“The thesis that most politicians put forth is that the Indian problem is economic, that all we have to do is solve the Indians’ poverty problem and we have solved the Indian problem, period. It was an intuitive flash that told me that that was not the problem at all. The real problem was lack of cultural self-esteem. The key to the problem was to teach Indians that they could do anything they wanted to do: and to do that you have to have cultural self-esteem.”
1964
1968 “Red Power will be the saving force in the coming years.”
The white man has to realize that the old stereotype of the no-good, drunken, Indian bum is just a lot of nonsense. Indian culture will be the real key to the Indians’ success in the future and to the white man’s happiness as well. I am not a protest type. Perhaps I could be called an aggressive pacifist, but I really feel that we can achieve more thought out culture than we can through protests. We have to take a positive approach to the problems of our people, and now the time is ripe. The return of the Red Man is now, you see this trend in magazines, radio and television. Even McLuhan has stated that the tribal society will be the electronic-age society. As Indians, we are well equipped to face that kind of society and that kind of future.
The Indian people were treated in much the same way as the Jews were treated in the Nazi regime. They were not allowed to practice their religion, speak their own languages, and live in their own traditional ways. The Indian kids were put in residential schools, starved, and beaten. They slaughtered our people, our education was denied us, our rights were denied us, and everything else that should have been ours.
“The old Indian and the young as well, identified with nature around him… he adapted to his environment. The white man identifies with the material things around him. His world is a rotting, rusting thing and he rusts with it. Life is different to an Indian and when the Government stepped in and gave welfare, this source of return replaced the bounty of nature the Indian had known. The Indian thinks in terms of the moon, the stars, the sun… but this doesn’t mean he is lazy. His has been a different world. HIs life was governed by his place in the tribal community. Ours has been a culture based on nature, not on sanctuaries where you hide in the dark and mutter a prayer but where you stand on a hill and talk to your God. Ours has been a culture of wandering and accepting the environment, not one of cities and buildings.”
1968
“The while man is a victim of the world he created for himself to live in - out of that comes his barbarism. Now he’s a victim of the pollution and waste he created. He is a victim of his own mental pollution. The creation of ethics, political games, philosophies, religions, the patterns of morality and all the rest of it- have upset his mental ecology and this mental imbalance is the problem. The western european man is more to be pitied than anything else, because he is in a state of insanity - not able to maintain a balance between the various forces of human capacity. The physical level is the only level on which western european man has made any progress. On other levels he has become a victim of his own mental pollution. You’ll find a lot of good people in white society who have sort of cleaned out their own sewers. At least they have filtered the pollution to a point where they can see a better way of living, and relating to the world around them, but all of us are victims of the conditions produced by polluted individuals.”
“There’s an Indian fort right in Toronto. I dropped around the other day to talk to Duke Redbird, a young Indian artist, builder and general factotum of what he claims to be the first Indian-promoted sale of real Indian handicraft and lore. The fort stands near Bloor and Bathurst Sts. There are real chiefs’ headdresses, baskets, woven belts, etc. The totem pole is a beauty.”
Lotta Dempsey, 1963
“A flag for Indians was unfurled at a conference of the National Indian Council of Canada. Duke Redbird designed the flag shown here.”
Times Colonist, Victoria BC. 3 Jun 1964
“While I was studying symbols in Indian Culture, I found out a bird is always a messenger and red of course, is representative of the redman. So my chosen name meant that I was an Indian messenger of some sort. It wasn’t until later that I found out the Thunderbird is usually a red bird.”
“A Chippewa artist born on the Saugeen Reserve has been painting in Ottawa for the past year. He works in a number of art forms but is most proud of his paintings. He sells them almost as fast as he paints them. However, he doesn’t rejoice in their saleability. “Selling them keeps me eating,” he said “but it means that I’ve never been able to have an exhibition.” Paintings are only a part of Duke’s work. He carves medicine sticks, he does line drawings of Indian families, and his Indian bookmarks are individually made in fine leather and sold in 100 craft stores across Canada. “
The Indian has had forty thousand years in North America and he has learned to live here. This is a fundamental difference between the Indian and the white cultures. The white thinks he must have dominion over his environment and, as a result, is garbaging himself right out of existence. We are going to have to teach the white man the Indian way of life. If we don’t, he’s going to kill us all.”
Pow Wow at Duck Lake NFB 1967
14m (Duke 11:00-14:00)