the sun, where the waters said
come, come and eat of my abundance. I have known you in the freedom of
your winds. And my spirit, like the winds, once roamed your good lands.

But in the long hundred years since the white man came, I have seen
my freedom disappear like the salmon going mysteriously out to 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 land and my home, I was called a savage.
When I neither understood nor welcomed this way of life, I was called
lazy. When I tried to rule my people, I was stripped of my authority.

My nation was ignored in your history textbooks - they were little
more important in the history of Canada than the buffalo that ranged
the plains. I was ridiculed in your plays and motion pictures, when I
drank your fire water, I got drunk -- very, very drunk. And I forgot.

Oh Canada, how can I celebrate with you this Centenary, this hundred
years? Shall I thank you for the reserves that are left to me of my
beautiful forests? For the canned fish of my rivers? For the loss of my
pride and authority, even among my own people? For the lack of my will
to fight back? No! I must forget what's past and gone.

Oh, God in Heaven! Give me back the courage of the olden Chiefs. Let
me wrestle with my surroundings. Let me again, as in the days of old,
dominate my environment. Let me humbly accept this new culture and
through it rise up and go on.

Oh, God! Like the Thunderbird of old I shall rise again out of the
sea; I shall grab 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 segment of your society. Before I follow the great
Chiefs who have gone before us, oh Canada, I shall see these things
come to pass.

I shall see our young braves and our chiefs sitting in the houses of
law and government, ruling and being ruled by the knowledge and freedom
of our great land. So shall we shatter the barriers of our isolation.
So shall the next hundred years be the greatest and proudest in the
proud history of our tribes and nations."

Chief Dan George