So this is the place where dwells the Great White Father, ruler of
many lands, lodges, and tribes, in the hollow of whose hands is the
peace that rests between the once hostile red man and white. They
call him the King of England, but to us, the powerful Iroquois
nation of the north, he is always the "Great White Father." For
once he came to us in our far-off Canadian reserves, and with his
own hand fastened decorations and medals on the buckskin coats of
our oldest chiefs, just because they and their fathers used their
tomahawks in battle in the cause of England.
So I, one of his loyal allies, have come to see his camp, known to
the white man as London, his council which the whites call his
Parliament, where his sachems and chiefs make the laws of his
tribes, and to see his wigwam, known to the palefaces as Buckingham
Palace, but to the red man as the "Tepee of the Great White
Father." And this is what I see:--
What the Indian Sees.
Lifting toward the sky are vast buildings of stone, not the same
kind of stone from which my forefathers fashioned their carven
pipes and corn-pounders, but a grayer, grimier rock that would not
take the polish we give by fingers dipped in sturgeon oil, and long
days of friction with fine sand and deer-hide.
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